Speech Accent Archive (9/10/08)

My friend Victoria set me a link to an interesting accent site, the Speech Accent Archive. It's a great resource for ESL teachers and fun to browse. Actors also!

From their website:

The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers.

This website allows users to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent. The speech accent archive demonstrates that accents are systematic rather than merely mistaken speech.

Here's my favorite to date: Brooklyn.

This was a followup to an earlier email:

Thanks to the Language Trainers Group. A rainy day activity -- I did really poorly on this "guess the accent" quiz. See if you can do better. And don't sign up for their language classes. Come to CHICLE.