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."

Comments

What???

[pytsun]

No cockney support? Insensitive clods...

Re:What???

[phaze3000]

Just wot I wos finkin geeza.. are they having a fucking giraffe or wot?

George Mason

[dotwaffle]

It's nice they named a University after him, after all, he did save Jack Bauer's life by swapping seats on the plane with the nuke...

Re:George Mason

[Moonpie Madness]

Dude, he was going to die anyway, and it's not how you die, but how you live, and that dude was a prick. and dude, its like, dude. I wonder if there was any bimbo-speak in the lingo program

Re:George Mason

[abram10]

Who is Jack Bauer, and where did he come from? Why did George Mason switch seats with a nuke? How'd he do that? Why was a nuke sitting there? Did he say, "Please, Mister Nuke, may I sit there?" ;-D

Re:George Mason

[k98sven]

Not to mention being the only founding father who was uncompromising in his stance against slavery.

"Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant."

A deeply underrated man.

Re:George Mason

[semifamous]

Enlightenment lies within. ...altough you should start at the first chapter of the story. That link points to part 24 of 24. The nuke was in like #13 or so I believe, so you should start at the beginning so you know how he got there.

George Mason was a hero... but just to Jack. That's just about all he was worth.

Re:George Mason

[Anonymous Coward]

He was also against ratification of the Constitution because it did not outlaw slavery.

Yes. Very deeply underrated.

Re: Vlad

[Anonymous Coward]

The spoke's on JOO!

IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[after]

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.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Yes but why is British english considered the true english? because England is the most important country in the world, or because english originates from there?

If you think it's the former, then since Britain isn't the great empire she once was, and is only just a regular country these days, then you could consider US english as being the "root" english language.

If you think it's the latter, then one could also consider than 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.

What I'm saying is, every language is the derivate of something else, it all depends on your point of view. And what's more, within the UK and the US, there are great variations of accents, so I'm not sure it means anything to say "british english is true english".

Perhaps if someone could come up with a "reasonable average" of the lingo, then that would be the true english...

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if someone could come up with a "reasonable average" of the lingo, then that would be the true english...

Sylvester Stallone got English right. Let him be our definition of true English.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[ender81b]

Of course, what area of england do you want to be the "original"? You want a london accent? Posh southerner? Northern English? Glaswegian?

The accents across england, imo, are extremely varied -- as much as the differneces between american and australian for example. Of course, this is coming from an american who only spent 4 months over there but take it as you will.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[ozbird]

Glaswegian?

Err, last time I checked Glasgow was in Scotland, not England. I suspect that you may be about to learn the phrase "Stitch that, Jimmy!" from our Scottish brethren who are less understanding...

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, last time I checked Glasgow was in Scotland

You mean one of the 3 pieces of land around England that like to believe themselves as independant, that have fake local governments so that they can live out their dreams of being independants, yet never were able to gain their independance in centuries, and that would never survive as separate countries if they weren't in the UK?

Come on, get over it. Scotland is some region of the UK, just like Hampshire or Suffolk, has been for ages, and everybody in the world but scots see it that way.

Kind of like Corsica to France really: loud mouthed, independentists, but ultimately just a piece of french territory that would wither and die without the mainland.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that you said some region of the UK. That's correct. The United Kingdom. Not England, as the previous poster suggested.

Learn the difference : England + N. Ireleand + Scotland + Wales = United Kingdom

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, you'd understand why an American would easily get confused.

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

[Mindcry]

umm... you both have accents, sorry to say ;) you can consider his proper and yours not, but i don't think that's really entirely correct either... old english from the long long ago didn't sound anything like modern british english does today either, so really i'd say there's not much luck with that arguement.

Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Mindcry]

from last i heard (royal shakespeare company interview i believe), they would have sounded like irish pirates or some such... i heard a couple of the company doing a dialogue like that, and it was really strange...

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 and some links for the curious.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[CGP314]

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.

As someone who moved from the US to the UK, let me tell you that the British people here don't consider the language I speak to be English. It's American, and I better not forget it. : )

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[DietVanillaPepsi]

But then again, there are many different British accents. And British English is a evolved version of Old English. So none of us are speaking true and natural English. Such is the nature of language and progress.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not right: The three pieces of land around england that you're talking about might well not be able to survive on their own, but obviously enough, Northern Ireland could economically survive very well if reunified with Southern Ireland, independent of England (though a fair bit of the population would object to such a reunification with Ireland proper at the moment)

And remember that racially, the Scots and the Irish are pretty much the same people. What if they got over their bickering? A unified Irish-Scots nation like there was until about the 10th century would not only be perfectly capable of surviving independently, it would pretty seriously freak out the English, as there is very little love indeed between the Southern Irish and the English for pretty obvious reasons (millions dead in a famine caused by foreign invaders tends to piss the survivors off...)

The Welsh and Breton, while Celtic, are from a different branch of the celtic family tree, and might be a bit less enthusiastic about unifying with the Irish And Scots, but it's not at all inconceivable.

Imagine Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales ceding from the United Kingdom of Britannia and joining a reuinified Celtic nation ruled from Hibernia. That WOULD, most certainly, not only be self-sufficient, it would also be a force to be reckoned with - the famine killed off our weakest first, and evolution works. Remember that we Celts have very long memories.

Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Hortensia Patel]

Well, you could argue that accent change is a kind of meme propagation, and new memes propagate much faster in (densely-populated) core areas than in (sparsely-populated) peripheral/frontier areas. Rather like the extreme vagaries of fashion being primarily urban rather than rural.

No idea whether that's the real explanation, but the phenomenon you describe doesn't sound all that curious.

Incidentally, the Shakespeare's Globe theatre here in London is doing a couple of "original pronunciation" performances as part of this year's season; should be interesting.

Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[orthogonal]

Maybe not. It's a curious but well-known phenomenon in dialectology that peripheral/frontier dialects tend to be conservative [i.e., less changing] while innovations accumulate more rapidly in the core areas

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:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[tverbeek]

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.

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.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[SpinyNorman]

Considering that English comes from England, I'd say that the English do indeed have a better claim to the name. If American settlers, who brought the language with them had kept the language the same (obviously an impossibility - not the way language works), then it might be reasonable to consider it just a dialect, but the way they are diverging I'd say "American English" is best (and presumably it'll eventually become a different language, unless global communications means that the time of new language creation is behind us).

P.S. Don't tell me that English in England should be called "British English"... we don't refer to "French French" just because some Canadians speak it too.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[UnknowingFool]

Interesting point. I always thought that American English was not per se "truer" but had fewer pronounced variations in a given area than British English.

Of course that's not to say that American English doesn't have variations (Southern drawl, New England, Bronx, etc), but I think there's less variation in all of Texas than there is in the city of London.

