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.

As well as making Accentricity, I work on the Manchester Voices project at Manchester Metropolitan University, with Rob Drummond and Holly Dann. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we ran a podcasting course and competition for schools called Talking About Voices. This is a special episode announcing the competition winners.

If you’re a teacher in a school in Greater Manchester, email manchester.voices@mmu.ac.uk">manchester.voices@mmu.ac.uk to ask about taking part in Talking About Voices round 2 in the coming school year. If you’re a pupil, or if you have a young person in your life who would love this, ask their teacher to get in touch.

If you live in Greater Manchester, there are various ways you can get involved in our research right now! Just go to www.manchestervoices.org to get started.

Over the past year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been working with a group of people from all over the world, teaching them to podcast and helping them to tell personal stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. Everyone who took part was brand new to podcasting, and most of the episodes were made without any professional equipment, using mobile phones and free editing software. The results of this course are seven episodes: each one about a very different migration experience, and each person bringing their own style and personality. We hope you love them as much as we do.

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Anna Durkacz is a singer-songwriter, and a member of two bands, Ravaged Hearts and The Professors of Logic. The song at the end of the episode is In Praise of Polish, from the album Come of Age.

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Our Accentricity t-shirts are out now! Get yours podcast.com/merch/black-accentricity-organic-t-shirt">here.

They’re designed by artist Cat Ingall, who also makes other cool things that you can buy from here Etsy shop.

You can also support the podcast on Patreon or Steady, or with a one-off donation to help keep Accentricity going.

***

Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our podcast.com/newsletter">newsletter  for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes.

Over the past year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been working with a group of people from all over the world, teaching them to podcast and helping them to tell personal stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. Everyone who took part was brand new to podcasting, and most of the episodes were made without any professional equipment, using mobile phones and free editing software. The results of this course are seven episodes: each one about a very different migration experience, and each person bringing their own style and personality. We hope you love them as much as we do.

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From Lisa:

I am a PhD student at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg in Germany. I study the history of the German language and I am especially interested in graphematic change and the influence of animacy on different aspects of language. Together with a colleague, I write a blog about language that you can find at https://derzwiebel.wordpress.com/. Right now I am also working on launching a podcast about the origins of the German writing system. You can find updates about the podcast project on Twitter. My personal Twitter account is @ladida_lisa.

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Our Accentricity t-shirts are out now! Get yours podcast.com/merch/black-accentricity-organic-t-shirt">here.

They’re designed by artist Cat Ingall, who also makes other cool things that you can buy from here Etsy shop.

You can also support the podcast on Patreon or Steady, or with a one-off donation to help keep Accentricity going.

***

Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our podcast.com/newsletter">newsletter  for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes.

Over the past year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been working with a group of people from all over the world, teaching them to podcast and helping them to tell personal stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. Everyone who took part was brand new to podcasting, and most of the episodes were made without any professional equipment, using mobile phones and free editing software. The results of this course are seven episodes: each one about a very different migration experience, and each person bringing their own style and personality. We hope you love them as much as we do.

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Helen Shutt is a writer and theatre practitioner currently based in Glasgow. She is in the final year of a PhD experimenting with ways of co-authoring with the audience in performance as a means of creating community. Outside of her research she has facilitated participatory drama workshops with a variety of organisations and communities both locally and internationally, including collaborative projects in India (ThinkArts), Malawi (Theatre for a Change) and Sierra Leone (Timap for Justice).

Sam is a writer and English Language teacher originally from Washington State, USA. After leaving the USA and living in nine countries around the world, he moved to Berlin, his home of nine years. Shortly after being interviewed for this episode, he moved back in the United States. He then accepted a teaching job in Kurdistan, where he is now living.

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Our Accentricity t-shirts are out now! Get yours podcast.com/merch/black-accentricity-organic-t-shirt">here.

They’re designed by artist Cat Ingall, who also makes other cool things that you can buy from here Etsy shop.

You can also support the podcast on Patreon or Steady, or with a one-off donation to help keep Accentricity going.

***

Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our podcast.com/newsletter">newsletter for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes.

Over the past year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been working with a group of people from all over the world, teaching them to podcast and helping them to tell personal stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. Everyone who took part was brand new to podcasting, and most of the episodes were made without any professional equipment, using mobile phones and free editing software. The results of this course are seven episodes: each one about a very different migration experience, and each person bringing their own style and personality. We hope you love them as much as we do.

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Claire Needler is an Ethnology PhD student in the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen. Her research interests include contemporary uses of Scots, especially among young people; how to promote positive attitudinal change towards the Scots language; and whether teaching the Scots Language Award in schools boosts pupil self-esteem and wider achievement. She is interested in the intersection between language, culture and identity, and how these combine to create a feeling of community belonging.

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Thanks to Dawn Leslie and Hamish Garland for being part of this podcast, and to Professor Jennifer Smith for the permission to use the clip from the Scots Syntax Atlas.

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Our Accentricity t-shirts are out now! Get yours podcast.com/merch/black-accentricity-organic-t-shirt">here.

They’re designed by artist Cat Ingall, who also makes other cool things that you can buy from here Etsy shop.

You can also support the podcast on Patreon or Steady, or with a one-off donation to help keep Accentricity going.

***

Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our podcast.com/newsletter">newsletter for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes.

Over the past year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been working with a group of people from all over the world, teaching them to podcast and helping them to tell personal stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. Everyone who took part was brand new to podcasting, and most of the episodes were made without any professional equipment, using mobile phones and free editing software. The results of this course are seven episodes: each one about a very different migration experience, and each person bringing their own style and personality. We hope you love them as much as we do.

