In 2003 the editor of BBC Wales New Media Department put forward a proposal for a project on language in the UK that aimed to build on previous successes such as Robert McCrum s The Story of English and Melvyn Bragg's The Routes of English:

The UK Speaks (working title) is a major project led by BBC Nations and Regions which will celebrate and explore the diverse languages, dialects and accents of the UK. Working with a range of expert partners the BBC will undertake a unique survey of language in the UK at the start of the 21st century. The project will be both entertaining and have a strong social purpose; celebrating the diversity of the UK by affirming the value of regional and ethnic differences as expressed through language. The survey will provide the starting point for an ongoing study of language in the UK. (Rose/Mowbray, Executive summary).

The upshot of this proposal - subsequently re-named the Voices project - can undoubtedly be described as a major success for the BBC in 2005. Working in close consultation with Professor Clive Upton in the School of English at the University of Leeds, the project began with a survey of English around the UK led by a team of BBC broadcast journalists. This research drew on, and has now become integral to, the Survey of Regional English (SuRE) devised by Upton and others in the 1990s, itself building upon the pioneering work of Upton s predecessor at Leeds, Professor Harold Orton, some 50 years earlier.

The results of this new survey of English provided the basis for a range of media outputs, including a dedicated series on BBC Radio 4, Word4Word, further programmes across BBC network radio stations, Nations and Regions network and Asian Network as well as TV contributions such as BBC 2 s The Way That We Say It. Finally, the project led to the production of an interactive website (www.bbc.co.uk/voices), which offers widespread access to more than 300 professional recordings of different varieties of English together with some 50,000 public responses to a range of language-related themes. By the end of 2005, the Voices website had received over one million hits, far exceeding original expectations.

It is not uncommon to hear academic linguists bemoaning the mis-representation of language whenever linguistic issues are taken up by the media. Ironically, however, we have little systematic understanding of the ways in which language-related issues are actually thematised in, for example, the print and broadcast media or, increasingly, the new electronic media. For academic linguists, one obvious legacy of the BBC Voices project is a wealth of resources on language practices and values within the UK that can now be exploited in their own right by dialectologists and sociolinguists. At the same time, the project presents a unique opportunity for the exploration of what is a relatively unusual example of large-scale interaction between academic linguists, the media, and the wider population on a wide variety of themes specifically relating to language.

The aim of our research is to focus on the interactive website of the BBC Voices project in order to explore the treatment of language by an organisation outside of academe that sought to present the subject matter in ways that were (in its own words) entertaining yet with a strong social purpose. Our investigations will be organised around three inter-related aims:

• The first aim is practical insofar as our work will document and evaluate the Voices website as a concrete example of professional and popular discourse on language in the UK.
• The second aim is explicitly theoretical insofar as our research will build on ongoing work in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology on the representation of language-related issues in and by the media in the context of so-called language ideological debates.
• The third aim is primarily methodological in that we will investigate the Voices website as a specific instance of multimodal/computer-mediated discourse, thereby contributing to recent theoretical developments in this area.

In sum, our research will help to consolidate the BBC s original intention that the Voices project act as a starting point for further study on language in the UK.