Return to The Living Archive Web Site (History & Heritage Page)

Please be patient these pages are slow to load - but worth the wait. Don't keep clicking on the links!		This project was researched, carried out and put together by 40 Year 7 children at Bushfield Middle School, working with Philippa Tipper and Jane Turner of the Living Archive, Wolverton, Milton Keynes. What you will discover in the following pages are some of the findings about how people speak who were born and brought up in Wolverton, which is now part of the new city of Milton Keynes. You will hear people talking and be able to compare how four different generations of Wolvertonians pronounce certain words and sounds. There are also video clips showing how some of the children's games are played today, as well as older people talking about the games they played when they were at school. Thanks go to all the Wolvertonians who were interviewed and shared their childhood memories. "Do we all speak now like someone off of East Enders?" - Roger Kitchen, General Manager, Living Archive "As we listened to both adults and children's conversations, the pronunciation seemed rather different, due to, when the children are in school, they pick up a variety of different accents, where as the adults generally talk in similar ways. We tried to prove the differences and similarities in both adults and children's accents." "We studied the dialect from people who were brought up and raised in Wolverton in between the ages of 10 and 70. We asked questions to our interviewees so that we could find out the way people pronounced the words. We got some of the answers that we were looking for, and we noticed the differences in how the adults talk to the children." "Children and adults move to Wolverton from other places and bring along different dialects, therefore the accents and dialects are changing all of the time. When children move here they often go back to where they have come from to see their family, therefore they take back the new dialects and accents and bring back other dialects and accents." Advice was given by the Open University Centre for Language and Communications. The project was funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
	compare the way different people speak.
	learn our playground games
	meet people born in Wolverton
	see how much you remember!
There are 4 sections: Accents Games People Process Quiz Because the pages contain large files they are slow to load - but definitely worth the wait! The sound and video files require QuickTime 4 (or higher) which you can download here. The full version of this project is available on CD ROM.

Accents | Games | People | Process | Quiz