Voices of the UK

The Voices of the UK project, funded by The Leverhulme Trust from 2009 to 2012, is the first attempt to present significant amounts of data emerging from a nationwide survey of spoken English since the 1950s.

Voices of the UK presents:

details of all 303 BBC Voices Recordings on the Sound and Moving Image Catalogue
online access to 283 BBC Voices Recordings in English at BL Sounds
descriptions of the linguistic content for researchers and non-specialist users.

BBC Voices Recordings

The BBC Voices Recordings is an audio archive of group conversations made in 303 locations across the UK by BBC Local and Nations Radio in 2004 and 2005. The recordings involve 1,293 speakers discussing their words for 40 prompt terms (e.g. 'mother', 'tired' and 'to play truant') and exploring the language they use and encounter in their daily lives.

Linguistic descriptions

Detailed descriptions of the linguistic content of selected recordings have been created and published at BL Sounds alongside the corresponding audio file. These descriptions constitute a unique record of spoken English in the UK at the start of the 21st century and present linguistic features in four categories:

Elicited lexis: a list of responses to 40 prompt words

Spontaneous lexis: a glossary of spontaneously occurring words and phrases that contrast with mainstream usage and potentially reflect regional and/or social variation (e.g. ‘slape’ [= 'slippery'] or 'court' [= 'to date/go out with'])

Phonology: an auditory assessment presented in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) of (i) vowel sounds arranged according to Wells’s lexical sets; (ii) consonantal features (e.g. H-dropping: 'happy' [api] for /hapi/); and (iii) selected continuous speech processes (e.g. secondary contraction: 'haven’t' as [ant])

Grammar: an inventory of forms that contrast with Standard British English presented using neutral terminology (e.g. 'generalisation of simple past': that man’s never spoke to me from that day to this)