Part of this is that the US is younger and part of it is that the US grew up in a time of mass communication. Although variations have appeared, with recorded media, at least people know that they exist. Otherwise isolation from different regions would have made the phonetic variations more pronounced and widespread.

Chinese has many dialects due to it's several thousand years of existence, and they don't sound anything alike. Chinese people can't talk to other Chinese person if they don't speak the same dialect. Whereas Spanish and Italians can converse with a bit of work because most of the phonetics and grammar are still the same.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[tverbeek]

Don't tell me that English in England should be called "British English"... we don't refer to "French French" just because some Canadians speak it too.

No, but we might call it "Southern French", "Parisian French", "Norman French", "Provencal French", etc. :)

French is an unusual case in linguistics, however, as the people who live where it originated are (at least officially) trying very hard to keep it from evolving naturally.

Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Deadstick]

IIRC, scholars study the isolated communities on the islands along the US Atlantic coast to see what Shakespeare's actors would have sounded like.

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.

Among other things.

rj

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[aelfwyne]

It must be noted (since you mention Texas) that the woman who they used to represent the Texas sound, according to their site, actually lived 20 years of her life in Missouri. I don't know where that falls in her learning of the language - but as a native Texan myself (and not far from Carthage, which is where she claims to be from) I can tell you for certain that her accent is very mild compared to most people in the area, and I have no doubt it is because of her years spent in the midwest.

If they're going to do such a survey, they should have been careful to pick NATIVE speakers - that is, those who were born, grew up, went to school, and worked most of their lives in the place they are representing.

Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Black Parrot]

> 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:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[doktor-hladnjak]

Well, there is of course that little issue, where there are approximately 5 times as many American English speakers as English English speakers.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[doktor-hladnjak]

Well, almost by definition ALL variants of English have evolved from Old English, including American, Canadian, English, South African, Australian, etc. Old English certainly has no monopoly on "true and natural" English either. If anything, all native speakers of English speak "true and natural English".

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate it when people think I have an East London accent. I don't. I have a South East London accent.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[STrinity]

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.

The problem with this analysis is that American English started to diverge from the mother tongue at a point when British English didn't sound a thing like modern British English. In fact, there are linguists who think the Southern accent sounds closest to how people spoke in the Elizabethan era -- which means Shakespeare should properly be performed with Brett Butler as Ophelia and Jeff Foxworthy as Polonius.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[STrinity]

Considering that English comes from England, I'd say that the English do indeed have a better claim to the name.

There has never, ever been an English language. If you pick up untranslated copies of Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knights, two works composed more or less contemporaneously, you'll find that they're barely even the same language. Chaucer happens to be easier to read because he wrote in the London dialect, whereas Anonymous lived out in the boonies. Does that mean Chaucer has a "better claim" to being an English author?

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[funkydom]

OK this post and its parent are completely offtopic but I had to reply..

Imagine Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales ceding from the United Kingdom of Britannia and joining a reuinified Celtic nation ruled from Hibernia.

Well seeing as England as a country has a GVA of around 4 times Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales combined, i'd say it wouldn't be too worried ;)

Remember that we Celts have very long memories

This mentatily annoys the hell out of me - all of mankind has been persecuted, tortured and treated unfairly at some time in history. The original inhabitants of England had their fair share of massacre and enslavery from the Romans.
Holding grudges isn't productive for anyone.

Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[gidds]

It wouldn't surprise me to find that accents varied more throughout the UK than in any other comparable area -- from the various Scottish, Welsh and Irish accents, to the distinctive accents around Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, Cornwall, the Home Counties, the Estuary (which is where I am). It's a wonder we can still understand each other (most of the time!).

As to the 'original' accent, I remember reading that the area whose accent has changed least since Chaucerian times is the north-east of England: Newcastle, Darlington, Durham. (I spent three years at uni at that last, and even then I couldn't understand the Scousers, let alone emulate them...)

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[zsau]

Well, mass communication has an affect, but of course it doesn't stop changes. Australian English continues to diverge from American even though the majority of our television is American. Indeed, Australian English is beginning to show regional variations (in the last twenty years, for instance, younger people in Victoria have begun pronouncing a short e as a short a before l, so that 'celery' and 'salary' are homophones). Australian English has long been held as an interesting dialect because so few speechgroups have been so homogeneous over so large an area.

And of course, the Chinese dialects aren't really dialects. They're independent languages. Unless, of course, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy (Max Weinreich).

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Anonymous Coward]

and if any of those toga wearing pussies show their faces here again, we'll give them something to remember us by!

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[SpinyNorman]

For that matter I believe there are more people of Irish descent here than in Ireland... so let's just call the country Ireland while we're at it too! ;-)

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[SpinyNorman]

Of course there are dialects as well as languages, and "American English" would currently be properly regarded as a dialect of English... but should it ever diverge sufficiently to the point of being another language, then it'd be a bit perverse for America to call it's language "English" rather than "American" (and then tell the English to rename their language as something else?!). That was the only point I was making - that the language named "English" belongs to England, and always will do should it ever branch.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that we Celts have very long memories.

But very selective ones.

As a direct descendent of the Bru na Boinne I demand that you get out of my country. Go back to where you came from. Down with the Celtic invaders!

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Anonymous Coward]

The original inhabitants of England had their fair share of massacre and enslavery from the Romans.

The original inhabitants at that stage, uh, were mostly Celtic... Part of the problem is that the modern English are (still!) perceived as descendants of the invading Romans that pushed the celts out of their lands across England and France to Ireland and Scotland (not that the Celts are particularly blameless...ask what happened to the Picts when the Scotians (Irish) invaded and established Scotia Minor...or "Scotland" as it is known today...)

And English glorification of the relatively barbaric and warlike Roman culture doesn't help to endear them to Irish cultural scholars - Though a few centuries previously again (i.e. over two millenia ago), the ancestors of the irish did lay seige to rome (google "To the victor the spoils".).

Side note: Americans have difficulty comprehending just how much longer european history is, let alone prehistory...

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Anonymous Coward]

British English isn't the 'true "natural" English language'. In some ways, American English is more conservative than British English;

Wow. The human ability for self delusion is just amazing. Does it make you better to call it British English? You do realize that the people who live there are called the English? And that the language they speak is simply English and not British English?

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Anonymous Coward]

Lest we forget that in 1603 it was the king of Scotland that gained the English thrown, not the other way around. Of course the Staurts eventually lost the crown (well, a few times, but the Civil War and Glorious Revolution don't count) due to the Act of Settlement 1701 which ultimatly placed succession to the George I. Anyway, England had a Scotish Monarch for over 100 years and the result of that was a new bible, the bill of rights, initial settlement in the American Colonies, Civil War, and the unification of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[blair1q]

No, the British realize they have an accent, and learn that to have no accent, you have to use the voice you sing with, because when you sing you have no accent unless you impute it deliberately.

