BBC Pronunciation Unit

Last updated

The BBC Pronunciation Unit, also known as the BBC Pronunciation Research Unit, is an arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) comprising linguists (phoneticians) whose role is "to research and advise on the pronunciation of any words, names or phrases in any language required by anyone in the BBC". [1] It does not concern itself with promoting any accent, despite the popular association between Received Pronunciation and the BBC. Its predecessor was the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, which existed from 1926 to 1939.

Contents

Advisory Committee on Spoken English

The Advisory Committee on Spoken English was founded by John Reith, the BBC's first managing editor, with the intent to "maintain a standard of educated Southern English". The founding members were: [2]

It held meetings a few times a year to decide on "general principles" of pronunciation for announcers, and "rulings" on "doubtful words", which were published in the Radio Times . Its initial aim was prescriptive, but it increasingly sought public opinion in the Radio Times. It published Broadcast English, a series of seven booklets documenting recommended proncuniations of specific words, chiefly place names, from 1928 to 1939. The pronunciation of place names was crowdsourced. In 1928, 1,946 letters surveying pronunciation were sent to educated people, such as postmasters and vicars, in villages, 94.5% of which were returned. In 1929, Lloyd James invited readers of the Radio Times to submit their pronunciation of place names, and received at least 1,500 letters and postcards. The lexicographical work was mostly done by a "specialist sub-committee" made up of Jones, Lloyd James, Henry Cecil Kennedy Wyld, and Harold Orton. The committee was suspended in 1939 due to the outbreak of World War II. [2]

The committee originally used an ad hoc respelling system for representing English pronunciation, but it later adopted the International Phonetic Alphabet and a more systematic respelling system. [2]

Pronunciation Unit

The committee was replaced by a team consisting of Lloyd James and Jones, who remained "linguistic advisors" to the BBC until their deaths, and two former assistant secretaries of the committee, Gertrude M. "Elizabeth" Miller and Elspeth D. Anderson. The day-to-day work was taken over by Miller and Anderson. The team became known as the BBC Pronunciation Unit in the early 1940s. [3] [4] [5]

As of 2008, the unit consisted of three phoneticians, and the database it maintains had more than 200,000 entries. [1] Part of its work has been published as pronouncing dictionaries, the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (1971, edited by Miller), revised by Graham Pointon in 1983, and the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (2006), edited by Lena Olausson and Catherine Sangster, both published by Oxford University Press (OUP). The former used the IPA and the BBC's own respelling. [6] The latter used OUP's IPA scheme, devised by Clive Upton in the 1990s, and OUP's respelling. [7]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Jones (phonetician)</span> British phonetician (1881–1967)

Daniel Jones was a British phonetician who studied under Paul Passy, professor of phonetics at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne. He was head of the department of phonetics at University College London.

Received Pronunciation (RP) is the British English accent regarded as the standard one, carrying the highest social prestige, since as late as the very early 20th century. Language scholars have long disagreed on RP's exact definition, how geographically neutral it is, how many speakers there are, the nature and classification of its sub-varieties, how appropriate a choice it is as a standard, how the accent has changed over time, and even its name. The study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation, while other features of standard British English, such as vocabulary, grammar, and style, are not considered. The speakers who conventionally use RP have changed the accent to such a degree over the last century that many of its early 20th-century traditions of transcription and analysis have become outdated or are no longer considered evidence-based by linguists. Still, these traditions continue to be commonly taught and used, for instance in language education, and RP remains a popular umbrella term in ordinary British society and in linguistics.

Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect or simply the way a particular individual speaks a word or language.

Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Voiced glottal fricative</span> Consonantal sound represented by ⟨ɦ⟩ in IPA

The voiced glottal fricative, sometimes called breathy-voiced glottal transition, is a type of sound used in some spoken languages which patterns like a fricative or approximant consonant phonologically, but often lacks the usual phonetic characteristics of a consonant. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɦ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is h\.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Close front unrounded vowel</span> Vowel sound represented by ⟨i⟩ in IPA

The close front unrounded vowel, or high front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound that occurs in most spoken languages, represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet by the symbol i. It is similar to the vowel sound in the English word meet—and often called long-e in American English. Although in English this sound has additional length and is not normally pronounced as a pure vowel, some dialects have been reported to pronounce the phoneme as a pure sound. A pure sound is also heard in many other languages, such as French, in words like chic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Close central rounded vowel</span> Vowel sound represented by ⟨ʉ⟩ in IPA

The close central rounded vowel, or high central rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʉ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is }. The sound is also commonly referred to by the name of its symbol, "barred u".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John C. Wells</span> British phonetician (born 1939)

John Christopher Wells is a British phonetician and Esperantist. Wells is a professor emeritus at University College London, where until his retirement in 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics. He is known for his work on the Esperanto language and his invention of the standard lexical sets and the X-SAMPA phonetic script system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. C. Gimson</span> English phonetician

Alfred Charles "Gim" Gimson was an English phonetician.

For centuries, there have been movements to reform the spelling of the English language. Such spelling reform seeks to change English orthography so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle. Common motives for spelling reform include making learning quicker, making learning cheaper, and making English more useful as an international auxiliary language.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) can be used to represent sound correspondences among various accents and dialects of the English language.

A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lilias Armstrong</span> British phonetician (1882–1937)

Lilias Eveline Armstrong was an English phonetician. She worked at University College London, where she attained the rank of reader. Armstrong is most known for her work on English intonation as well as the phonetics and tone of Somali and Kikuyu. Her book on English intonation, written with Ida C. Ward, was in print for 50 years. Armstrong also provided some of the first detailed descriptions of tone in Somali and Kikuyu.

The English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD) was created by the British phonetician Daniel Jones and was first published in 1917. It originally comprised over 50,000 headwords listed in their spelling form, each of which was given one or more pronunciations transcribed using a set of phonemic symbols based on a standard accent. The dictionary is now in its 18th edition. John C. Wells has written of it "EPD has set the standard against which other dictionaries must inevitably be judged".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Roach (phonetician)</span> British retired phonetician (born 1943)

Peter John Roach is a British retired phonetician. He taught at the Universities of Leeds and Reading, and is best known for his work on the pronunciation of British English.

Jack Windsor Lewis was a British phonetician. He is best known for his work on the phonetics of English and the teaching of English pronunciation to foreign learners. His blog postings on English phonetics and phoneticians are prolific and widely read.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Lloyd James</span> Welsh phonetician

Arthur Lloyd James was a Welsh phonetician who was a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the linguistic adviser to the British Broadcasting Corporation. His research was mainly on the phonetics of English and French, but he also worked on the phonetics of Hausa and Yoruba. He killed himself while a patient at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he was committed after killing his wife, the violinist Elsie Winifred Owen, in 1941.

John Henry Esling, is a Canadian linguist specializing in phonetics. He is a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Victoria, where he taught from 1981 to 2014. Esling was president of the International Phonetic Association from 2011 to 2015 and a co-editor of the 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association.

Joseph Desmond O'Connor was a British linguist and Professor of Phonetics at University College London. A festschrift in his honour edited by Jack Windsor Lewis, was published by Routledge in 1995.

Beatrice Lilian Honikman was a phonetician of South African origin who taught at SOAS University of London and the University of Leeds. Her special field was the phonetics of African languages.

References

Bibliography