George Mason University Speech Accent Archive 191
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."
Very curious methodology (Score:5, Interesting)
It might be useful for tracing people's origins when they are in an Anglosaxon country. But you might as well just ask them.
What would be more useful, perhaps, is a study of the relative differences in accents between native speakers of the "same" language, and how these differences come about.
Problems with study (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a speech synth/recognition researcher, but I do know that generally, for speech research, much stricter constraints are placed on audio being acquired. The extreme variety of the site is nice, but I'm not sure that it outweighs the drawbacks.
Japanese people can't pronounce L!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:5, Interesting)
Getting speakers of English as a foreign language to repeat a standard English phrase. It's highly unlikely that this produces accents in the sense of two speakers of the same language would recognise. I.e. would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase? Somehow, I don't think so.
Probably not, for the same reason kids don't understand you when you baby-talk them. With kids, they hear the word the way the adults say it, presumably correctly. Then they speak it in their "I'm still learning to talk" accent. So I might say "later", but my daughter will say "waiter". I understand her because I've been hearing her trying to talk, and she understands me because it's my speech she's trying to emulate. But if I say "waiter" when I mean "later", she'll be confused.
Mind you, she knows that she's not perfectly emulating my speech, and she tries everyday to speak a little more clearly. This is the reason you don't baby-talk kids, and you don't imitate a foreign-speaker's accent when you talk to them. They won't learn the correct speech (assuming you're speaking it 'correctly', whatever that is), and most importantly for the foreign-speaker, they won't understand you. (It's less important that the kid understand you and more important that they hear the word correctly. Understanding will come with time, but breaking an accent you imposed on them will be very difficult, if not impossible) Also, mind you, it's perfectly ok to limit your vocabulary to theirs, if necessary, to get your message across. But in neither case will the person's vocabulary expand when you do that, so unless you're trying to say something of grave importance ("Your house is on fire! Call 9-1-1!"), you're better off going ahead and taking the time to teach the new vocabulary. :)
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure. Why not? I'm an American who's been living in Paris for several months, and I've noticed the following things:
- As an anglophone, it is easier for me to understand other anglophones speaking French than a francophone speaking French.
- As an American, I can tell the difference between an American, a Briton and a German speaking French.
- As a Southerner, I can tell the difference between a Californian, a New Yorker, and a Floridian speaking French
If the accent is strong enough, it will always shine through.Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:4, Interesting)
Also true in genetics, where's it's called Founder's Effect.
It's not that difficult to understand. Assume that in one year 1 person in X comes up with a language innovation -- a new word, a new way of pronouncing a word, an idiom, whatever. Or sate in another (but equivalent) way: assume that a language innovation happens on average every X person-years. Also assume that the innovation spreads with some frequency to persons who hear it.
Then then more people interacting in a place, the more innovation you'll have. More people will be present in core areas, fewer in peripheral or frontier areas.
And every time someone leaves an area for a previously unsettled area, that person will take with him his knowledge of the language as it currently exists in that area, like a snapshot -- but once settled in the new area, the smaller settling population will generate less innovation, causing language change to slow in the newly settled area.
In genetics, Founder's Effect of course refers to genes (and alleles): if a small group branches off from a larger group to settle a new area, all alleles/traits present in the larger group may not be represented in the settlers, or represented in the same frequency. What was a rare trait, (e.g., blue eyes) in the larger group might not be so rare in the smaller group.
Indeed, physical separation of groups of animals of the same species, as by geographical barriers, is though to be one of the main causes of speciation, where one species splits into two.
Interestingly, there are a number of parallels between genetic distribution over space and language transmission over space. Of course, we should remember that we get our genes exclusively from our parents, but our language from peers as well as parents.
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess this where the whole question of how native we're in English comes into play.
I have at least 4 accents combined (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:3, Interesting)
I shared a flat with 5 UK citizens while at university in Scotland. We all had accents. There was a Glaswegian accent, a northern highlands accent, a Mancunian accent (i.e. Manchester), a Birmingham(?)-by-way-of-Australia accent, an East London accent, and a midwestern American accent (mine). (Plus a Welsh classmate whom I never could understand.) They occasionally made fun of me by talking funny like I did (especially the way I said my name), but I did the same with each of them.
