Cookson Archive

The initial impetus for this Archive came from a grant awarded in 1994-1995 to the former Department of English Language from the Catherine Cookson Foundation.

The main aim of this grant was to set up an Archive for the preservation of Tyneside and Northumbrian dialect materials. In particular, it aimed to salvage the reel-to-reel tapes originally created during the ‘Tyneside Linguistic Survey’ (TLS) conducted in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s under the direction of Professor Barbara Strang (with assistance from Joan Beal, Anthea Fraser-Gupta, Val Jones, John Local, Vince McNeaney, Graham Nixon and John Pellowe). The grant allowed the original tapes to be transferred to audio-cassette format and they were catalogued and archived in a specially designated room in the Percy Building. Janet Lamb was engaged as a research assistant on this project and she completed the tasks listed above. The remainder of the grant was used to pay Alison Furness to carry out orthographic transcriptions in electronic format from the new audio cassettes.

In addition to this dataset, the Archive has a wide range of materials relevant to the study of Tyneside and Northumbrian Dialect:

These include:

  • Index card transcriptions of the TLS.
  • TLS coding scheme.
  • Published and unpublished materials in manuscript and other formats relating to the TLS and to the dialects of Northern England more generally.
  • Manuscript and DAT materials relating to the ‘ Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English’ project undertaken by Gerry Docherty, Paul Foulkes, Jim Milroy and Lesley Milroy of the former Department of Speech, Newcastle University.
  • Master’s and Doctoral Theses on Tyneside and Northumbrian dialect.
  • Manuscripts and DAT tapes relating to the ‘Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English’ project.

Here's what our sponsor Catherine Cookson had to say! (PDF: 122KB)