ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the BBC Voices Recordings, the digital audio archive of group conversations recorded by BBC Local Radio journalists under the umbrella of the BBC Voices initiative and deposited at the British Library (BL) in November 2005. We first introduce Voices of the UK (VoUK), a BL project designed to create a dynamic online dataset of British English vernacular speech by extracting detailed linguistic information from the Voices recordings, which makes the collection searchable according to linguistic criteria. Next, we outline the approach adopted by the BL-based research team and reflect on the challenges encountered in describing twenty-first century English for both an academic and a public audience. Finally, we present two case studies to demonstrate potential applications of this dataset.
