Voices of the UK: Accents and dialects of English. London: The British Library Board, 2010. Two CDs + 32-page booklet. ISBN: 978-0-7123-5107-2.

Voices of the UK consists of two CDs containing 143 short audio recordings (CD audio tracks) of accents and dialects from across the UK, and an explanatory booklet. The recordings are sampled from four collections held by the British Library: the Berliner Lautarchiv British & Commonwealth Recordings (15 tracks, on CD1); the Survey of English Dialects (51 tracks, on CD1); the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (8 tracks, 5 on CD1, 3 on CD2); and the Millenium Memory Bank (69 tracks, on CD2). The 32-page booklet describes these corpora, provides some general information on the content of the recordings on the CDs, and gives particulars for each track: title, speaker’s name, date of birth, and location, recording location, and recording date and duration. CD1 contains older recordings of traditional English and Scots dialects. The samples from the Berliner Lautarchiv British & Commonwealth Recordings are readings of the Parable of the Prodigal Son and recitations of dialect poetry, and the performance nature of these recordings sets them apart from the rest of the material in Voices of the UK, which consists of naturalistic conversation and informal interviews. Nevertheless, the Berliner Lautarchiv recordings are of considerable interest, given their early date (the samples on this CD were recorded between 1916 and 1918) and geographical spread (they are the only source of early recordings in this collection for Scotland and Northern Ireland). The Survey of English Dialect recordings, made between 1953 and 1974, are a vital audio accompaniment to the published phonetic transcriptions from the same survey (Orton, Sanderson & Widdowson 1962–1971), and the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects tracks provide a fascinating glimpse of the closely related, but less well known, survey of conservative forms of English in rural Wales (see Parry 1999). The recordings on CD2 are taken from the Millenium Memory Bank corpus, collected in 1998–1999, with the addition of a few recordings from the urban phase of the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects from the 1980s. These recordings, all but two of which are of white British or Irish speakers, range from very traditional and localised forms of speech, such as those from Lerwick, Shetland (Track 53), and Bleanish Island, Fermanagh (Track 67), to those of young people in urban areas, such as Leeds (Track 9) and Chatham (Track 33), who, nevertheless, have very distinct regional varieties. In addition, CD2 contains three recordings of RP English, and one each of speakers of British Indian and British Jamaican English. Of the 143 samples in Voices of the UK, all but 17 are available online at one or both of the British Library’s accent and dialect websites: Archival Sound Recordings (http://sounds.bl.uk) and Sounds Familiar (http://www.bl.uk/soundsfamiliar). Although all of the recordings on the Sounds Familiar website can be accessed by members of the public, most of the recordings on the Archival Sound Recordings website are only available through institutional subscription, making Voices of the UK particularly useful for those who do not have such access. However, the samples on Voices of the UK are significantly shorter than those on the British Library’s websites – the longest track in the set (CD1, Track 54) is 82 seconds long, the shortest (CD1, Track 3) 37 seconds. This is substantially shorter than the versions available online (where these two tracks are, for example, seven minutes and two-and-a-half minutes long, respectively), and even these extended versions are, in many cases, excerpts from longer recordings. Voices of the UK is, then, very much a sample of resources already available on