Newcastle University

The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE)

The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE) is a corpus of dialect speech from Tyneside in North-East England. It is based on two pre-existing corpora, one of them collected in the late 1960s by the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS) project, and the other in 1994 by the Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (PVC) project.

NECTE amalgamates the TLS and PVC materials into a single state-of-the-art corpus and makes them available in a variety of aligned formats: digitized audio, standard orthographic transcription, phonetic transcription, and part-of-speech tagged.

NECTE is available to academic researchers, educationalists, the media (in non-commercial applications) and organisations such as language societies and individuals with a serious interest in historical dialect materials.

This is a photo of a NECTE project research day during which former members of the TLS team were invited to come and talk about their methods of data collection and analysis. L-R in the photo are: Will Allen (RA on the NECTE project), Karen Corrigan (P.I. of the NECTE project), Anthea Fraser-Gupta (RA on the TLS project and now at Leeds University) and John Local (RA on the TLS project and now at York University).

This is a sample of the TLS transcription coding scheme which the team used to convey fine-grained phonetic distinctions.

The scheme itself is being discussed in the previous photo and a hard copy of the scheme is on the table in front of Will Allen and John Local in the photo.

Sound file 1: Mechanic.wav

This is an extract from speakers taken from the PVC sub-section of the corpus and this is how what they are saying looks when transcribed and tagged according to the NECTE protocol.