I'm In Yon Fogarty. Welcome to the Thursday show where we talk with people who are doing interesting things with language.

I'm here today with Rob Drummond, who's a sociolinguist at the Manchester Metropolitan University.

His book now out in paperback is called You're All Talk, and he did a large project

exploring accents and dialects of Greater Manchester touring the region in his accent van. Rob Drummond,

welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thank you very much. Yeah, so I just finished your book,

and I loved it, but before we talk about, and I want to

talk all about it, but first, I have to hear more about this accent fan. Yeah, now this act is

proved very popular. People are very interested in this. And quite rightly, it was, it was great.

So what it was, basically, is that we wanted to do a project around Greater Manchester,

which is where I'm based and where the university is. And it's kind of a social linguistics

project. We wanted to collect people's voices, basically. We wanted to interview them, record

them. And we thought a really nice way to do this would be to go out and about and kind of

speak to people, you know, in their own places, on their own turf, and rather than try and get people

into the university. And so we came up with this idea of the accent band, which is basically a kind of a

mobile recording studio. And we drove around the 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester, which is in the northwest of England,

and we invited people on board and people climb on.

And we're not in there with them.

They kind of, they get faced with a camera and a voice recorder and they get asked questions.

And the questions are about where they're from and how they speak and what they think about the way they speak and all these kind of things.

And it was just a really nice way of gathering that kind of recorded data because people felt very, there was a bit of privacy and people clearly felt quite comfortable in sharing some of their stories.

So it was great.

It was a really, really nice, nice way to do research. Yeah, it sounds very authentic. But how did you get people to come into the van? That sounds a little sketchy. Yeah, yeah, it does a little bit. And that's quite fine. Yeah, whenever I describe the project, yeah, people kind of raise his eyebrows.. And I have, I describe it in a very careful

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