Sounds Familiar? What you can hear You can listen to 71 sound recordings and over 600 short audio clips chosen from two collections of the British Library Sound Archive: the Survey of English Dialects and the Millennium Memory Bank. You’ll hear Londoners discussing marriage and working life, Welsh teenagers talking with pride about being bilingual and the Aristocracy chatting about country houses. You can explore the links between present-day Geordie and our Anglo-Saxon and Viking past or discover why Northern Irish accents are a rich blend of seventeenth century English and Scots. What you can do In addition there are interpretation and learning packages relating to the dual themes of language variation and language change within spoken English. In Regional Voices you can explore the differences that exist in spoken English as you move across the country, while Changing Voices gives you the chance to hear how English has changed in different parts of the country over the last fifty years.
The Listening Project The Listening Project is a partnership between BBC Radio and the British Library that invites people to share an intimate conversation, to be recorded and broadcast by the BBC and, if suitable, curated and archived by the British Library. These conversations will form a unique picture of our lives today, preserved for future generations. Visit The Listening Project website (BBC) and get involved. Throughout the Project, our experts will be discussing these conversations and highlighting related recordings in the archive, on their Sounds blog. Visit the Sounds blog and join the conversation. Sounds at the British Library Our Sounds website showcases over 50,000 recordings from our world-class collection of 3.5 million items. Listen now to over 50,000 sounds. Oral history and research Oral history in the classroom Our Learning website suggests many opportunities for using audio material in schools. And are you sitting or sat at a computer? The BBC and the British Library: in partnership