Try taking a craic at this lingo

Mar 18 2005 With Daniel Thomson, The Journal

If you would like to know how people in your region spoke half a century ago, then you don't need a time machine.

Hundreds of recordings of people from Northumberland to Cornwall have been put online by the British Library Sound Archive in a new website designed to preserve the country's diverse regional accents.

Launched this month, www.collectbritain.co.uk has pulled together two large sound archives of English speakers made 50 years apart and put them on the web for the first time.

It features more than 55 hours of recordings and gives visitors the chance to compare how people spoke in the 1950s with how they speak now.

The words in each recording are explained so that visitors know what a stithurum [OK] is, what to put in the barton-linhay[OK], how to play knur [OK] and spell and when to eat bait, bever[OK], docky [OK] or snap.

Ranging over football to farming, shipbuilding, steelworking, mining, fishing, shopping, computers and much more, the interviewees discuss a huge array of subjects.

The interviews not only reflect ways of speaking, but also ways of life that have changed forever, making the site an essential resource of regional and social history.

The site has recordings from more than 250 locations in rural England as well as multiple extracts from today's major cities.

The archive's curator Jonathan Robinson says that although regional accents are often weaker today than in the past, the appeal of diverse dialects still remains.

"The way people speak in England has changed over the past half-a-century. But there is still an incredible amount of regional diversity and the recordings on this website illustrate elements of continuity and of change."

Jonathan adds that some of the examples on the site are from communities so remote they no longer exist and that certain dialect words have been lost over the decades.

"But hopefully people will be able to see that it is a popular myth that everything has become vaguely homogenised."

The British Library Sound Archive is one of the largest of its type in the world and opened in 1955 as the British Institute of Recorded Sound.

The Archive holds over a million discs, 185,000 tapes, and many other sound and video recordings.

The collections come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound from music, drama and literature to oral history and wildlife sounds.

Collectbritain.co.uk is the British Library's largest digitisation project to date and now contains more than 90,000 images and sounds selected from the archive's world-renowned historical collections.

The site takes users on a journey through time and place using material taken from the library's huge resources of maps, books, topographical drawings, stamps, photographs, newspapers, music and sound.

This excellent site gives visitors the opportunity to experience the past and learn more about the people who lived in their area in years gone by through fascinating sound recordings of the language they used.

Regional words from around the North

Bairn: Child.

Bait: Food.

Lass: A woman or young girl from the Scandinavian word Laskr. [OK]

Midden: Dung heap.

Heugh: A promontory such as that at Tynemouth.

Hyem: Home, a word of Scandinavian origin.

Lough: Lakes in Northumberland are called Loughs pronounced Loff. [OK]

Gowk: A fool.

Cracket: A wooden stool.

Clarts: Dirt or mud.

Beck: Viking word for a stream used in south Durham, Yorkshire and Cumbria.