Wednesday, January 7, 2009

The Sounds of English - A Speech Accent Archive

I just came across a wonderful resource called the Speech Accent Archive. The archive was established by George Mason University "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." There are currently 1050 samples in the archive and it is growing daily. Check it out - it is a great way to learn more about dialects and accents.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a great link! I'm going to send it to a couple of ESL professors I know.

Thanks for dropping by my blog. I've linked you because I like what I see!

I secretly hope we, as a group of English language bloggers, are actually helping someone learn...maybe a tiny bit(?) ;-)

Cheers!

Laura Payne said...

Thanks Carlos.

In addition to the possibility of helping people learn, I like to demonstrate how much fun can be had with language while learning.

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