ABSTRACT
In 2003, a proposal was put forward within the BBC for a project on language in the UK. From its inception, this enterprise had an overt social purpose in the sense that it not only aimed ‘to celebrate and explore the diverse
languages, dialects and accents of the UK [ . . . ] at the start of the 21st century’ (Rose and Mowbray, n.d.), but, in the words of Voices project director Mick Ord, it also intended to ‘unite people across the UK in a shared local and national conversation’ (Ord, 2005) about contemporary language use.
