ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 explores the local meanings and politics of Geordie styling in a series of high performances which are predictably and consciously identified by their actors as true stylizations, in order to offer further evidence of the types of social meanings created at the intersection of linguistic styling, contextualization and regionality. The chapter first focuses on Cheryl’s famous interview on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories show, broadcast on 23 October 2010, which aimed at renegotiating Cheryl’s identity after Cheryl had started to emerge as an ambivalent personality, changing ‘from some kind of Mother Teresa to Cruella De Vil’ (Piers Morgan). Then, it discusses Sting’s identity construction as it seems to emerge in the singer’s move from disaffiliation to reaffiliation towards Geordieness. Lastly, it touches on a YouTube Geordie video, which received two million hits in a very short span of time in 2012, making the Geordie variety go viral on the Internet.
