We saw in the previous chapter that the English on RTG, though written, is highly vernacular: in some respects, it can be regarded as a graphic analogue of everyday phonic conversation. As such, it will inevitably contain regionally marked features. The use of these features by members of a speech community living close to each other (which are absent or infrequent in the speech of people living further away) reflects an empirically verifiable linguistic fact: natural languages display diatopic variation; that is, variation in space. Or, more accurately, a person’s idiolect (that is, their unique way of speaking) will typically indicate their social background and affiliations, including where they spent their formative years. For most posters on RTG, this is of course the English region widely referred to as ‘North East England’, or ‘The North East’.

In human geography, the term region is applied to ‘a more or less bounded area possessing some sort of unity or organizing principle(s) that distinguish it from other regions’ (Gregory 2000: 687). Although the territory contained within the ‘bounded area’ of North East England can vary depending on who is defining it and for what ends, in this book, when the terms North East England and the North East are used, they should generally be understood as referring to the official administrative counties and districts given in Table 2.1 and mapped in Figure 2.1. The term Northumbria is also sometimes used to refer to this area, which roughly corresponds to the territory covered by the historic counties of Northumberland and County Durham. Compared with other English regions, the population is quite low (approximately 2.6 million in mid-2019, according to the ONS) and spread over a large area (8,500 square kilometres), making it slightly smaller than Corsica and Puerto Rico, but larger than Delaware. Most people live in three urban areas centred on the cities of Newcastle-upon- Tyne (Tyneside), Sunderland (Wearside), and Middlesbrough (Teesside). To the south and north of Tyneside lie the coalfields of County Durham and south east Northumberland, with their ex-mining towns and villages, while the rest of the region consists of wild moor-covered uplands and rich agricultural lowlands (Aalen 2006). This corner of England has played an important – if sometimes overlooked – role in British history. For example, in the seventh and eighth centuries it was at the heart of Norþanhymbra (‘Northumbria’), the largest and most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which stretched from the River Humber to what is now south east Scotland. Northumbria was one of the most important centres of learning in Western Europe, with its intellectual and religious life based at the monasteries and scriptoria of Lindisfarne, Jarrow, and Wearmouth. A thousand years later, as a consequence of the increasing exploitation of indigenous coal reserves in the eighteenth century, North East England became one of the first European regions to industrialise. While coal had probably been dug in the North East since Roman times, the Industrial Revolution led to the employment of thousands of men (and to a lesser extent women and children) in the collieries and ancillary industries of the ‘Great Northern Coalfield’. A particularly significant development – the railway – arose from the need to transport the coal rapidly and efficiently from collieries in West Durham and Darlington to the port at Stockton on the River Tees. Later, the North East was at the vanguard of developments in shipbuilding technology, armaments, and electrical turbine generation.