George Mason University Speech Accent Archive

JT Olds writes "Apparently George Mason University is running a project to document differences in speech and accents from different backgrounds and the like. They have a paragraph that 306 sample readers have read and recorded, and all of these sound files are categorized by background, gender, age, and other things. They say that this is primarily for teaching and learning, and is especially useful for any linguists out there, but I just thought it was cool. The sound bytes are released under the Creative Commons license. Of course, the Google cache of the main frame is here. As a side note, I did get the link to this from Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins."

They could learn from actors...

[Monkelectric]

Actors/voice actors have "dialect tapes" which they study to learn accents. I have a few and generally they start by giving vowel substitutions, common phrases and syntax, and then move on to insanely boring phrases you must repeat while trying to copy their accents and inflections.

Which British English?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you even been to the UK? There are a LOT of different accents there :)

Quicktime!?

[barcodez]

Great they are all encoded in a proprietary format :(.
Anyone know how to get quicktime working in Firefox on Linux (Gentoo)?

Re:Hmmmmm

[mocm]

They don't reverse them, they only have one sound for l and r which lies between the two sounds. Naturally it is difficult for them to even distinguish the sounds and even more difficult to speak them.
It is like the French U which English speakers never get right because they don't even realize the difference (rue is not pronounced like roo, it is like the German u (that should be \"u, but no Umlaut in /.).

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you went back to the Old English days it would not be your accent that would make it hard for people to understand you--but that Old English is a language that hardly resembles Modern English. Not only are there characters that are no longer used, but the language itself has a different basis than Middle English and Modern English does. I assume what you really meant to say is if the person went back in time to when people spoke Early Modern English.

Re:Quicktime!?

[barcodez]

Just to answer my own question # emerge mplayerplug-in Looks like I saved myself the 1000 and half my deskspace :p

Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Black Parrot]

> We were just talking about how the British English language was the true "natural" English language, all other derived languages that were English with an accent. For example, If I (a person who lives in America and speaks US English; no born American (thank goodness)) were to go to England and converse with an Englishman; who would have the accent, me or him? The obvious answer, as a lot of Americans fail to realize, is me.

Maybe not. It's a curious but well-known phenomenon in dialectology that peripherial/frontier dialects tend to be conservative while innovations accumulate more rapidly in the core areas. IIRC, scholars study the isolated communities on the islands along the US Atlantic coast to see what Shakespeare's actors would have sounded like.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[shepd]

>Err, last time I checked Glasgow was in Scotland, not England.

True, but you'd ever been to Cumbria [jpb.co.uk], you'd understand why an American would easily get confused.

Re:Quicktime!?

[Anonymous Coward]

No they are not ... :P

They use standart quicktime files with imapcm audio ... mplayer could play them forever and anything gstreamer based should too . You don't even need any binary codecs for them..

get mozplugger or that mplayer plugin for your browser

Bork bork bork...

[hefa]

This stuff is cool, IMHO. In case anyone's interested, here's the Swedish version of the concept: http://swedia.ling.umu.se/

In SweDia you can listen to 100 Swedish dialects recorded 1998-2000. Hurty flurty schnipp schnipp!

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[zsau]

Actually, that's not true. Obviously if you went to England, you'd have an accent. But there's a lot of different accents in England. Even in the city of London there's at least three native accents (Cockney, Estuary and Received). But that's not what I'm getting at.

British English isn't the 'true "natural" English language'. In some ways, American English is more conservative than British English; American retains the flat a in words like 'fast' and 'pass' (so 'pass' and 'mass' rhyme), whereas in southern British English they've become the broad a. Most American dialects have retained the rhotic in almost all positions (and where it's been lost---words like 'ass' (from arse) and 'bust' (from burst)---the r is no longer written, left no trace, and the resultant word is generally distinct), but in almost all English English dialects I've heard (I'm Aussie), it's gone. Of course, British English is more conservative in other ways---it retains a three-way distinction between father/bother and cot/caught, for instance. (In everything here, Australian follows British. Sometimes Australian follows American. Sometimes Australian is original or shares changes with the other Southern Hemispherean Englishes.)

British English is no truer an english then any english. Just because the name of the language is the same as the adjective for things that come from England (and the name of the people from there, too) doesn't mean the English have any particular claim to English any more. Especially because there's probably as much variation in English English as there is in World English.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[PacoTaco]

english, which is a normand anglo-saxon tongue, originated either from Saxony (in Germany) or Normandy (in France) and therefore is itself an accented version of these languages.

Plus Latin (old and Renaissance) and a bunch of other stuff. Here's a nice chart [danshort.com] and some links for the curious.

Re:Problems with study

[bziman]

As a linguistics student at George Mason University and having used this system, I know that the people who developed this project took great care to make sure that the "paragraph" represents all of the phonemes in the English language. It is therefore a good representation (maybe not perfect, but good). Furthermore, each speaker is made to repeat the phrase three times. And the audio is of sufficient quality for analysis -- at least for research in my graduate English phonetics class last year.

International Dialects of English Archive

[johnwbyrd]

The IDEA archive [ukans.edu] has a far more complete collection of accents and voice samples. Excellent source material for geeks who work in film, TV or theater.

Re:Actually...

[tverbeek]

the dominant Canadian accent corresponds very closely to the dominant American accent.

That's because they all live on our border and watch our TV shows. :) Seriously, the accent we're talking about here evolved mostly in the Great Lakes region, where there's always been plenty of interaction between the two countries. When you get away from that area (e.g. Newfoundland, Georgia) the similarities fade.

Its not that different from noting the similarities between Tyneside and Lothian accents. Sure, one's English and the other Scottish, but they're neighbors.