Does sound change ride the Metro? Exploring the cultural impacts of the Tyne and Wear Metro

Infrastructure projects and other planning initiatives shape and reshape our communities. This means that decisions made by planners and policymakers at local, regional and national levels inherently have cultural effects that must be considered in planning assessments. However, cultural infrastructure within such initiatives, if considered at all, is limited to what UNESCO defines as "tangible cultural heritage", with aspects of "intangible cultural heritage" largely set aside. Language is one such aspect of "intangible cultural heritage" and so should be considered by planners and policymakers when conducting planning assessments. However, research exploring the effects of infrastructure projects on communities primarily focuses on other domains such as economics or public health. The lack of research investigating potential correlations between infrastructure projects and linguistic identity has rendered language largely invisible when making planning decisions. In North East England, for example, different phases of the Tyne and Wear Metro influenced how people move through, use, and come into contact with one another within physical and social spaces. Although this influence may disrupt and reshape the intangible cultural heritage (such as dialectal variation) of local communities, we actually know very little about how projects like the Tyne and Wear Metro affect local dialects, or even how they shape people’s sense of place and local identity. This project is high-potential, blue-skies research that for the first time addresses the question "Do infrastructure projects influence local place identity and the dialects of the communities they affect?" It lays the foundations for an ambitious research programme which more broadly examines the cultural and linguistic impacts of infrastructure projects and other planning initiatives. It focuses on exploring this topic by comparing two sites in the Metropolitan Borough of South Tyneside—Hebburn and the Boldons. The overarching aim is to determine whether the construction and subsequent expansion of the Tyne and Wear Metro has resulted in changes to the linguistic identities of local speakers. In doing so, it will achieve the following objectives: (i) Assess whether infrastructure initiatives can have such effects; (ii) Establish the extent to which local place identity is implicated, and (iii) Demonstrate whether patterns of dialectal variation across the two sites can be attributed to the effects of changes to local place identity generated by access to new transport links. In launching this research programme, a key methodological objective is to develop a proof-of-concept framework for the analysis of how dialectal variation and place identity are influenced by planning initiatives. By collecting Sociolinguistic Interviews with South Tyneside residents in conjunction with the use of a Participatory Geographic Information Systems tool, this approach will interrogate residents’ retention of traditional dialect forms while tapping into local perceptions of regional space for the analysis of dialect data. The results will feed into outputs, outcomes and impacts relevant to a broad range of academic audiences, as well as to planners, policymakers, heritage organizations, and other key stakeholders beyond academia.