Is it offensive to "adopt" an accent? (Score:3, Interesting)
When Dick van Dyke adopted a "cockney" accent in Mary Poppins, he was beloved by Americans but panned by the English. Yet most people didn't realize that Monty Python's Terry Gilliam wasn't English and that his accent wasn't natural, or if they did, they didn't hold it against him. For years, I thought Peter Jennings, who was based in London for ABC news for many years, was British because he spoke with an accent at that time.
If you adopted an English accent,
a) Would the British people recognize it as being "fake"?
b) Would they treat you more favorably? Would they view it as offensive (such as a person trying to fake their way into a higher social status)?
Re:Actually...it depends on the language (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, German. There is an official "High German" (Hochdeutch) that is learned in school and is considered "correct." Other dialects, of which there are many of course, are considered "nonstandard." This is more than just a Texan being proud of speaking Texan, they are really considered different. Someone who speaks Hochdeutch natively (there are a small number) are considered by others to have "no accent."
Remember: this is a language that standardises its spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation and comma usage by international treaty. Making one accent official is comparatively speaking, trivial.
As a native english speaker myself, I find this all all a bit berserk. But other people, other ways.
Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:3, Interesting)
> As a child in the South in the Forties, I was taught that we were speaking essentially pure Elizabethan English and every other form was a corruption. My linguist uncle, OTOH, says that the true story is that children of colonial farmers, isolated from other white children by the sparsity of the population, were each given a slave child to play with...with the obvious linguistic outcome.
I don't know about your uncle's explanation of the mechanism, but the suggested outcome is certainly correct. When sociolinguistics classes cover Black English, Ebonics, AAVE, or whatever the current politically correct name of it is, and give a summary of (say) 10 features of that sociolect, the majority of White southern students will say "Heck, I use 7 of those features", or "My granny talks just like that", or something to that effect.
FWIW, a linguist friend says that most of the studies of BE/E/AAVE are done by northern linguists who have never bothered to find out how southerners speak.
Re:Actually... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard this before too. One key example that comes to mind is Icelandic. Both modern Norwegian and Icelandic are largely decended from Old Norse, which of course was spoken in what is now Norway. A long time ago, some people from there went off to settle in Iceland. Interestingly, the language as spoken in modern Iceland is much more similar to Old Norse than Norwegian is to it. I think the usual explanation given is that Iceland was very isolated over those 1000 or so years.
Now, to know how people spoke English in North America at the time of the American Revolution seems difficult. At that time (and certainly say 100 years before) English as spoken in England (of course this is complicated too, since the variation of accents in Great Britain is more dramatic than the variations in North America) would have been largely the same as English spoken in the New World. Since then, both have probably diverged a lot from that ancestor, because neither country was particularly isolated linguistically (unlike Iceland).
However, I know I stumbled across something a few years ago that claimed modern North American English is closer to what was spoken back in the 17th and 18th centuries than modern BBC or The Queen's English is to it. I wish I could remember the reference for it, but I can't.
Finally, the whole situation is complicated by continued linguistic contact between the UK, the USA, and Canada. One interesting (although maybe dubious) claim is that the way, for example, southern US English, Boston English, and London English all have a tendency to drop r's at the ends of words came about from the upper class in the states sending their children to boarding schools in England in the 19th century. The story goes that in Philadelphia and rural areas further away from the coast (in particular) this was not a common practice and so that sound never really took hold there. Interesting stuff...
weird... (Score:3, Interesting)
I concur on your second point. I've never tried the third one, as I don't hang out with any of the American expats here, and even if I did they would want to speak English, not Norwegian.
Re:Is it offensive to "adopt" an accent? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you adopt my accent well enough, then I won't see it as faking my accent, I'll see it as losing your accent, and the extent to which I see it as losing your accent depends on how well you adopt mine.
However, if your attempt at adopting my accent is based on cliches and generalisations of what my accent sounds like, then it will sound wrong to me, and probably be offensive, as it will seem like you're making fun of it.
I would guess that Dick van Dyke did the latter, wheras Terry Gilliam was surrounded by people that would tell him he sounded like a idiot if he got it wrong.