BBC Voices
Number of items in collection: 283
Short description:
Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.
Listen to 283 conversations about language recorded by BBC Nations and Regions as part of the nationwide BBC Voices survey of 2005.Long description:
Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.
Listen to 283 conversations about language recorded by BBC Nations and Regions as part of the nationwide BBC Voices survey of 2005.BBC Voices Recordings is an audio archive of 303 group conversations recorded by the BBC as part of a nationwide linguistic survey, Voices. The conversations were recorded between May 2004 and July 2005 by 46 local and national radio stations within BBC Nations and Regions and the independent Manx Radio. Selected extracts were broadcast on BBC Local Radio throughout August 2005 and formed the basis of Word 4 Word, a six-part Radio 4 series exploring language use across the country.
In order to ensure the recordings were comparable with each other, every conversation followed the same loose structure and used the same set of prompts. Before a recording session each interviewee was sent an identical set of 39 common words (e.g. ‘grandmother’, ‘annoyed’ and ‘to play truant’) arranged in a ‘spidergram’ and asked to think about the words and phrases they might use. This methodology, developed by researchers at the University of Leeds, encourages contributors to supply responses as naturally as possible and to reflect on their words, their accent, their styles of talk and their attitudes to language.
The 283 recordings available here represent the entire set of BBC Voices Recordings conducted in English and/or Scots and Ulster Scots (as defined by the participants). Each recording will be accompanied by a PDF document containing a detailed linguistic description created during the British Library’s Voices of the UK project, funded by The Leverhulme Trust from 2009 to 2012. Each PDF contains a list of the responses given by the contributors to each of the 39 words. A number of descriptions also include details of pronunciation and noteworthy grammatical features found in the conversation. Descriptions will be published in batches from April 2012, with a complete set available by summer 2013.
The British Library acknowledges the support of its partners: The Leverhulme Trust, the University of Leeds and BBC Voices.