Americans raised in certain parts of the Midwest (and the television newsreaders who learned to copy them) have perfectly unaccented speech, with no inflections of vowels, no hardening or softening of R's or other consonants depending on lexical position, etc.

N.B. I was disappointed that the "accent database" didn't focus on native English speakers. It would have been an order of magnitude more interesting. Especially if it were rendered as a map (seen them before with special symbols to show accent keys in various places, but never with a click-through playback of the samples, and too tired to see if maybe someone's got one on the web yet).

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Reziac]

Interesting about words like ass/arse. One hardly ever hears "arse" in the U.S.

Maybe related -- I've always tended to say "warsh" instead of "wash". My mom (Norwegian ancestry) says "wash", but my dad (Scot/Irish/English) said "warsh", and my mom swears I inherited it from him. (But my mom's sister also says "warsh", so the "surplus R gene" is clearly present in both families :) It doesn't seem to be environmental, as my sister says "wash" just like my mom, and we went to all the same schools. I do wonder to what degree factors like a given gene pool's typical mouth and jaw structure influence accent.

The people I know from Australia and Ireland sound more like each other than they do any of the Brits of my acquaintance.

I once saw a research stat to the effect that in England alone, there are more than 80 mutually unintelligible dialects, while in the U.S., there are none (not counting Gullah, which is really a separate language from English). I wish this researcher could have heard a southern black gentleman (probably born about 1920) I once met -- what he spoke was definitely English, but I could hardly understand a word of it. His younger companion literally had to translate for me. Frex, he said "tailor" more like "tell-uh" and the whole word is very short and quick (almost tries to be one syllable) but still softly-pronounced. (I only remember this example because eventually I grokked that he was a tailor by profession.)

I don't know if I had a point, but it's all rather interesting :)

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[zsau]

Yeah... 'ass' totally replaced 'arse' in the US. It's been borrowed into Australia, but 'arse' is commoner. A word I read online from Americans every now-and-again which is never used in Australia is 'cuss', meaning 'curse'. It has the same origin. ('Bust', OTOH, has spread throughout the world, or at least to Australia.) This sound change happened in America and England, so there are some English who say 'ass', but it mostly the later r-dropping (which changes the sound of the vowel) became standard.

As to 'warsh', it's certainly nothing biological, and everything environmental. Can you say 'cosh' okay? or 'mosh'? Indeed, can you say 'wash' without the 'r'? Of course you can! One of your parents said 'wash', the other 'warsh' (though friends and peer-groups have a much bigger influence on your speech then your parents). Did you have the same groups of friends? I doubt it.

Irish accents sound quite distinct to me :) On the other hand, there are some London accents which sound very much like the siblings of my accent. And I'll say Canadian and Americans sound the same, but Canadians would dispute that :)

I find it highly unlikely that there are 80 mutually unintelligible dialects in England. A mutually unintelligible dialect is essentially a language. Scots, spoken in Scotland and Ulster (Ireland), is sometimes called a separate language, sometimes a dialect. We can blame the union of England and Scotland and subsequent dissolution of the Scottish Parliament for that. What I've heard of it is pretty hard to understand! (Scots isn't Scottish Standard English, nor is it Scots Gaelic.)

But some colloquial American dialects get a bit hard to understand. Someone claiming to be from the north-east described himself as what sounded like a 'lostin' to me, but he was saying painfully clearly 'law student'; or someone asked me for a 'pup', when really he meant 'soft drink' (it later occurred to me that he was trying to say 'pop'). I'm possibly at a disadvantage, though, because I don't watch much tv.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[dwalsh]

And if you look at the left of the chart, the Celts come first. Which just confirms that the Irish are the best source for English pronunciation. For example, unlike the English, we use things called "consonants" such as "H" (you may know this as "aitch").

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Reziac]

Wash vs Warsh -- what I was getting at was that certain mouth structures may make a certain accent easier or more natural-feeling to pronounce. Now that I'm thinking about it -- among the people I know say one or the other, "warsh" seems to go with a narrower jawline. Might be that unwitting selection toward some particular physical trait influences which accents survive and develop, and which die out. Follows that a thoroughly mixed gene pool is less likely to have/develop/keep 'em. Of course, it'd be damned hard to separate just what you're looking at, unless you could do "keep 'em isolated in a box" type language experiments. (Not highly practical, tho isolated villages might serve.)

I also wondered WTF was with the "80+ mutually unintelligible dialects" (and this was a research project thru some big university, not just a nut blowing smoke) and what qualified as either a dialect or unintelligible. This was a number of years ago, so I've no idea where to find a cite.

In my experience: Central Canadians are not readily distinguishable from midwestern Americans -- you'll hear ordinary "American English" and "plains cowboy drawl" in common in both countries. There are pockets in B.C. that have an accent VERY much like Appalachian hillbillies; there's a Canadian actor from B.C. who still had the accent in his early film work -- damn, I can't think of his name (starred in one of the latenight series in the 1980s, started with a V; by then he'd had lessons and lost the accent). In Eastern Canada, one hears "oot" and "aboot" and "eh", and overall a vaguely British sound; but "oot" and "aboot" (if not "eh") are also heard in heavily-Norwegian parts of Minnesota. (Jesse Ventura cracks me up, he has a real Norske-Minnesotan accent, just like some of my relatives there.)

I've seen films made in Australia where all sorts of accents were to be heard, from pretty close to generic American or "British light", to "you're from WHERE??" Well, Australia is a big country too :)

Got a phone call from an Aussie recently and at first could barely understand her, but after we'd talked for a while, my ear adjusted. -- I pick up accents fast; if I lived there for two weeks, I'd sound just like y'all. :)

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[zsau]

I betcha it's just habit and coincidence and nothing to do with biology.

I've seen films made in Australia where all sorts of accents were to be heard, from pretty close to generic American or "British light", to "you're from WHERE??" Well, Australia is a big country too :)

No. Australia's accent variation has typically been whether you say 'carsel' or 'cassel' for 'castle', or 'grarf' or 'graff' for 'graph' (as well as country folk using broad accents, which are kinda close to Hollywood Australian). Some parts of the country have the short front vowels higher then others (though not approaching New Zealand's height, wier they speak like thus end say funny thungs no ind).

