AS a lad growing up in south Birmingham, Clive Upton helped out in his dad's butcher shop, and when he was older did holiday work in the city's meat market.
"If I was pushing a trolley of meat down an aisle, I used to say 'Mind your backs', a phrase I never usually used. Saying 'Excuse me, could you please move' wouldn't really have registered.
"I think it's the first time I was aware of adapting how I spoke according to the audience. We all do it with words and accent, and it's part of the endless fascination of language."
This empowering ability to change the nuances of our speech according to the situation is done mostly unconsciously, but it's the kind of thing that Upton notices and gets excited about because, he says, it's all about people and how they interact.
This love affair with the English language was to lead to a doctorate in linguistics. The subject of his PhD thesis paid clear tribute to his family background: The Language of the Meat Trade: A Survey of Terms Used By A Selected Sample of Butchers in the UK.
The eminent professor supervising his doctorate was almost equally enthused by the many terms for "topside", and Clive's father Chris was no doubt pleased as punch at the manner of his son's achievements – especially so, perhaps, as he himself had been forced to leave school at 14. Funnily enough, says Clive, Upton the Elder never liked carving the roast.
Cataloguing and analysing the vagaries of butchers' language (he found that topside was "cocked hat" in Sheffield and "hindlift" in Leeds, by the way) was the first of many books published by Upton, including the Oxford Dictionary of English Pronunciation, and recently the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary, compiled jointly with his son Eben.
Now a senior lecturer in the School of English at Leeds University, he is also the custodian of one of the greatest treasures of the English language and one of the university's major claims to worldwide fame – the Survey of English Dialects.
Compiled over 12 years after the Second World War, the SED is the only comprehensive survey of dialects spoken in England. Dialect encompasses vocabulary, grammar and accent.
Its focus was rural speech, and fieldworkers visited 113 villages across the country, recording samples of vernacular spoken much as it had been for many centuries by interviewing people about their life and work.
The interviewees were folk who had stayed in one place all their lives, their speech uncontaminated by that of other communities.
The purpose of the survey and its raft of 1,300 questions was the creation of a resource by which linguistic historians could unearth sounds, vocabulary and grammar going back to Shakespeare, Chaucer and even the Norman Conquest.
While students of linguistics are constantly recording and analysing the speech of smaller communities or groups within them, there has been no work on the scale of the SED since the early 1960s. Nor has there been a large-scale survey of the way our increasingly complex urban communities use the language.
But now a project which will help to update the SED, and concentrating much more on large centres of population, is being launched jointly by the BBC and Leeds University.
Known as Voices, BBC staff called audio-gatherers will travel across the country recording the speech of at least 1,000 interviewees from an eclectic mix of people across the UK.
The methods used have been devised by Clive Upton and colleagues, and those interviewed in pairs will be encouraged to talk about family relationships, social situations, and the words they use for certain objects (sofa, settee, couch? snicket, ginnell, passageway?).
Thousands more individuals will take part in an online survey, and the combined material gathered will be used to make a series of TV, radio and online programmes about the English language, which will be broadcast later in the year.
The audio material will provide content for an online interactive dialect map of the British Isles, and the interviews will be deposited with the national sound archives of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Island, as well as making their contribution to an enhanced SED.
Scratching the surface of language can cause huge debate, says Clive Upton. "For example, who is to say that non-standard English phrases like 'I'm not going nowhere' are substandard English? This one goes back to Shakespeare and beyond. It's the same with accents. Who is to say that one sounds more educated than another? Many of our prejudices and misconceptions are just not logical."
Prejudiced and illogical they maybe, but they're pretty much dyed-in-the-wool – a fact underlined by a new BBC poll of attitudes to dialect, accent and the way we speak.
Across the whole UK sample, the Leeds accent ranked higher in terms of pleasantness, prestige and helpfulness in getting ahead in the job market. It was considered more pleasant that accents in London, Belfast, and Cardiff and Bristol, but 33 other accents were considered to be easier on the ear.
And within Yorkshire, while more than half of those questioned liked and felt proud of their accent, 18 per cent said they were not proud of their accent, and 56 per cent said they wish, at least occasionally, they had a different one.
It's strange in itself that those surveyed had no hesitation in commenting on the accents of others in way what they would never comment on colour or size.
But clearly a Yorkshire accent – with its psychological connotations of straightforward honest dealing – is considered to be a bonus in the financial services sector, whose call centres abound in this region.
Common perceptions of accent can be affected by popular culture. Hence the recent rehabilitation of the West Midlands accent, possibly influenced by jolly Howard of The Halifax's TV ads, and the sharp punditry of BBC Five Live and Match of the Day 2 presenter Adrian Chiles.
One question in the new Voices survey asks for names describing a person wearing cheap trendy clothes and jewellery, which may well bring up words from around the country other than the already identified chav, pikey, and scally.
Clive Upton says it's easy for people to get exercised about so-called abuse of the language and use of slang, when language is a living thing which can't and won't stand still.
And speaking of abuse, in the less-enlightened 1950s, 84 words for left-handed were recorded, most of them appallingly derogatory because of the suspicion of left-handedness that then prevailed.
What Dr Upton has noticed about language change in Britain during his decades of study is the increasing regionalism of accent. People move around more, so an accent perhaps embraces a greater area than previously. But accents are not being completely homogenised, he says.
"We like to think the world will stay the same," says Clive Upton. "But only a dead language stays unchanged. I would love to come back in 500 years' time and see what's happened to English.
"Studying language is about the words and accents, but it's also about history and geography, psychology and sociology. They're all the reasons I love it."
sheena.hastings@ypn.co.uk

To record your views on the Voices website log on to www.bbc.co.uk/voices or call 0800 0566787 for a copy of the survey.

Yorkshire pride – but a hankering for something a bit posher
Brian Dooks
A BBC poll has discovered that 58 per cent of Yorkshire people are proud of their accents but would like a posher voice to impress on special occasions.
The survey, carried out as part of a project to record the way the nation sounds, revealed more than three-quarters of people across the country believed they had a reasonably strong accent, with those from Northern Ireland and Scotland most proud of their lilt.
In the nationwide poll of 5,015 people, the Leeds accent was rated as more pleasant than those from London, Belfast, Cardiff and Bristol. The most hated accent was from Birmingham, with Liverpool and Glasgow not far behind.
Actor Sean Connery topped the chart for the UK's most pleasant speaker, along with broadcasters Trevor McDonald and Terry Wogan, and actor Hugh Grant.
In Yorkshire, 74 per cent of respondents said they thought the variety of accents they hear everyday is increasing, with 81 per cent saying they like the variety. But 43 per cent admitted to changing their accent when they meet people for the first time.
Yorkshire dialect expert Dr Arnold Kellett, of Knaresborough, said: "People should be encouraged to retain their local speech and be able to switch into a kind of standard English when that's required, for example when they are travelling or they think they might not be understood."
The vice-president of the Yorkshire Dialect Society added: "There's not a single Yorkshire dialect and therefore there is not a single Yorkshire accent. There's a big difference between the West Riding and the North and East Riding styles of speech. We should be proud to speak with our local and regional style. Obviously I would champion the use of the Yorkshire dialect as much as possible but we have to face the fact it is very rapidly dying out."
The BBC's audio-gathering project – to be known as Voices – will run through 2005 with more than 1,000 interviewees from around the country helping to provide a linguistic blueprint for Britain.
Its recordings will be used to update the University of Leeds's Survey of English Dialects, which was the first scientific attempt to map the accents we have and the special local idiosyncrasies in our language.
The series, Word for Word is on BBC Radio 4 with Dermot Murnaghan on Wednesday at 9am.