Speech Accent Archive

The NPR had a wonderful report this weekend about the Speech Accent archive, including an extended interview with the archive's creator, Steven Weinberger.

It's simply fascinating to listen to the hundreds of different voices in the archive, all reading the same passage, and noting the geographical differences. Can you guess this one (Quicktime required)?

How about this one?

Visit the archive yourself to find out more. Here's the purpose statement from the archives:

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. 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.

Tags

More like this

Who says religion and science can't go together well? I just read an interesting paper by Kinzler et al.(1), published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with apparent Biblical inspiration (OK, maybe not), as it begins with Judges 12:5-6 as an epigraph. In that passage…
Discriminating against people who do not speak your language is a big problem. A new study suggests that the preferences that lead to these problems are hard-wired at a very young age. Even five-month-old infants, who can't speak themselves, have preferences for native speakers and native accents…
The general consensus about last week's world accent test is that it was very difficult, but also quite fun. Everyone also wanted to know the answers to the quiz. I'm not going to make it that easy for you, but at the end of the post I will offer a way for you to figure out which is which. The test…
A post over at the Scientist blog laments the difficulty in getting people to acknowledge the English-language bias in science: Many, perhaps most, scientists are grateful that English has become the international language, but an informative protest comes from Prof. Tsuda Yukio of Japan, who has…

What a cool resource! The first one sounds to me like maybe a Long Island accent? Or Queens? And the second one sounds like an urban (not outback) Australian accent to me. Or maybe South African of English (not Afrikaans) descent.

Very cool! I also thought the first one was from Queens, but that's apparantly not good. I think the second one is from New Zealand; it's not completely like an Australian accent.

Rivanny,

Yes, you're right about New Zealand. I have a friend from New Zealand who sounds exactly like this.

Lila,

I have a Pacific Northwest accent, too. About the most interesting thing about it is that I say "pop" instead of "soda."

When I was in the service in Germany I had a roommate from Connecticut (I am from Michigan). We met a German woman on the train from Munich one day who mentioned that she thought the Midwest accent (one an American might consider boring or none) was the most distinctive (and coarse) American accent and that the Connecticut accent sounded very similar, to her at least, to a Southern accent. Interesting point of view on how we perceive accents based on our own!

BTW - Is the first accent Boston? Or maybe New Jersey? (You already threw out NY, my first guess!)

By Wayne Zandbergen (not verified) on 06 Mar 2007 #permalink

I'd say the first is from the Bronx. The few Kiwis I have known have similar, but stronger, accents.

Ooops! To be more specific, I was referring to the second sample for the Kiwis.

No one has gotten it yet. I should point out that New York hasn't been thrown out entirely -- just Long Island, Queens, and the Bronx.

1) to me the "tristate" accent sounds pretty much the same to me whether it's CT, northern NJ or NYC. my first guess was Brooklyn, even before I saw that other parts of NYC have been ruled out.
2) definitely NZ but I see that has been guessed.

The first is Brooklyn. I'm guessing Canarsie or maybe Bensonhurst. M is right about the similarity of "tristate accents" but the way the speaker makes Stella sound like "Stelllah" is different from the someone from, say, Jersey City or the Bronx would say.

By Roberto Rivera (not verified) on 06 Mar 2007 #permalink

M / Roberto:

Yep, it's Brooklyn!

The speech accent archive is an amazing site, but it looks like it doesn't yet have samples to distinguish between the various tri-state accents. Fascinating that even with hundreds of accents included in the database, we can still identify even more different varieties.

Boston and England

As a non-native speakers who've lived in the U.S. for over a decade, I thought accent is a fascinating topic too. That's why we made it very easy for anyone to record "please call stella" at our site (http://www.kantalk.com) so he or she can get feedback from others. Check it out.