Tyne Bytes: Computerised Sociolinguistic Study of Tyneside

The relationships between language variation and social structure within an urban community are far too complex to be adequately handled by traditional methods. The Tyneside Linguistic Survey offers a radical approach to sociolinguistic modelling, using multi-variate techniques. Linguistic and social clusters are discovered within a sample of Tyneside speakers by generating classifications based on a wide range of linguistic and social variables. In this study Dr. Jones-Sargent lucidly presents the background and philosophy of the TLS, the implementation of the computer model and an analysis of the results.