Have you ever taken part in one of those impassioned conversations when people from different parts of the British Isles compare their different ways of saying things? What, for example, did you call those soft shoes with laces that you wore for school sports: was it pumps or plimsolls, daps or tackies or possibly trainers? And how would you describe ‘a young person in cheap trendy clothes and jewellery’? The answer will probably depend a lot on your age and gender, as well as the place where you (or possibly your parents) grew up!

This website is part of an exciting nationwide project to record the varied speech of the UK. Word4Word is a collaboration between the BBC and The Open University, and is part of Voices, a project between the BBC and the University of Leeds to gather the most extensive record of the nation’s speech in over 50 years. As well as providing some general information on the English language and some suggestions on how to take your interest further, we show you how to conduct research interviews into the language of your own community, based on documents that you can download.

How you can get involved
When the last full-scale Survey of English Dialects (and, at the time, that did mean only English, not Scottish or Welsh or Irish) was conducted in the 1940s and 1950s, reel-to-reel tape recording was still a new technology, researchers went round on foot, and there was a heavy emphasis on the words people used for geographical features or agricultural implements. Today we have at our disposal less intrusive recording equipment, together with the possibility of computerised analysis of language data and the sharing of our findings via the internet. So, in this new electronic era, we would like to invite you to conduct your own piece of research on language variation in the British Isles...

How to conduct your own interview
It goes without saying that all research into spoken language involves listening to people talk! But, if you can record what they say, you will be surprised at how much more information you can gather and how much more insight you can gain. And if you share that information and insight with others via the Voices website, you will be contributing to a major national survey of contemporary language use in Britain.

If you decide that you would like to get involved with this, the first things you will have to do are:

• identify a suitably varied group of people to interview (you might want to begin with your extended family, but do think also in terms of the work context, or perhaps a group of people with some shared interest; the BBC advised its own interviewers to choose a maximum of 4-5 people who were ‘good entertaining speakers with rich accents and a fascination with words’);
• arrange a convenient time and place for the interview;
• have a set of topics to explore in the interview - but why think up your own when we have the 'Spidergram' of topics that the Voices project used? Get it, and other useful activity sheets, from our Download your kit page;
• make sure everyone knows what’s involved (academic disciplines that work with people have developed guidelines on the ethics of conducting research - you can find more about this on the British Association of Applied Linguistics website) and reassure them it’s going to be fun – after all your recording may well become a family heirloom or community resource!

Before you start making arrangements for your own interviews, you might find it useful to listen to a discussion between Barbara Mayor of The Open University and BBC broadcast journalist Jodie Campbell, who conducted some of the Voices interviews in the north-west of England. Amongst other things, you will hear Jodie talk about how she set about persuading people to get involved, and how she made sure that her interviews ran smoothly.

• Listen to the discussion - pop-up window (2.01MB Quicktime player required)
• Transcript of the discussion

Going off to interview people might sound like a very formal, and perhaps slightly scary, thing to do. But it doesn’t have to be that way – it’ll go a lot more smoothly and yield richer material if your interviewees are relaxed and enjoying the interview! To help you feel more comfortable, and highlight some of the mistakes first-timers often make, here’s our guide to getting the best from your interview.

Recording your interview will give you a record which you can listen to afterwards and analyse in detail. If you’ve prepared in advance, and ideally practised, then you should get much better results. To help you get started we’ve gathered together some of the top tips for beginning sound recording.

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Content last updated: 20/07/2005

About our expert

Barbara Mayor is Lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communications at the Open University. She currently chairs one of The Open University’s most popular courses, 'The English Language: past, present and future' (U210). Over the years Barbara has also acted as consultant to various related BBC programmes, including the Radio 4 series, Word4Word.

Barbara is particularly interested in the linguistic behaviour of bilingual speakers, especially adolescents, and in cross-cultural differences in the use of English as a global language of education.

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