North East Vernacular English Online

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.