The linguistic landscape of North East England

Research on language attitudes and perceptual dialectology has shown that north-east English is one of the most widely recognized and positively evaluated varieties in Britain. There is also a rich tradition of dialect writing associated with the region, and a long history of both ‘folk’ and scholarly attention to local forms of language – for example, it is the only part of England to have a major corpus devoted to it – the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. However, one element is missing from the otherwise well-charted dialectological terrain. Dr Michael Pearce has addressed this gap in a chapter published in Perspectives on Northern Englishes (Mouton de Gruyter, 2017), which gives an account of localized forms in the ‘linguistic landscape’ (that is, the public display and representation of written language on road signs, advertisements, house names, vehicles, and so on). This first foray into an under-researched aspect of the region’s local linguistic ecology describes and contextualizes a corpus of signs compiled in 2014–15, showing how they draw extensively on a set of features which previous studies have revealed to be enregistered as part of north-east dialect. The implications of the findings are discussed and the – perhaps surprisingly – infrequent appearance of such forms in the linguistic landscape is addressed.

You can read more about Michael's research on the language of the region here.