TheBBC Pronunciation Unit, also known as theBBC Pronunciation Research Unit, is an arm of theBritish Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) comprisinglinguists (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 anyaccent, despite the popular association betweenReceived Pronunciation and the BBC. Its predecessor was theBBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, which existed from 1926 to 1939.
The Advisory Committee on Spoken English was founded byJohn 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 theRadio Times. Its initial aim wasprescriptive, but it increasingly sought public opinion in theRadio Times. It publishedBroadcast English, a series of seven booklets documenting recommended pronunciations 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 aspostmasters andvicars, in villages, 94.5% of which were returned. In 1929, Lloyd James invited readers of theRadio 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, andHarold Orton. The committee was suspended in 1939 due to the outbreak of World War II.[2]
The committee originally used anad hoc respelling system for representing English pronunciation, but it later adopted theInternational Phonetic Alphabet and a more systematic respelling system.[2]
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[update], 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, theBBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (1971, edited by Miller), revised by Graham Pointon in 1983, and theOxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (2006), edited by Lena Olausson and Catherine Sangster, both published byOxford University Press (OUP). The former used the IPA and the BBC's own respelling.[6] The latter used OUP's IPA scheme, devised byClive Upton in the 1990s, and OUP's respelling.[7]
