Listen to the way this speaker pronounces the word aye [= yes] on the in-breath – an extremely rare feature in English, but common in Scandinavian languages.

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=021M-C0908X0005XX-0300V0.xml

'Recording of the Week' highlights gems from the Archival Sound Recordings website, chosen by British Library experts or recommended by listeners. This week's item was selected by Jonnie Robinson, a specialist in sociolinguistics & education at the British Library. The recording of Edward Blaire (d.o.b. 1903) was made by Clive Upton in 1974 in Patterdale, Westmorland, for the University of Leeds Survey of English Dialects

Talk of village horse fairs in an accent that I would have heard in my childhood just 9 miles away. Llanymynech straddles the Shrophire (England) / Montgomeryshire (Wales) border and before the 1969(?) Sunday drinking referendum in Montgomeryshire had the distinction that the Welsh part of the local pub was roped off from the English part, being forbidden to sell alcohol on a Sunday.

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=021M-C0908X0012XX-0500V0.xml

Recording of the Week highlights gems from the Archival Sound Recordings website, selected by British Library experts or recommended by listeners. This week's item was selected from the Survey of English Dialects collection by Antony Gordon, senior cataloguer and systems administrator at the British Library Sound Archive. It is an interview of John Edward Humphreys (d.o.b. 1894), made by Michael Barry in 1955 for the University of Leeds.

Although best known for his epic fantasy novels such as Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien was also a philologist and professor of English. This educational disc was recorded for the Linguaphone language course company in 1929 as part of their English Conversation series. The other speaker is Prof. A. Lloyd James.

English Conversation: At the Tobacconist's

 

'Recording of the Week' highlights gems from the Archival Sound Recordings website, selected by British Library experts or recommended by listeners. This week's item was selected from the Early spoken word recordings collection by Stephen Cleary, Curator of Drama & Literature recordings at the British Library Sound Archive.

One of the rarest sounds of the British countryside is the booming call of the Bittern, a bird belonging to the heron family. A shy dweller of wetland areas, it was driven to the very edge of extinction in the UK  - in 1997 the national population was at its lowest, with only 11 booming males being identified. Thankfully, improved habitat management and reedbed conservation has resulted in an increase in numbers and today around 75 breeding males are thought to exist. Follow the link to listen to the booming calls of this elusive bird.

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=022M-WBOTAXSTEL01-0100V0.xml

'Recording of the Week' highlights gems from the Archival Sound Recordings website, selected by British Library experts or recommended by listeners. This week's item was selected from the British Wildlife Recordings collection by Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife Sounds at the British Library Sound Archive. It was recorded in May 1966 in Norfolk, England, by Lawrence Shove.

In this moving interview, Edith Birkin (née Hofmann) describes her experience during the Holocaust. Born in Prague in 1927 she was sent with her family to the Lodz ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1941, before deportation to Auschwitz. After a death march across Germany she was liberated from Belsen in 1945.

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=021M-C0410X0030XX-0100V0.xml 

'Recording of the Week' highlights gems from the Archival Sound Recordings website, selected by British Library experts or recommended by listeners. This week's item was selected from the Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust collection by Mary Stewart, Oral History curator at the British Library. It was recorded by interviewer Katherine Thompson in 1989.