By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
When I lived in New York, I got good enough at accents to tell a Brooklyn native from a Long Island local. But we are becoming more and more global, and no brain can keep hundreds and the thousands of accents and dialogues straight. That’s where technology comes in. I found a cool website that catalogues audio snippets from Afrikaans to Zulu.
Browse By Language
Browse By Region/Country
About the Archive
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. Source: The Speech Accent Archive via Digg
So…. I go to the site, click on my home area (Oregon) and instead get a map of AFRICA? Looks like the site might need a little work.
Click anywhere and it takes you to Africa.
Try the links by language not the map – that seems to work.
I tried my native tongue and it sounded like nothing like the intonations and accents of the language, rather it was broken english read poorly… it needs work I suppose.