http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_atlas.php is a cool site that has recordings of many people reading the same passage of English text, to provide samples for determining accents. Information is recorded about the person’s native language and how they learned English. You can find the samples by browsing on a world map, searching by native language, or doing more sophisticated searches (by age, gender, other languages, how English was learned, and so forth).
It is a great resource for theater students who need to hear a regional accent, as well as for linguistics researchers. Some of the samples have phonetic transcriptions and some of those have been annotated, to indicate the ways in which the accent differs from “standard” English.
It’s an amazing resource, and one that kids at almost any age will take to. Now, when I show it to middle school kids, I fire up a Dropbox from CLEAR ( http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/ria/audioDropbox2/ ) and have the kids record their own takes at the passage. Once the “toy snake for Brother Bob” giggles pass, they love working through the archives and “sourcing” their own accents.
Comment by tieandjeans — 2010 November 30 @ 03:50 |
Fabulous and fascinating. I just wish there were more texts read (and more speakers).
Comment by bj — 2010 November 30 @ 05:48 |
I just went through the accents for different Australian states. Personally, I don’t think there is much of a regional difference in Australian accents, mainly a class/education one. The one from NSW was a broader lower class accent than the others. So not sure on reliability of this.
Comment by David Stern — 2010 December 3 @ 15:15 |
The London one was a rather peculiar accent. hmmm this is a mix of non-native speakers around the world some of whom could barely speak English and hadn’t practiced the text and an odd selection of native speakers.
Comment by David Stern — 2010 December 3 @ 15:23 |
[...] recently posted on English dialects, and have now come across a nice map of regional American English Dialects: Aschmann's map of [...]
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