Whose Voices?

Partners and collaborators

BBC Voices

Description

In 2003 the editor of BBC Wales New Media Department put forward a proposal for a project on language in the UK that aimed to build on previous successes such as Robert McCrum s The Story of English and Melvyn Bragg's The Routes of English:

The UK Speaks (working title) is a major project led by BBC Nations and Regions which will celebrate and explore the diverse languages, dialects and accents of the UK. Working with a range of expert partners the BBC will undertake a unique survey of language in the UK at the start of the 21st century. The project will be both entertaining and have a strong social purpose; celebrating the diversity of the UK by affirming the value of regional and ethnic differences as expressed through language. The survey will provide the starting point for an ongoing study of language in the UK. (Rose/Mowbray, Executive summary).

The upshot of this proposal - subsequently re-named the Voices project - can undoubtedly be described as a major success for the BBC in 2005. Working in close consultation with Professor Clive Upton in the School of English at the University of Leeds, the project began with a survey of English around the UK led by a team of BBC broadcast journalists. This research drew on, and has now become integral to, the Survey of Regional English (SuRE) devised by Upton and others in the 1990s, itself building upon the pioneering work of Upton s predecessor at Leeds, Professor Harold Orton, some 50 years earlier.

The results of this new survey of English provided the basis for a range of media outputs, including a dedicated series on BBC Radio 4, Word4Word, further programmes across BBC network radio stations, Nations and Regions network and Asian Network as well as TV contributions such as BBC 2 s The Way That We Say It. Finally, the project led to the production of an interactive website (www.bbc.co.uk/voices), which offers widespread access to more than 300 professional recordings of different varieties of English together with some 50,000 public responses to a range of language-related themes. By the end of 2005, the Voices website had received over one million hits, far exceeding original expectations.

It is not uncommon to hear academic linguists bemoaning the mis-representation of language whenever linguistic issues are taken up by the media. Ironically, however, we have little systematic understanding of the ways in which language-related issues are actually thematised in, for example, the print and broadcast media or, increasingly, the new electronic media. For academic linguists, one obvious legacy of the BBC Voices project is a wealth of resources on language practices and values within the UK that can now be exploited in their own right by dialectologists and sociolinguists. At the same time, the project presents a unique opportunity for the exploration of what is a relatively unusual example of large-scale interaction between academic linguists, the media, and the wider population on a wide variety of themes specifically relating to language.

The aim of our research is to focus on the interactive website of the BBC Voices project in order to explore the treatment of language by an organisation outside of academe that sought to present the subject matter in ways that were (in its own words) entertaining yet with a strong social purpose. Our investigations will be organised around three inter-related aims:

• The first aim is practical insofar as our work will document and evaluate the Voices website as a concrete example of professional and popular discourse on language in the UK.
• The second aim is explicitly theoretical insofar as our research will build on ongoing work in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology on the representation of language-related issues in and by the media in the context of so-called language ideological debates.
• The third aim is primarily methodological in that we will investigate the Voices website as a specific instance of multimodal/computer-mediated discourse, thereby contributing to recent theoretical developments in this area.

In sum, our research will help to consolidate the BBC s original intention that the Voices project act as a starting point for further study on language in the UK.

Publications and outputs

Bethan Davies, Tommaso M. Milani, and Will Turner.  Forthcoming.  Multilingual Nation online?: Possibilities and constraints on the BBC Voices website.  In Sheena Gardner and Marilyn Martin-Jones (eds), Multilingualism, Discourse and Ethnography.  London: Routledge

Johnson, Sally and Tommaso M. Milani. 2010.  Critical intersections: language ideologies and media discourse.  In Sally Johnson & Tommaso M. Milani (eds), Language Ideologies and Media Discourse: Texts, Practices, Politics.  London: Continuum, 3-14

Sally Johnson, Tommaso M. Milani, and Clive Upton.  2010.  Language ideological debates on the BBC 'Voices' website: hypermodality in theory and practice.  In Sally Johnson & Tommaso M. Milani (eds.) Language Ideologies and Media Discourse: Texts, Practices, Politics.  London: Continuum, 223-251

Sally Johnson.  2008.  New perspectives on language and media.  Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12 :2, 241-249. 
Tommaso M. Milani.  2008.  Review of Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook (eds), Disinvesting and Reconstituting Languages, in The International Journal of Bilingual Edication and Bilingualism, 11 (5)

Sally Johnson, Tommaso M. Milani, and Clive Upton.  2008.  Whose Voices?: A hypermodal approach to language ideological debates on the BBC 'Voices' website.  Lancaster Working Papers 127, Centre for Language and Social Life, Lancaster University

Conferences

Bethan Davies, New Challenges for Multilingualism in Europe, Dubrovnik, 11-15 April 2010

Bethan Davies, Tommaso Milani, and Will Turner, Discursive Spaces: The BBC Voices website as a mediatised site of language-ideological reproduction, Language and the (New) Media: Techonologies and Ideologies, University of Washington, Seattle, 3-6 September 2009

