Tyneside

Tyneside is an area of North East England consisting mainly of a conurbation centred on the city of Newcastle and the town of Gateshead, on either side of the River Tyne. This chapter outlines distinctive features and key changes in the accent and dialect of this region, linking current characteristics with historical migrations and reflecting on the social patterning of ongoing developments, as revealed in the wealth of recent studies of the area. It focuses in particular on the research from the late 1960s to the present which has produced or subsequently exploited the various datasets of sociolinguistic interviews recently amalgamated in the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (Corrigan et al. 2012, http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte).