Abstract

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 also 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 (University of Newcastle). 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 chapter is a first foray into an under-researched aspect of the region’s local linguistic ecology. It describes and contextualizes a corpus of signs compiled
in 2014–15, showing how they draw extensively on a set of features which previous studies have revealed to be enregistered as part of north-east dialect. The implications of the findings are discussed and the – perhaps surprisingly – infrequent appearance of such forms in the linguistic landscape is addressed.