Dr Mike Pearce has been invited to give a talk at the Centre of Research in Linguistics and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. His topic is 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 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 at Newcastle
University. However, one element is missing from the otherwise
well-charted dialectological terrain: 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 talk
will offer a first foray into this under-researched aspect of our local
linguistic ecology. Location: King George VI Building, LTh 6. Time/Date: 26th April 2016, 16:00-17:00.