The lost voices of Britain before WW1: German recording of British PoWs reveals a rural society rich in now extinct accents that varied from village to village

The recordings were discovered by British academic John Adams

They are believed to be the earliest known recordings of its kind



Experts fascinated that the Oxfordshire accent has completely changed



Recordings made by Alois Brandl and Wilhelm Doegen



They will be unveiled at next year's First World War centenary events



The voices of British soldiers held prisoner in Germany during the First World War have been uncovered in recordings that offer extraordinary insight into a world before radio and mass produced motor cars.

Discovered by academic John Adams in Berlin, they reveal a society where accents changed distinctly from village to village and some dialect words are virtually unrecognisable.

Among the men recorded was John Hickman, a musician from Bletchingdon, north of Oxford, who experts say has an Oxfordshire accent completely different from that of today.

Recordings of prisoners of war in 1916 have been found in Berlin and offer an insight into regional accents

They noted that he pronounced the word ‘were’ as ‘weir’, ‘father’ as ‘feyther’ and country as ‘cundri’.

Jonnie Robinson, head of sociolinguistics at the British Library believes this is the earliest known recording of its kind.



Mr Adams came across a reference to the recordings in a German book and traced the archive to the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2007.



Wilhelm Doegen (far right) and the linguist Alois Brandl (fourth from right) made the recordings of the PoWs

'These were made on the spot at the time,' he told The Times. 'The songs and voices echo a lost

Britain, one we can hardly imagine.'

The 200 recordings have been preserved on shellac discs and are expected to form part of an audio

cenotaph for next year's First World War centenary events.

The recordings were originally made on wax by Austrian philologist Alois Brandl and sound recordist Wilhelm Doegen.



Many of the prisoners were asked to read from the Bible or tell jokes and limericks.

Hew Strachan, who is advising the government on next year's events, said: 'Regional accents were

much stronger.



'This was a period when you could tell people from one village to another, it wasn't just county to county.'