Voices in the UK
The collection isn’t just fixed in time, for there are recordings of both young and old, some born as late as the 1980s.
The collection isn’t just fixed in time, for there are recordings of both young and old, some born as late as the 1980s. These are modern voices, of course, lacking the sensation of nostalgia, and strangeness, evoked by the older folk. So we can hear for ourselves the changes in the particular locations across the country. A significant, but unsurprising, truth is that the younger the person is, the less ‘dialectal’ their voice is, in the sense that it is harder for a latter-day Professor Higgins to determine exactly where they come from, beyond the general region. Robinson talks about the ‘astonishing regional diversity’ of the dialects in the recordings. Yet they are all, essentially, comprehensible to most (British) listeners, and a linguist will tell us that the differences are not actually that great. English is diverse, but Robinson should beware the ‘golden age’ principle (‘things were better in the old days’): way back in 1905, Joseph Wright wrote in the preface his English Dialect Grammar: ‘There can be no doubt that pure dialect speech is rapidly disappearing even in country districts, owing to the spread of education, and to modern facilities for intercommunication.’ Dialects seem to have been ‘disappearing’ since well before the time of the featured speakers. Although we do get to hear the self-maintaining and distinctive accents of some of our cities, the youth of Liverpool, Newcastle or Glasgow are absent. What the collection doesn’t show – as Robinson admits – is the rise of new urban dialects following the large-scale immigration of the last forty years. That is for another collection, as he says.
The British Library have done us a great service in allowing the public – film-makers, actors, and school children – an opportunity to listen to an array of unvarnished, authentic accents and dialects, old and new.
British Library: Regional Voices web resource: www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/regional-voices/
Paul Kerswill
Professor of Sociolinguistics, Lancaster University