An Online Archive of Speech Accents

Use your words! Language scholars and teachers will find the Speech Accent Archive, at http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/, a useful resource. Speech Accent Archive contains over 250 English-language speech samples in accents ranging from Afrikaans to Zulu. Each speaker is speaking the same good-sized (and fairly silly) paragraph. The site works best with, at minimum, a 800 x 600 resolution monitor and will require a QuickTime plugin to play the samples.

Select a language from the list on the left to get a list of available speakers. Some accents have multiple speakers; Bengali, for example, has four speakers available. (English has 39.) Information about each speaker includes birthplace, native language, English learning method (academic or not) and more. Click on the icon above birthplace to view a map of that region. Also on the speaker's page is a phonetic transcription of the message listed at the top of the page.

Posted to Culture