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Charles Lee is an academic and literary translator based in Asheville, North Carolina.

Alejandra Cole is a Chilean-American Spanish language teacher in Florida.

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Our Accentricity t-shirts are out now! Get yours podcast.com/merch/black-accentricity-organic-t-shirt">here.

They’re designed by artist Cat Ingall, who also makes other cool things that you can buy from here Etsy shop.

You can also support the podcast on Patreon or Steady, or with a one-off donation to help keep Accentricity going.

***

Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our podcast.com/newsletter">newsletter for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes.

Over the past year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been working with a group of people from all over the world, teaching them to podcast and helping them to tell personal stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. Everyone who took part was brand new to podcasting, and most of the episodes were made without any professional equipment, using mobile phones and free editing software. The results of this course are seven episodes: each one about a very different migration experience, and each person bringing their own style and personality. We hope you love them as much as we do.

***

From Maria:

I am originally from Bulgaria and I have lived in Edinburgh for the last ten years. During that time, I collected a couple of degrees, including PhD in Phonetics from Queen Margaret University. Right now, I am finishing a Master’s programme in Speech and Language Therapy and I am hoping to start practicing soon. I love learning about people’s stories about their accents and recently I started the #AccentPositivity campaign for Bilingualism Matters with this matters.org/network/edinburgh/news/accent-postivity">blog post. You can share your accent story using #AccentPositivity and you can find me on twitter @drdokovova. 

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You can find out more about Bilingualism Matters matters.org/">here, and you can find their, podcast Much Language Such Talk, here and on the podcast streaming apps.

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Our Accentricity t-shirts are out now! Get yours podcast.com/merch/black-accentricity-organic-t-shirt">here.

They’re designed by artist Cat Ingall, who also makes other cool things that you can buy from here Etsy shop.

You can also support the podcast on Patreon or Steady, or with a one-off donation to help keep Accentricity going.

***

Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our podcast.com/newsletter">newsletter for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes.

Over the past year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been working with a group of people from all over the world, teaching them to podcast and helping them to tell personal stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. Everyone who took part was brand new to podcasting, and most of the episodes were made without any professional equipment, using mobile phones and free editing software. The results of this course are seven episodes: each one about a very different migration experience, and each person bringing their own style and personality. We hope you love them as much as we do.

***

From Veronica:

Hello, everyone! I am Veronica, a mainly Italo-Argentinean curious soul, with some German and Russian origins, too. Since my multicultural growth around some parts of the world and my multilingual journey, I have been interested in discovering new cultures and languages, one of the main reasons why I decided to study them and make a career out of this passion. Particularly, I like to concentrate on cross-modal and cross-cultural interactions between young adults. My plan is to start a podcast about it soon, interviewing some peers and sharing our adventurous and interesting stories (Las Cross-Rues, updates via my Instagram profile). Apart from that, I also like writing multilingual poems, that you can read here.

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Our Accentricity t-shirts are out now! Get yours podcast.com/merch/black-accentricity-organic-t-shirt">here.

They’re designed by artist Cat Ingall, who also makes other cool things that you can buy from here Etsy shop.

You can also support the podcast on Patreon or Steady, or with a one-off donation to help keep Accentricity going.

***

Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our podcast.com/newsletter">newsletter for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes.

This episode is Accentricity’s first audio research paper. In April this year, I was really excited to have an article published in a linguistics journal, telling people about some of the findings from my PhD research. But… not all people. Because although I did my best to write the article as clearly and simply as possible, it’s only really accessible to other linguists. That’s fine, of course – journal articles are for talking to other people in your field. But I think my findings might be interesting to people who aren’t linguists, too. So I’ve made this podcast episode to accompany it. It contains the same findings as the journal article, but explained in a more accessible way, and with some voices and ideas other than mine included.

I’ve left out some detail which might be interesting to other linguists. If you are a linguist and want this detail, you can find the article platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/eww.00066.dur">here, or you can find the pre-publication version here. If you are a linguist who is much too busy to read the article, then give your eyes a rest and enjoy having information delivered to your ears instead :)

This is a new thing that I’m trying out, and I’d love to hear what you think. Should I do this for every piece of research I do? Want to chat about the process of making it? Feel free to drop me a line on accentricity.podcast@gmail.com">accentricity.podcast@gmail.com with ideas or questions.

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* Leon Żydowski moved from Poland to Scotland when he was 5. He lived there for 13 years, before moving back to Poland last year, aged 18. He’s now studying Tourism & Recreation at University in Wroclaw at weekends and working during the week. 

* Julia Stachurska moved from Poland to Scotland when she was 7. Now, at 21, she’s a student at the University of the West of Scotland, a caseworker at the Scottish parliament, and an SNP (Scottish National Party) council candidate for Murdostoun, North Lanarkshire.

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Our Accentricity t-shirts are out now! Get yours podcast.com/merch/black-accentricity-organic-t-shirt">here. 

They’re designed by artist Cat Ingall, who also makes other cool things that you can buy from here Etsy shop.

You can also support the podcast on Patreon or Steady, or with a one-off donation to help keep Accentricity going.

***  

You can find a transcript for this episode on the website. Our transcripts are made my Aileen Marshall: contact her at aileentranscribes@gmail.com for all of your transcription needs!

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Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our podcast.com/newsletter">newsletter for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes.