The RTG corpus

Ready to Go (RTG) is an online forum for people with an interest in Sunderland A.F.C., a football club with a fan-base centred on a city on the North Sea littoral at the heart of the region. It is a written corpus, making it an unusual data-set in the study of regional non-standard language. While ‘the research community is not exactly drowning’ in corpora that sample regional dialects (Szmrecsanyi and Anderwald 2018: 303), those that do exist consist mainly of orthographic transcriptions of interviews with informants. In some cases, such as the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE), these interviews were carried out specifically for linguistic research; in others they have been co-opted for research after being recorded for other purposes (e.g. the Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects is mainly made up of local-history interviews).

This focus on spoken rather than written language in corpus-based dialectology is unsurprising, given that audio recordings allow access to phonology, and also because the naturally-occurring, spontaneous, unselfconscious, everyday speech of folk in their locally-based communities has conventionally been seen as the ‘holy grail’ of the sociolinguistic enterprise (Holmes and Wilson 2017: 268). Certainly, there has been a bias against regarding writing as truly vernacular, because the acquisition of literacy has generally meant literacy in Standard English. The Standard Language Ideology exerts its strongest influence at the level of morphosyntax, so when people write they typically use what they believe to be standard grammar. Should written text therefore be discounted as a source of non-standard forms? While in the past writing might have been constrained by proximity to the standard, in the era of Web 2.0 contemporary forms of writing online show ‘a relative lack of institutional regulation’ resulting in a proliferation of ‘spoken-like and vernacular features, traces of spontaneous production, innovative spelling choices’, and so on (Androutsopoulos 2010: 209). On the vernacular participatory web (Howard 2008; Androutsopoulos 2010) sites such as RTG are socio-pragmatically complex arenas of argument, anecdote, banter and debate, in which non-standard, regionally marked Englishes flourish. These are qualities which make them a valuable resource for social dialectologists. Indeed, in some respects the language of RTG is closer to the ideal object of sociolinguistic enquiry than is the language captured in speech-based corpora, because it has not been elicited for the purposes of research.

Another advantage of the corpus is its size. At approximately 12 million words (and growing) RTG is about twelve times bigger than DECTE, the closest comparable NEE corpus. Size is important when morphosyntax is the research focus, since the larger the corpus, the more chance a particular form will occur. For example, yon is not found in DECTE, but appears 29 times in RTG (as of March 2020). A description of NEE demonstratives based on DECTE would therefore have been incomplete. Size can also be measured in terms of the number of active individuals registered to use the site, which currently stands at over 12,000.

Much of the research presented here would not have been possible without the rich and endlessly fascinating archive created by the RTG community, to whom I extend my thanks.