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I just came across a lovely Web site that has recordings of English accents, native and foreign, with close IPA transcriptions. (You need QuickTime installed to hear them, but it's available for download.) A very nice job, and a nice way to learn some of the conventions of IPA transcription. You're likely to get awfully tired of listening to the sample paragraph, though.

It's from George Mason University, and it's at
http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/
Enjoy.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler U Michigan Linguistics Dept "I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent." - Mark Twain, 'Following the Equator'

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]I just came across a lovely Web site that has recordings of English accents, native and foreign, with close IPA ... to get awfully tired of listening to the sample paragraph, though. It's from George Mason University, and it's at http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/[/nq]
I tried the 'native English speaker from Oxfordshire' and I have to say that if they're suggesting (as they seem to) that they are capturing local accents, this one comes nowhere near. No doubt the gentleman concerned was, as they say, born in Henley, but his accent owes a great deal more to RP than to Oxfordshire. The Lady from Leicester ditto. And the gent from Glasgow sounded a good deal more genteel than Brits would expect to hear from a 'Glasgow accent' (though obviously the accents vary throughout the City.) On a dial-up connection I couldn't really take time to investigate further.
But it seems a little pointless to classify accents on the basis of people's place of birth. People move away from their places of birth, often at an early age. There are many Brits who were born in India who speak cut-glass English. And education plays a part - the 'public school' accent is picked up by most attendees if they haven't already learnt it at home. Prince Philip was born in Greece but that wouldn't be helpful to linguistic students if a sample of his speech was on that page. George W Bush was born in Connecticut.

John Dean
Oxford

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[nq:1]But it seems a little pointless to classify accents on the basis of people's place of birth[/nq]
When we sampled dialects for the TIMIT speech database recordings, we took down where the person had spent most of their growing-up time, before about age 12. Based on this location, we categorized the speakers, using about 5 or 6 major American dialect areas. People who had moved around alot before that age, we put into the "army brat" category. We got some regional accents, but most of the speakers were just plain vanilla.

One other good thing we did was to have each speaker read the same two sentences that we had larded with dialect shibbeleths, so you could look at dialect variation without confounding differences in vocabulary and syntax. Of course, with that degree of control, you lose some of the effects of spontaneity.
So TIMIT, available form the LDC, might be another good source for dialect stuff, although limited.
- Bill F.

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[nq:2]I just came across a lovely Web site that has ... though. It's from George Mason University, and it's at http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/[/nq]
[nq:1]I tried the 'native English speaker from Oxfordshire' and I have to say that if they're suggesting (as they seem to) that they are capturing local accents, this one comes nowhere near. [/nq]
Perhaps it can be explained, but I can't see the point of the project at all, except to illustrate how a native accent may be subdued by higher education, and perhaps, as John L suggests in passing, that it may help one to learn IPA transcription.
My main criticism, I think, is that the artificial text represents nothing that any of the speakers, especially the non-American ones, would ever say: apart from the general tongue-twisting unlikelihood of the thing, over here you just can't "go shop" except in baby-talk; and the Glaswegian even went off the script and inserted "on" before Wednesday, while some of the other British speakers and the Queenslander hesitated at that point. A speaker's natural rhythms are surely inextricable from the actual sounds. Not, therefore, the best example of how even these people sound.
John D's point that the speakers were not typical of their regions is crucial, too. If these language graduates (?) were contrasted with samples from "broad" speakers the archive would have more interest.

And, to pick a sizable nit, I don't get the impression that any of the speakers learned English in a "naturalistic" way: it seems pretty clear that they learned it naturally, and it wouldn't tell us much if they hadn't.
A lost opportunity.
Mike.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]I just came across a lovely Web site that has ... though. It's from George Mason University, and it's at http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/[/nq]
[nq:1]I tried the 'native English speaker from Oxfordshire' and I have to say that if they're suggesting (as they seem ... one heck of a statement, given that pure Brum is one of the thickest, most distinctive accents in the country.)[/nq]
Much as I hate to say it, on the basis of the "British" samples, I wouldn't place much trust in the samples purporting to represent locales that I'm less familiar with.
Cheers - Ian

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