Identifying the Main Determinants of Phonetic Variation in the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English*

Abstract

The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English is a corpus of dialect speech from North-East England. It includes phonetic transcriptions of 63 interviews together with social data relating to each interviewee, and offers an opportunity to study the sociophonetics of Tyneside speech of the late 1960s. In a previous paper we began that study with an exploratory multivariate analysis of the transcriptions. The results were that speakers fell into clearly defined groups on the basis of their phonetic usage, and that these groups correlated well with social characteristics associated with the speakers. The present paper develops these results by trying to identify the main phonetic determinants of the speaker groups.