Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
> 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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Look out!
Plus Latin (old and Renaissance) and a bunch of other stuff. Here's a nice chart and some links for the curious.
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.