Movies are a different matter, though. It's only been in the last hundred years that we've become independent from England both legally and culturally, so for certain people, English accents seem better to use when they're being recorded. And then American accents are more common on movies and a movie using the American accents used in movies seems more professional, and you get paid better for acting in America too. I don't really think that watching Australian movies or television is your best way of getting an idea of Australian accents. You're much better off coming down under :)

-- I pick up accents fast; if I lived there for two weeks, I'd sound just like y'all. :)

Just so long as you don't say 'y'all' too much! My database tutor* is American and uses 'y'all' all the time. It gets very tiring. (We use 'youse' or 'you'.)

* I haven't actually worked out how to translate 'tutor' (in this sense) into American yet, but that might just be the fact that my American college-going acquaintence isn't doing any subjects with a tute/lecture split. Somewhere in between a teaching assistant and a professor, I think.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Reziac]

I don't normally say "y'all", itself often exaggerated for media stereotypes... we have our share of that too. Your database tutor needs a regional adjustment. :) Would movies made in and for Australia still try to sound "more English"??

That NZ accent, as portrayed in print, sounds kinda like a Dutch accent from someone whose English isn't very practiced (tho most Dutch that I've heard speak pretty good "American"). Where all did NZ folk come from originally, anyway??

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[zsau]

It's possible. One can never tell. It wouldn't likely be something they were instructed to do, but something they did because of the formality of the situation. Of course, as an American, Australian will sound pretty British to you anyway. Ahfta all, Ostralian is closely related, as I said, to British.

Kiwis are mostly like Australians, though a lot of Scottish people found their way there, esp. to South Island (I think). I dunno if convicts were ever sent there, but they weren't sent to Melbourne or Adelaide. And we've sent convicts to England too :) (America had a war to become independent; Australia slowly developed into it with a combination of legislation and High Court decisions. The High Court being the highest court in Australia.) The a>e>i thung us somethung thet hes heppend to some ixtint in Australia (end South Efruca, for thet metter), too, though certainly not to the same degree as in Kiwiland. End some buts of Amiruca seem to be doung the reverse; I've heard Amirucans sayung thungs like 'gass' for 'guess'. (Mumuckung Kiwi eccents us fun.)

(My grandparents on my mother's side are Dutch, but they don't sound anything like Kiwis, and certainly don't speak unaccented Australian.)

Geeks Law

[McCarrum]

I think I just found a great tool for my role playing game ...

Very curious methodology

[heironymouscoward]

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.

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.

Re:Very curious methodology

[mocm]

I don't know about local Dutch accents, but I can recognize various German accents even when the people are speaking English. I can also recognize most other European language speakers when they are speaking English, although it gets a little harder when the languages are similar and I don't speak them myself. But I guess as soon as you speak a language yourself and can recognize diffenernt dialects in that language, you will also be able to recognize them when the people speak a foreign language.
If you ever listend to Gaelic or Welsh you can also see where the English accent of those people come from even if they don't speak the original language anymore.

Re:Very curious methodology

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I can recognize various German accents even when the people are speaking English

I can't recognize southern France accents through english. It's very well known that the "singing" rolling accents found in the south of France just isn't compatible with pronouncing english properly, so either someone from there will speak english so badly you won't get a word of it, or he'll speak english properly and his native french accent will be filtered out by his very act of speaking english.

It's just harder to learn english if you have a southern french accent to begin with. But once english is mastered enough, you won't hear any difference between a Paris speaker and a Marseille speaker. English acts as an equalizer here.

Re:Very curious methodology

[mocm]

Sure if they have been studying English for a long time and lived in an English speaking country, most people (especially if they were still relatively young when they learned the language) will adapt to the accent they hear every day. I have even met some Americans that lived in England for a long time who have a British accent.
When I talked about recognizing the native language accent, I was talking about people who learned English in high school and haven't spent much time in an English speaking country.
I also realize that (since I am not a native speaker) my accents adapts to the local English accent when I spent a certain amount of time there.
I guess it depends on the amount of sounds your native language uses on how fast you are adapting to a foreign language. That's why Japanese have trouble with r and l, Germans with th and French with h. They either don't have those sounds in their own language at all or they are more limited.
The worst obstacle for people using the alphabet, is that they can read the language without pronouncing it. I once attended a physics lecture in France and thought the people were speaking French (which I only speak a little), but they were actually speaking English, pronouncing the words as they would if they were read French.

Re:Very curious methodology

[Mindcry]

I don't speak any other languages and i could pick out some of the different accents of the same langauge... living near washington DC gives pretty good grounds to learn, but i imagine german/french readers (among others) could tell the differences of location for their native tongue... ivory coast/canadian/louisiana/paris french sound fairly distinct, even when speaking english...

Re:Very curious methodology

[fucksl4shd0t]

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

[fucksl4shd0t]

I can't recognize southern France accents through english. It's very well known that the "singing" rolling accents found in the south of France just isn't compatible with pronouncing english properly, so either someone from there will speak english so badly you won't get a word of it, or he'll speak english properly and his native french accent will be filtered out by his very act of speaking english.

"He had a minkey."

(obligatory Clouseau quote)

Re:Very curious methodology

[The Phantom Blot]

Would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase?

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:Very curious methodology

[The Cydonian]

would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase?

I can answer the question in terms of Indian English. As an Indian who speaks English but not as a "mother" tongue, I've always been able to recognise the respective mother tongues of other Indians through English; that is, not that difficult to differentiate between English as spoken by a native Tamil speaker, and that spoken by, say, a native Hindi speaker (even if I don't necessarily speak either language).

I guess this where the whole question of how native we're in English comes into play.

Re:Very curious methodology

[JustKidding]

I think one could figure out which movies and tv shows get repeated over and over in a certain country just by listening to these samples. I don't think it would be very hard to find out someone is a big fan of Steve the Corcodile Hunter...

For people living in non-english speaking countries, TV and music are probably the only sources of spoken english, so they tend to copy the accents.

Re:Very curious methodology

[doktor-hladnjak]

I don't know about local Dutch accents, but I can recognize various German accents even when the people are speaking English

I have to agree here with recognizing German accents in English--at least the more major variants. I'm a native English speaker, but I can instantly recognize if somebody is Swiss or Austrian or German based on the way they speak English. At a finer level though, it seems to get more difficult, especially since regional variation in English education tends to have a larger impact. There are still a lot of people in the former East Germany, who never learned English in school. Even in the Saarland (where I live), a lot of people learn English as a second foreign language (after French), which means they may not have started learning it until high school. For whatever reason, this seems to lead to an accent that sounds like one straight out of a bad American WW2 movie.

Re:Very curious methodology

[Deadstick]

Puts me in mind of a fascinating encounter a couple of years ago, when my wife and I were riding a train from Paris to Tours. A young woman in front of us heard us speaking English, turned around and asked where in the States we were from, and that started a long conversation.

