Over the past few years, as well as making Accentricity, I’ve been working on the Manchester Voices research project at Manchester Metropolitan University, with Rob Drummond, Holly Dann, Sarah Tasker and Erin Carrie.

As part of this work, we used oral history recordings to explore language change over time, and we’ve recently published a journal article about this work. We’re really proud of this article, but it’s not really that accessible to people who aren’t professional linguists, and we wanted to find a way to share our work with everyone who’s interested: so we made a podcast episode to act as a companion piece to this article.

If you want to read the article in full, you can find it here.

The oral history recordings we used for this research were provided by the British Library’s Archives+ as part of their Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. In this episode I speak to Dave Govier, the project manager for the North West Hub. We focused on a collection of interviews by journalist Alec Greenhalgh. The full length interviews are available in the Archives+ search room at Manchester Central Library, and you can also read the full descriptions online at the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue. The British Library collection reference is UAP001.

The Manchester Voices project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Thanks also to Dr Danielle Turton for her advice on our methodology for examining rhoticity.