Ann Thompson, Finding a Voice, Language and the (New) Media: Techonologies and Ideologies, University of Washington, Seattle, 3-6 September 2009

Will Turner (with Philippa Law, BBC), Are we on the same page?: Journalistic and academic views of the BBC Voices website compared, 3rd International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE3), University College , London 15-17 July 2009 
Ann Thompson, Locating the Voices, 3rd International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE3), University College London 15-17 July 2009

Will Turner, 'We were very isolated': polyvocality, hybridity and the mediatisation of a language ideological debate, 17th Sociolinguistic Symposium (SS17), Free University Amsterdam, 305 April 2009

Sally Johnson & Will Turner, Whose languages? Whose publics? Representations of multilingualism on the message boards of the BBC Voices website, AILA, Essen 25-29 August 2008.

Ann Thompson, Joseph Wright's Slips, Methods XIII, Leeds 4-8 August 2008.

Ann Thompson & Clive Upton, Making the Voices heard, Methods XIII, Leeds 4-8 August 2008.

Will Turner, Sally Johnson & Tommaso M. Milani, Whose languages? Whose publics? Mediated representations of English and its users in the age of globalisation, Methods XIII, Leeds 4-8 August 2008.

Tommaso M. Milani, Response to Susan Gal's keynote address Language and space/place: implications for linguistic minorities, Conference on language planning and language policy. Saltsjobaden, Sweden, 9-10 June 2008.

Tommaso M. Milani, The BBC Voices project, Postgraduate Conference, Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, University of Leeds, 12th June 2008.

Will Turner, The BBC and its publics, Postgraduate Conference, Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, University of Leeds, 12th June 2008.

Will Turner & Ann Thompson, Whose Voices? Mediated representations of English and its users in the age of globalisation, 'Communications and Space' international postgraduate conference, Institute of Communication Studies, University of Leeds, 6th June 2008.

Tommaso M. Milani, Multimodality and (self-)censorship: possibilities and constraints of analysing the BBC Voices home page, Poster presentation at the Research Seminar on Multilingualism, Discourse and Ethnography, MOSAIC, School of Education, University of Birmingham, 8-10 April 2008.

Ann Thompson, Poppies in the cornfield, Poster presentation at Sociolinguistics Symposium 17, 3-5 April 2008.

Sally Johnson, Clive Upton & Tommaso M. Milani, Voice, stance and expertise on the BBC Voices website, Sociolinguistics Symposium 17, Amsterdam 3-5 April 2008.

Invited talks

Clive Upton, The place of a 'standard' accent in a standardised language.  Institute of Lithuanian Language, Vilnius University, 7 October 2010

Clive Upton, Partners of the Ends: Midlanders and the dialectal'North-South Divide', Centre for Research into Language, University of Winchester, 23 March 2010

Sally Johnson & Tommaso M. Milani, Whose voices? A multimodal approach to language ideological debates on the BBC Voices home page, University of Sheffield, 30 April 2008.

Ann Thompson, Joseph Wright's slips, Yorkshire Dialect Society, 24 May 2008. 

Sally Johnson, Clive Upton & Tommaso M. Milani, Whose voices? A multimodal approach to language ideological debates on the BBC Voices home page, University of Leeds, 16 April 2008.

Will Turner & Ann Thompson, Whose Voices? Mediated representations of English and its users in the age of globalisation, University of Leeds, SLCS Postgraduate Research Training Seminars, 10th March 2008.

Sally Johnson & Tommaso M. Milani, Whose voices? A multimodal approach to language ideological debates on the BBC Voices home page, Lancaster University, 3 March 2008.

Will Turner, Whose Voices? Whose Publics? University of Leeds, SLCS Postgraduate Research Training Seminars, 3 December 2007.

live Upton, Partners of the Ends: Midlanders and the dialectal'North-South Divide', Centre for Research into Language, University of Winchester, 23 March 2010

Sally Johnson & Tommaso M. Milani, Whose voices? A multimodal approach to language ideological debates on the BBC Voices home page, University of Sheffield, 30 April 2008.

Ann Thompson, Joseph Wright's slips, Yorkshire Dialect Society, 24 May 2008.

Sally Johnson, Clive Upton & Tommaso M. Milani, Whose voices? A multimodal approach to language ideological debates on the BBC Voices home page, University of Leeds, 16 April 2008.

Will Turner & Ann Thompson, Whose Voices? Mediated representations of English and its users in the age of globalisation, University of Leeds, SLCS Postgraduate Research Training Seminars, 10th March 2008.

Sally Johnson & Tommaso M. Milani, Whose voices? A multimodal approach to language ideological debates on the BBC Voices home page, Lancaster University, 3 March 2008.

Will Turner, Whose Voices? Whose Publics? University of Leeds, SLCS Postgraduate Research Training Seminars, 3 December