English Accents and Dialects
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All languages change over time and vary according to place and social domain, as is perfectly illustrated by these extracts taken from two large audio resources held in the British Library Sound Archive: the Survey of English Dialects and the Millennium Memory Bank. Together, they provide a fascinating overview of spoken English during the second half of the 20th century. Its rich diversity documents both continuity and change, offering many insights into local history and the fabric of social and working lives.
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 and education.
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. Underpinning the survey were 1300 questions designed to elicit responses that would best illustrate the lexical, phonological and morphological diversity of spoken English. The questionnaire was arranged in nine books, covering such topics as the farm, the human body and social activities.
Locations were selected according to a number of criteria. Almost all were rural, since small communities in isolated areas with historically stable populations were considered most likely to preserve traditional dialects. Urban areas were intended for inclusion later, but that plan was abandoned on economic grounds. Criteria for choosing contributors were crucial to the goal of comparability. Two or three people were interviewed in most locations. Priority was given to older males: there is a considerable body of statistical evidence suggesting men are more likely to use the vernacular. They were usually aged 60 or over, preferably born of native parents, "with good mouths, teeth and hearing" and "of the social class from whom the most representative local speech could be obtained."
Advances in audio technology during the 1950s made it increasingly possible, and indeed desirable, to record informal conversations on site. Several locations were revisited to record original contributors or replacements with similar profiles, a process that continued until 1974. Interviews were unscripted and unrehearsed, encouraging speakers to use their normal speech forms. Length and quality of recording vary. The extracts chosen here, just a taste of what is available, were selected to reflect as far as possible the dialect in each of the 288 Survey of English Dialects site recordings held in the British Library Sound Archive.
The Millennium Memory Bank (http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/millenni.html) 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 personal oral histories from a broad cross-section of the population for the series The Century Speaks. Sixteen themes were conceived and developed to frame the whole project, including such topics as 'where we live', 'getting older' and 'beliefs and fears'. From the outset, the project sought to focus on local, everyday experiences. Interviewees were encouraged to reflect on events and change at a community level rather than on the wider world stage. Although the primary objective was to record thoughts and attitudes rather than speech patterns, the English spoken has an extremely strong community and place-based resonance.
Contributors were either recruited from established groups within the community, such as local history societies, or chosen from respondents to appeals broadcast over the radio. In contrast to the Survey of English Dialects, the Millennium Memory Bank set out to be inclusive: 56% of the contributors were male and 44% female, ranging from five to 107 years old and drawn from a diversity of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. A wide range of minority groups was included, among them the homeless and members of the traveller community. The result was 640 half-hour radio documentaries, broadcast in the final weeks of the millennium, and an archive of 5429 interviews on minidisks, now catalogued and held in the British Library Sound Archive (http://www.cadensa.bl.uk).
Given the contrasting intentions, scopes and scales of the two collections, exact geographical matches have not been possible in every case, partly because the Millennium Memory Bank is far more representative of the urban population. Nonetheless, in most cases, a speaker from the Millennium Memory Bank was matched to within five to ten miles of an original Survey of English Dialects location, usually much closer, and a number of additional speakers from key urban sites were also included. An attempt was made to use extracts only from interviews with someone who had spent most of their life in a particular place and can therefore be said to be fully representative of that speech community. Precedence was given to passages demonstrating particularly noteworthy linguistic features.
The sense of locality is strong in both collections. Rich in local history, they reflect not merely ways of speaking but also ways of life. The British Library acknowledges the support of our collaborating partners in this project: Leeds University Archive of Vernacular Culture (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/english/activities/lavc/index.htm) and BBC Nations and Regions, who are currently engaged in a nationwide project to chart the current linguistic landscape of the UK (http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/).
