George Mason University Speech Accent Archive

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Saturday March 27, 2004 @10:05PM from the y'all-come-back-now,-hear? dept.

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."

1 of 191 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Already noticed a stranscription error by Theovon · 2004-03-28 04:10 · Score: 0, Flamebait

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.