Her English was puzzling: grammatically flawless, French-accented, but with another accent mixed in that I just couldn't identify. It suddenly became forehead-slapping clear when we found she was on her way home from a year of teaching French at Sydney University, and that accent hiding behind the French one was Oz.

And at the same time it became clear that her original question was aimed at classifying our accents. Tours is a major center of linguistic education...I suppose the year in Oz was a grad student project.

r "Just enough French to be taken for a German" j

Re:Very curious methodology

[SpekkioMofW]

Agreed. The study captures only a limited amount of differences in English dialects....not sentence structure, idioms, etc. That's why, for example, the study doesn't seem to reflect Pittsburghese very well, for example.

Re:Very curious methodology

[McWilde]

I'm at work, so I haven't checked the audio. I think I could determine the region of origin of a Dutch speaker pretty well as long as he was speaking "Van den Broek English". Most Europeans and all Dutchmen should know what I'm talking about. It's a horrible mix of decent grammar and vocabulary with a pronunciation composed of entirely Dutch phonemes.
As Harry Enfield said: "Hello, mij neem is Frans van Bergen Henegem from de Emsterdem polies fors. And dis is mij kolliek Hans, hoe - ei em proud to see - is also mij lovver."

Problems with study

[0x0d0a]

This is a really wonderful idea. However, I worry that it has a copule significant problems for researchers. First, for computer analysis work, a paragraph is likely too short to be useful. It can take a *lot* of audio data to make up for one-time variations. Second, cleanliness of the recording. Since anyone can submit a recording, not only will the recording environments and devices differ, but it is unlikely that any recordings will be made in the kind of studio-quality or lab-quality environment that would make these most useful for analysis work.

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.

Re:Problems with study

[whathappenedtomonday]

too short to be useful

well, if you click the i symbol next to each ipa transcription (the pic with the phonetic spelling), you get a list of generalisations (ie in how far the speaker differs from standard variation).

anyone can submit a recording

university labs will gladly take part in adding to the collection, I guess. sub standard recordings can still be rejected. no problem there...

not sure that it outweighs the drawbacks

Students of Linguistics are working with material of much worse quality - I'm sure they'll welcome the project rather than running it down.

what I find a bit problematic is that they have the readers speak the same text only and not an additional conversation - that would be excellent material for my sampler...at least I have enough plastic snake samples to last me a lifetime.

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.

Re:Problems with study

[Raven42rac]

Why the hell is it that every time there is some cool semi-scientific article on /., all the nitpicky people come out to play? Can you appreciate anything without whining and complaining? "Excuse me sir, this gold bar is too shiny, a real gold bar should be semi dull!" I did not read anywhere on the link where it said "this is an extremely scientific study, and we are stuffy, serious scientists". It looks to me like they are saying "here are a bunch of people from different countries reading this paragraph aloud". Yes, most of us realise that it takes oodles of audio data to do any serious research, as anyone with Dragon Naturally Speaking or similar programs can attest to how long the program takes to recognise your manner of speaking.

Hmmmmm

[ziggy_zero]

When I found this site a few days ago (linked on Penny Arcade), one of the first things that came to mind was how useful it could be to an actor who has to learn how to do a certain accent. In some of the more common accents they even have a list of rules on how most speakers of that other language speak (e.g. many Japanese speakers reverse their R's and L's).

Re:Hmmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, you have a point there.

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:Hmmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

This is already being done. Many Canadian actors will take courses just on how to talk American. Most of it has to do with changing the very little things which most of us would never think of.

Re:Hmmmmm

[zsau]

(e.g. many Japanese speakers reverse their R's and L's).

Not quite. They tend to use a (single) sound that we Engish speakers hear as an R when they want L and an L when they want R; we're hearing the differences, not the similarities. Same with some European dialects that sound like they're mixing up V and W: In fact, they're using one sound in between V and W for both.

Re:Hmmmmm

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

In fact, they're using one sound in between V and W for both.

So do Hawaiians, for that matter.

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.

Re:They could learn from actors...

[jfengel]

I'm an actor, I've used the dialect tapes. I find them rather difficult to learn from, because it's hard for you to hear the subtle differences between what you're saying and what you're hearing.

I teach juggling, too, and it's much the same way. Both really require an expert eye/ear to tell you what you're doing wrong. Some people are gifted and can pick it up without help, but most of what I hear from people using dialect tapes comes across as bad parody.

Which British English?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Klingon

[Anonymous Coward]

you think the Klingon thing has been played out already?

Am I the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

...who finds these inexplicably hilarious?

Should I feel guilty for doing so?

Re:Am I the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Accents are inherently funny to me. Not really a race thing.

My southern-ese (think jeff foxworthy) has gotten me into trouble... well, maybe it was because I was driving around yelling it out my window... with a bullhorn... in the south... at 3 am... by some yuppie apartments.

Hey I though it was heeelarious!

Re:Am I the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Flamebait? This is the funniest post of 'em all!

Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the correct answer is both. Everyone has an accent. An accent is the part of speech which is neither specific to an individual or to the language. It varies by region, background, or time period. If you were to go back to the Old English days (there is no "single" English language as it has evolved over time) it is unlikely that anyone would understand you. The same for the Brits.

Maybe the question you meant was which is closer to "correct". If you consider correct to be closer to the root of the evolutionary language tree then the Brittish are probably closer since the Americans' language changed more quickly since the split.

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:Actually...

[stephanruby]

Maybe the question you meant was which is closer to "correct". If you consider correct to be closer to the root of the evolutionary language tree then the Brittish are probably closer since the Americans' language changed more quickly since the split.

Is that an assumption on your part? I thought it was the language in the satellite countries that changed the least. And the language in the original country that changed and evolved the most.

Re:Actually...

[tverbeek]

I thought it was the language in the satellite countries that changed the least. And the language in the original country that changed and evolved the most.

One thing that has pushed the evolution of American English (more so than British) is the ongoing influx of non-native speakers adopting it. Britain has had immigrants of its own since the American colonies were created, to be sure, but particularly since that nasty split with the British, American English has been spoken more by former Africans, Germans, French, Chinese, Norwegians, Poles, Mexicans, Dutch, Koreans, Arabs, etc. than by former Britons. That had to affect its pronunciation (and might explain some of the regional variations, depending on which immigrants settled where).

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that has pushed the evolution of American English (more so than British) is the ongoing influx of non-native speakers adopting it.

See, that would make a lot of sense -- but on the other hand, the dominant Canadian accent corresponds very closely to the dominant American accent.

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.

Re:Actually...

[doktor-hladnjak]

I thought it was the language in the satellite countries that changed the least.

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...

Re:Actually...

