T'way us were - Bostin' British Library website now includes over 650 sound recordings of English accents and dialects

1 March 2005 :: Posted by Ben Sanderson

Regional accents are back in fashion and spoken with pride. England’s rich assortment of accents and dialects are featured on an updated website from the British Library. Visitors to the site can listen to the incredible variety of spoken English, and hear the sounds and words which define people from all four corners of the country. The site is nobbut a mouse-click away at www.collectbritain.co.uk/collections/dialects/.

The site pulls together two large sound archives of English speakers made fifty years apart and puts them on the web for the first time. It is wick with over 55 hours of recordings and users can hear how people spoke in the 1950s, and how they speak now. The words in each recording are explained so that users know what a stithurum is, what to put in the barton-linhay, how to play knur and spell and when to eat bait, bever, docky or snap.

Ranging from football to farming, shipbuilding, steelwork, mining, fishing, shopping, computers and much more, the interviewees discuss a huge array of subjects. They reflect not only ways of speaking but also ways of life that have changed forever, making the site a treasure trove of local and social history.

The site features pairs of recordings from over 250 locations in rural England and multiple extracts from today’s urban centres.The website will interest specialists and non-specialists alike and should prove invaluable to the large number of actors who currently use the British Library Sound Archive for research purposes.

Jonathan Robinson, Curator of English Accents and Dialects at the British Library Sound Archive, said: “The way people speak in England has changed over the last half a century. Contrary to popular belief, there is still an incredible amount of regional diversity and the recordings on this website illustrate elements both of continuity and of change. It has all been made possible by the fact that the British Library’s oral history holdings include two wonderful collections – the Survey of English Dialects, recorded by Leeds University in the 1950s and the Millennium Memory Bank, recorded by the BBC in 1998/9.”

The accents and dialects website sits within the British Library’s Collect Britain website www.collectbritain.co.uk, funded with money from the New Opportunities Fund. The site contains over 90,000 images and 250 hours of sound recordings.

For further information please contact Ben Sanderson at the British Library Press Office, Boston Spa, Wetherby, West Yorkshire LS23 7BQ. Telephone 01937 546 126, fax 01937 546 571, email ben.sanderson@bl.uk

Notes for editors

1. Collect Britain - is the British Library's largest digitisation project to date. The Collect Britain website - www.bl.uk/collectbritain - now contains over 90,000 images and sounds selected from the Library’s world-renowned historical collections. The site takes users on a journey through time and place using material sourced from the Library's huge resources of maps, books, topographical drawings, stamps, photographs, newspapers, music and sound which the British Library preserves on behalf of the nation.
2. The British Library Sound Archive - is one of the largest in the world. It holds over a million discs, 200,000 tapes, and many other sound and video recordings. The collections come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound from music, drama and literature, to oral history and wildlife sounds. They range from cylinders made in the late 19th century to the latest CD, DVD and minidisc recordings. The archive holds copies of commercial recordings issued in the United Kingdom, together with selected commercial recordings from overseas, radio broadcasts and many privately-made recordings. It also offers public access to a wide range of specialist publications, books, magazines and journals covering every aspect of recorded sound.
3. The Survey of English Dialects - was the brainchild of Harold Orton at Leeds University and Eugen Dieth from the University of Zurich. It remains the only systematic survey of our native dialects. By the late 1940s, Orton and Dieth thought it vital to survey spoken English because, they believed, the linguistic landscape of post-war Britain would be drastically altered by increased social and geographical mobility and by wider access to broadcast media. From 1950 to 1961, a team of fieldworkers collected data in 313 localities. Their findings, published between 1962 and 1971, continue to be used by linguists worldwide. The recordings are held in the British Library Sound Archive. For full details visit the online catalogue at: www.cadensa.bl.uk reference C908.
4. The Millennium Memory Bank - is one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe. It was a joint project between BBC Local Radio and the British Library Sound Archive to create an archival ‘snapshot’ of ‘ordinary’ Britons’ opinions and experiences at the turn of the century. During 1998 and 1999, forty BBC local radio stations recorded 5429 personal oral histories from a broad cross-section of the population for the series The Century Speaks.
5. The New Opportunities Fund - distributes National Lottery money to health, education and environment projects across the UK. Funding for programmes is divided between England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales on the basis of population weighted to reflect levels of deprivation. For more information visit the NOF website at www.nof.org.uk.
6. bostin’ means great (West Midlands), nobbut means only (north), wick with means alive with, full of (north), a stithurum is a long-winded, dull tale (Lincolnshire), a barton-linhay is a cart-shed (Devon), knur-and-spell is a traditional game played with a stick and bat (Yorkshire) and bait (north-west & north-east), bever (south), docky (East Anglia) and snap (north & midlands) are local names for food taken to eat at work.