http://accent.gmu.edu/

"Everyone who speaks a language, speaks it with an accent. A particular accent essentially reflects a person's linguistic background. When people listen to someone speak with a different accent from their own, they notice the difference, and they may even make certain biased social judgments about the speaker.

The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded.1 The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers.

This website allows users to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent. The speech accent archive demonstrates that accents are systematic rather than merely mistaken speech.

All of the linguistic analyses of the accents are available for public scrutiny. We welcome comments on the accuracy of our transcriptions and analyses."


Does anyone know of corpora similar to this, that aren't based on prefab compositions and instead allow you to analyze the spoken structures/dialects/etc.? (I'm also interested in native but bilingual/multilingual accents, but I think some of those are mixed into the above corpus already... ) I found a couple but it doesn't seem that they're online/available to the public...

Edit: Or if you have any tips on simply Googling for this sort of thing or searching YouTube...

Last edited by nest0r (2010 January 28, 7:39 pm)