[Reziac]

You might be thinking of that acto some linguists, the "southern hill accent" or "southern drawl" of the Kentucky/Tennesee/Virginia region is more akin to a typical Shakespearean era accent than any other living English accent.

Quicktime!?

[barcodez]

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

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: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

Re:Quicktime!?

[latroM]

That makes your system non-free :/.

Re:Quicktime!?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you, some sort of GNU/Linux hippie?

Japanese people can't pronounce L!!

[JollyRogerX]

Japanese people don't REVERSE L and R, they just can't pronounce L at all. A lot of people (stupid people) imitating japanese accents reverse the l an r because they think it sounds japanese. It doesn't. It's justs stupid. BTW, they call it "Engrish" because they just can't say "English." Its just like how I cannot roll my R's no matter how hard I try. Thus, when I speak Spanish, I sound funny when saying words containing rr. If you want proof of this, just look on any Japanese Katakana or Hirigana chart. These contain all the phonetic sounds in the Japanese language. notice there is no L.

Re:Japanese people can't pronounce L!!

[Senjutsu]

Japanese people don't REVERSE L and R, they just can't pronounce L at all.

This is not particularly correct. Japanese has neither an R nor an L; it has a sound that stands somewhere roughly between the two (whether or not it sounds more like an R or an L depends on the exact speaker, their particular regional accent, and to a certain extent, their gender). And while Japanese speakers of English do not always or even consistently reverse the two consonants, as a consequence of growing up in an environment where the two sounds were conflated, they often have trouble distinguishing the two and have trouble remembering which tongue positioning they should be using for a particular word. Hence it is not uncommon to hear a native Japanese speaker produce an R instead of an L, or vice-versa, in English.

If you want proof of this, just look on any Japanese Katakana or Hirigana chart. These contain all the phonetic sounds in the Japanese language. notice there is no L.

That proves nothing, as Katakana and Hiragana charts contain neither Rs nor Ls; they contain, by definition, Katakana and Hiragana. On an English translation (and the key word here is "translation", as in close approximation of the sounds in english) of the (ra ri ru re ro) portion of the charts they are often presented as R sounds (as this is what they tend to sound like, especially when produced by male speakers in the standard accent), but it is not truly an R (or L sound), as the tounge is at a different position with respect to the upper teeth, and it shares elements in common with the R, L (and to a certain extent D) sounds.

Re:Japanese people can't pronounce L!!

[Orinthe]

Although I've never heared a Japanese person attempt to say 'Engrish', I suspect they would have just as much trouble saying it as 'English'. There are half a dozen problems with the word from the point of view of a native Japanese speaker, the least of which being the r/l.

Engrish - the obvious
Engrish - concurrent consonants are practically nonexistent in Japanese ('n' is a pseudo-exception, it is somewhat special in being its own syllable, but it's not the same 'n' that we know)
Engrish - The "short" 'i' also doesn't exist in Japanese, their vowels being limited to (forgive me for not being more technical) ah, ee, oo, eh, and oh
Engrish - The Japanese language is syllabic, and for reasons similar to the above, you can't end on anything but a vowel ('n' being the exception)

An English->Japanese->English transliteration (you don't really lose much coming from Japanese to English, not if you know how Japanese is pronounced, anyway) would probably look something like this:
ingurishu
or maybe
ingurishi

Re:Japanese people can't pronounce L!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Japanese people don't REVERSE L and R, they just can't pronounce L at all.

That's completely wrong. Many Japanese people can and do learn how to produce a distinct L and R. And if such a person is a casual speaker of English, it can be very difficult to remember which of the sounds goes where in any particular English word.

Re:Japanese people can't pronounce L!!

[tverbeek]

I can relate to your inability to pronounce a Spanish RR, because I have a hard time with it as well. But sometimes I pull it off effectively, and I've had classmates who routinely nail it. What it sometimes takes is speech therapy (the same kinds of techniques used to teach kids not to talk like Elmer Fudd or Sylvester the cat), but it's certainly not a matter of "can't".

With Japanese speakers and the English L and R sounds, it can be a combination of not hearing the difference and not being able to pronounce them distinctly. These are two separate issues, so different individuals will make different mistakes, depending on which part they're having difficulty with. For example, you can probably hear the difference between R and RR, but you can't enunciate the latter. But you might not be able to hear the subtle difference between a B and a V, so you misspell words with them in it.

Re:Japanese people can't pronounce L!!

[otomo_1001]

From what I remember from my Japanese studies, the r or l sound produced varies from our useage of r and l because of the position of the toungue.

So follow along and learn something, say an R. Now say an L. Notice the different position of your tounge and mouth? Both of these combined contribute to the sound. Japanese doesn't put the toungue at the ridge of your upper mouth (or your upper teeth) like we do with an L. Nor do they have the toungue curled and towards the bottom with an R. Instead you move your toungue up and towards the ridge. (no curling) and then you keep your mouth fairly round. Now try saying an L. Hard isn't it? Think of a Japanese native trying to do the R and L when you have no equivalent in Japanese.

Romajii is an *approximation* not a direct translation. Do you really think kung fu is how the words are said in Chinese? Or even Volkswagen in German?

Eek!!

[bagel2ooo]

Sound samples? Stepford Earth? *hides*

Accents

[ozbird]

They say that the first accent was a grave mistake...

Re:Accents

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

They say that the first accent was a grave mistake...

Not at all, it was an acute mistake...

Re:Accents

[tverbeek]

They say that the first accent was a grave mistake...

Not at all, it was an acute mistake...

There are also those who say that circumflex is a mistake.

No, wait... I'm thinking of circumcision . Never mind.

I just got back to Oz from NZ

[NemesisStar]

And while there I saw a chalkboard outside a cornerstore with a joke on it:

A foreigner was at a sheep farm watching them shear the wool off the sheep. Knowing a better way he said "Here, let me show you how to shear your sheep"

The Kiwi replied "I'm not shearing with anybody!"

Never let it be said that Kiwi's don't know how to laugh at themselves! (and for this instance we'll forgive them their rediculous accents ;))

Re:quicktime???

[Anonymous Coward]

it doesn't work on my machine, where do i downloa

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:Bork bork bork...

[Carthag]

And the equivalent in Danish, although there are only 24. Click the imagemap to hear the dialects.

Meanwhile on YRO.slashdot ....

[DrYak]

Nintendo sues "George Mason University" for their "Speech Accent Archive", saying that the university is guilty of trademark infringment on nintendo's patented "Hellooo it's meeee Marrrrrioooo " and that they're trying to take advantage of the copyrighted italian accent in their work...

Re:Meanwhile on YRO.slashdot ....

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so horribly unfunny you deserve a good beating.

