ABSTRACT
Lexis is at the centre of the Voices enterprise, both as it was originally conceived by the BBC and as it has evolved through the early stages of analysis. Lexical variation was appreciated as of primary interest to the radio audience who were to be mobilized to help the BBC and its academic collaborators with the project (Elmes 2005), so it was essential that words should be put in the spotlight from the outset. And for the dialectologist, collection of a mass of lexis promises to provide a great deal from which insights can be gained on linguistic variation and mechanisms of change. But lexical ordering and analysis are not necessarily straightforward, and the messages coming from careful research are certainly not clear-cut: words, never easy to gather in the mass in an orderly, structured way, are unruly and hard to codify once collected.
