Michael Pearce is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries at the University of Sunderland. He is the author of the Routledge Dictionary of English Language Studies (2007) and has published widely on the language and culture of North East England.
Pearce's impressive analysis of exchanges on an online chat forum offers insight into the distinctive vocabulary, phonology and grammar of North East Vernacular English. In evaluating how local dialect, supra-regional and vernacular features are deployed by contributors to express shared and contrasting linguistic identities, he demonstrates how online platforms are an equally rich repository of naturalistic and performative speech data as more conventionally created corpora. --Jonnie Robinson, British Library