One of the earliest recordings is of Florence Nightingale!

Jonnie Robinson curates the British Library's fascinating archive of dialect and accent recordings. Alex Corlett hears all about it.

- Alex Corlett

OF all of Britain's O exports, the English language is probably the one that has reached furthest around the world.

Yet within the borders of our own country, there are huge variations in its use.

Two villages might speak entirely differently, and as soon as you cross county lines and borders, there will be differences in the words and accents that are used.

One man who knows everything about our language's history is Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English for the British Library.

"I work in our sound archives.

"As I'm sure people are aware, the British Library is the national library, so we have huge collections.

"The British Library's sound archive started out as the National Sound Archive.

"I'm responsible for our sound recordings of English accents and dialects, which go back roughly one hundred years.

Unlike printed articles, there's no legal requirement for sound recordings to be submitted to the National Library.

"We have a number of curators who collect in a variety of areas.

"We've a popular music curator, classical music, traditional music and oral history and myself in spoken English.

"We encourage creators of audio output within the UK and beyond - if it has an impact on British cultural life to deposit - their material at the library."

The library has collections of every sound recording you can imagine, including field recordings of regular folk and their regional dialects.

This is how Jonnie's path towards the British Library began.

"I'm an ex-teacher and I've always been fascinated by language."

Jonnie once worked with the material from the Survey of English Dialects, a massive project undertaken in the 1950s, which involved hours of "field recordings" taken of dialects across the country.