North East Vernacular English Online - by Michael Pearce (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Drawing on thousands of naturalistic online interactions from Ready to Go, a popular football message board centred on North East England, North East Vernacular English Online describes dialect at the levels of morphology, syntax, lexis and - through a study of orthographic innovation - phonology, charting historical continuities as well as more recent developments.
Pearce also examines metalinguistic commentary and debate on the website, revealing folk-attitudes and perceptions of linguistic variation. Informed by the latest research, but also building on the foundational scholarship of the English Dialect Society and the Survey of English Dialects, this volume will appeal to academics in the fields of sociolinguistics and dialectology, as well as undergraduates, post-graduates and general readers interested in the language and culture of England's most distinctive region.

Review Quotes

Pearce's impressive analysis of exchanges on an online chat forum offers insight into the distinctive vocabulary, phonology and grammar of North East Vernacular English. In evaluating how local dialect, supra-regional and vernacular features are deployed by contributors to express shared and contrasting linguistic identities, he demonstrates how online platforms are an equally rich repository of naturalistic and performative speech data as more conventionally created corpora.

About the Author

Michael Pearce is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries at the University of Sunderland. He is the author of the Routledge Dictionary of English Language Studies (2007) and has published widely on the language and culture of North East England.