Engrish

[mAsterdam]

... many Japanese speakers reverse their R's and L's

Here are some nice examples of this and more. It also goes the other way.

Yoda speaks out...

[Anonymous Coward]

At web page looking at, catalog creating they are different speeches and styles on planet Earth I see. English language evolved on other planets what about analyzing? Mmmmmmm...

Don't forget these resources

[TTL0]

The Collection won't be complete w/ out Father Guido Sarducci Or the Jive Guys from Airplane

Re:Don't forget these resources

[samhalliday]

i once seen the jive sketch redon in cartoon form with 1337 talk instead of jive... it was hilarious! has anyone got a link?

Re:Don't forget these resources

[RollingThunder]

I think you're probably talking about one of the early Megatokyo strips:

Does anyone here speak l33t?

Re:Don't forget these resources

[Anonymous Coward]

woohoo!

Neural Network?

[Bou]

This sounds like a perfect collection to train a neural network on! Anyone tried that yet?

who's got the accent now?

[davids-world.com]

Sure - there is no 'high/pure language' outthere. Everything else is linugistics aristocracy. The archive is an example of the great variety among L2 English speakers (those who didn't acquire the language 'naturally' before the age of about 13). However, the meta-data about the speakers collected seems somewhat insufficient, and if you would actually want to use the corpus scientifically, you would want a greater consistency among the samples: only people that haven't lived outside of their original region and learned English 'academically', for example. The phonetic transcriptions, however, seem very useful!

Re:Geeks Law / Role playing

[davids-world.com]

I like role playing, too. I'm German (and native German speaker), I've spent some time in the U.S. when I was around 16-17, now, at the age of 26, I've been living in Ireland. Most people will know that the Irish accents are pretty distinctive (non-linguistics might say that every sentence sounds a bit like a complaint). I have found that most Americans that I talk to guess that I am Irish, or at least they say that I have an Irish accent. Most Irish people say that my accent is American. A couple of months ago all around the world in Oz, some cab driver guessed after five minutes: are you from Ireland? In most cases, when people talk to me for more than a few minutes, they wonder where I'm from, as they can't tell. It's strange, how adaptive we are. I assume that the fact that I'm not a native speaker helps me in adapting. For example, in my native German, I didn't assume a Berlin accent after four years there.

Re:quicktime???

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Use a real OS.

Serious oversights...

[neuroklinik]

They missed quite a few accents.

Bill Shatner
Christopher Walken
Dana Carvey's Ross Perot
James Stewart

Re:Serious oversights...

[GammaDriver]

I always wondered how James Stewart developed that accent or dialect. I ended up doing some teaching in central PA and did find one guy (who became a fly-fishing buddy) who sort of spoke like him - but then he might have been influenced by, and/or copied, Stewart's style. All I know is that the world needs more Shatners...

Re:Home search without a warrant OK in Louisiana

[Anonymous Coward]

I you havent done anything wrong, then you have nothing to fear.

Accents are mutable

[the_twisted_pair]

..as in, stay a while and yours will change, probably end up somewhere mid-atlantic. You too could end up sounding like Gross Lloydman.

I'm English, with pretty much a 'received-pronounciation' accent. Following 3 years spent working in Asia, when I returned home 2/3rds of the people I met for the first 6 months asked if I was Australian. Afetr a while I was sorely tempted to just reply 'Ah shit yeah.'

Re:quicktime???

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

emerge xine-lib xine-ui

Nevertheless

[the_twisted_pair]

L and R can lead to problems in everyday life. I worked in Asia for three years where during introductions my surname, Clark, usually caused facial expressions akin to a bulldog chewing a wasp.

Of course its reciprocal. I paused the first time I met a Mr. Ng.

Re:Nevertheless

[ndinsil]

I've often wondered about that. I've seen the name Ng in text several times but have no clue how to pronounce it. Is it like "rang" without "ray"? Just the ng, or is there something in there that would be interpreted by American ears as an implied semivowel? Whenever I'm reading something and come across that surname my mental voice skips a bit -- unsure just what to think.

Re:Nevertheless

[the_twisted_pair]

It's between 'Ung' and 'Ang'.
I spent my time being called 'Mr Matin' - my middle name was the most 'accessible'!

Groundskeeper Willie

[BoomerSooner]

(scottish accent)
Ack! Me retirement grease!
(/scottish accent)

Re:Groundskeeper Willie

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a loser.

I have at least 4 accents combined

[filekutter]

due to moving around the states... So, am I unique, or just a mutt?

Massachusetts

[nycsubway]

For doctors practicing in Boston:

Doc "Ok, open your mouth and say 'R'"

patient "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"

Doc "Good!"

International Dialects of English Archive

[johnwbyrd]

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

US English is influenced by Native Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

... at least in the view of Robert Pirsig. In Lila he called it "plain" or "plains" speaking, characterized by an economy of words and minumum of affect. That is, the accent and style typical of Midwesterners and Westerners.

Interestingly, most U.S. newscasters either come from the Midwest or cultivate that neutral way of speaking, so there must be a preference for it.

America isn't the lingistic island it once was though. This is mostly good but some asinine things seem to creep in. For example, it eats my ass that U.S. news media force the British style of a/an. While clearly this is recognition of the global market for our news 'product', we Americans aren't in the habit of dropping our "H"s so saying "an historic" just sounds affected - and wrong.

by the way, hear me as english #49, dude...

Already noticed a stranscription error

[Theovon]

There is an error in the transcription of the Afrikaans speaker from Pretoria. Near the beginning, the first vowel in the pronounciation of "ask" is wrong. It's transcribed as a backwards c. That's appropriate for the vowel in "call" prior, but in "ask", it's pronounced as an unrounded vowel, and it's lower.

Creative Commons..

[mumblestheclown]

What the heck is "the creative commons license?

I thought creative commons idea was a smorgasbord of license subparts that you could pick and choose amongst to create "a" CC license.

Re:Creative Commons..

[mumblestheclown]

What idiot marked my comment as a troll? how the HELL is my comment a troll?

lack of real slashdot moderator accountability sucks.

G. W. Bush Accent (west texan?)

[Radical Rad]

Our strategory is to maintain the new world order with our nucular capableness while simultanically hunting down criminables like Osama Bin Laden to stop their terroristic practicings.

Re:Home search without a warrant OK in Louisiana

[Anonymous Coward]

The government doesn't agree with that. Reach for the sky, unperson!

Is it offensive to "adopt" an accent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just out of curiosity:

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:Is it offensive to "adopt" an accent?

[mabinogi]

I don't think its offensive to adopt or imitate an accent...as long as you do it WELL.
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.

its not a troll

[Vitriolix]

there is no one CC license, there are at least 5 or 6: http://creativecommons.org/license/

interesting...

[shaitand]

Surely this would make good reference material for voice recognition systems?

hack patois

[Doc Ruby]

They need to sample the New Orleans (Nawlins) taxi radio chatter. It's like a peat bog crammed with living fossils of American history.

Re:Actually...it depends on the language

[real gumby]

In English there isn't an official accent (BBC "Received English" notwithstanding). Other languages have different conventions.

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.

Favorite accent humor story

[PapayaSF]

A friend of mine speaks German fluently and worked for a while in Germany. Sometimes just for fun he would speak German with an exaggerated Southern (American) accent. It was always puzzling to the Germans because they could easily understand him, but could not place the accent. "Are you from Austria?" was the most common response.

Re:Favorite accent humor story

[Neward Rylet]

Are you from Austria

Well, at least they're thinking in the right direction, wrong continent.

Re:PA? Big Deal.

[MoFoQ]

uhoh.....an AC who's all Freudian.

(MoFoQ reads original post) Hmmm...interesting, but I wonder what the IP-mafia (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) here in the states think about it.

It's too bad the entire contents of the Library of Congress isn't digitized and shared (something like out of ST:TNG).

Re:Stop being cheap

[MoFoQ]

or maybe it would help if we all stopped being broke...o wait...the economy (especially the tech sector) is down Fat Bastard's (the "corn in crap" guy from the Austin Powers movies) toilet....so it's a bit hard to "recover".

(long period of dumbfounded silence)

aawww...gawd....now I have to scrub my mind with bleach....thx alot for the imagery, my sic mind....

either way, I don't see the correlation between the archive and being too "cheap to get a mac".....or maybe there was a speaker at GMU who talked about macs and all.

FUK U

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not that far into the DVD series yet. Thanks, asshole.

weird...

[tuxette]

...I'm an anglophone in Norway, it's easier for me to understand Norwegians speaking Norwegian than anglophones speaking Norwegian.

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.

Not the most representative sampling...yet

[JGski]

Listening to a dozen of so (Tagalog, Indonesian, French, German, Danish, Dutch, Russian, etc.), I'd say these aren't exactly representative of typical accented English of this native speakers. Most are of people who are pretty multilingual from an unusually early age.

Still if you listen hard and know the accents already you can almost imagine what the real versions sound like. I hope they continue to gather a more realistic sampling.

Troll Moderation = Proof of Ignorance

[SnakeStu]

Moderating a post as "-1 Troll" isn't always a sign of ignorance, but clearly it was in this case. Someone in apparent ignorance of Creative Commons decided to punish you -- and the /. reader community in general -- by using their moderation power to flaunt their ignorance. Another red letter day for Slashdot's moderation system.

As you accurately and Informatively pointed out, CC is a set of licenses, not one license. The person who submitted the story is apparently just as ignorant about that as the person behind the mod down of your message.

Unfortunately, when you go to the site, there's no indication of any CC license (at least none that I can see, if one applies they're certainly not making it obvious.)

i'll give them two samples

[painehope]

I'll give them a sober one, which is a very strange blend of a deep South Texas accent, Nawlins ( New Orleans to all yall ), and a bit of Australian picked up off of one of my best friends and some co-workers who happen to be from there. Accent, syntax, etc. is a total muddle of the three ( shit, trying saying Zed for Z in the US, noone knows what the fsck you're talking about ).

Of course, get me drunk and I'm a prime candidate for a remake of Hee-Haw. If you're not a Southerner, and I'm drunk, good luck understanding a fucking word I'm saying.

Canadian Is The One English To Rule Them All

[Vagary]

I've read that Canada is considered the best country to learn English in because it doesn't vary much across the country*, it sounds enough like American to avoid prejudice, and it is the easiest to understand by other English speakers. (Does anyone know if it's the case that a Texan and a Scot will understand a Ontarian better than each other?) I wonder if it also has something to do with not covering up other accents, for example Europeans who learned English from Brits have a hybrid accent (eg: actor Frederik de Groot, ING Direct Spokesperson)?

* My Canada does not include Quebec or Newfoundland.

Re:Canadian Is The One English To Rule Them All

[Neward Rylet]

* My Canada does not include Quebec or Newfoundland.
Neither does mine.

Pirates ?

[ultranova]

Does the study show if software pirates say "arr" more often than other people ?

Speech Synthesis?

[Anonymous Coward]

That these soundbytes are under creative commons license is cool; might it be possible to extract the phonetic sounds from each of these readers and create a shit-hot speech synthesizer?

nick ...

Scarlett O'Hara Does Shakespeare

[saudadelinux]

The BBC has an interesting bit on this very fact. Check out the Real clip, "How Did People Speak Then?". Towards the end, they play a reconstructed accent circa Bill the Bard's time. Those of you familiar with accents from the American South will hear something creepily familiar in the way the woman speaks.

What about Fred?

[PegQuin]

So, I submitted Fred, from Cupertino, CA spoken via Apple's OS X Core Audio, recorded by Ambrosia Software's WireTap. Fred, as you may, know is also the voice of Stephan Hawking and has done numerous cameo appearances on TV and film. I'm merely questioning what makes a voice "human."

Uhmm, no...

[Senjutsu]

Romajii is an *approximation* not a direct translation. Do you really think kung fu is how the words are said in Chinese? Or even Volkswagen in German?

Of course not. Hell, I said as much in my post. Did you, perhaps, mean to attach this comment to the parent, and not to my post?

Re:Uhmm, no...

[otomo_1001]

Yep, my bad. I gotta get out of flat mode.

Then bugger off

[ccmay]

(a person who lives in America and speaks US English; no born American (thank goodness))

If you don't like Americans, what are you doing here, you insolent swine?

-ccm

(PS. Before you reply, you should know that I was born in England, and thank my lucky stars that I am now an American citizen.)

Re:Then bugger off

[after]

Please accept my deepest appologies, I didn't mean to sound politicaly incorrect ;)

Re:right direction

[airdrummer]

hmmm, mebbe u r on2 something there...

Age and accents

[theonetruekeebler]

I think accents are getting increasingly homologized as time passes and broad-audience sound-enabled media increases its hold on damned near everybody. Regional dialects and accens are disappearing as a result.

My father grew up about twenty miles from where Strom Thurmond was born, and I about twenty miles from there. But after I've been in deep conversation with non-Southerners, you would never know I was from the South unless you caught a particular turn of phrase. My father has a gentle lowland drawl (more Charleston than highcountry), and I once heard the century-old Thurmond speak, and to me he was damned near incomprehensible.

STELLAAAAAA!!!!

[Sabalon]

For some reason I have a very strong urge to go watch "A Streetcare Named Desire" right now, or failing that, "Oh Streetcar"