What makes a Latvian speaker of English sound different from a Kiswahili speaker of English? And can we tell if a speaker is from New Zealand or from Australia? These are a few of the questions that the Speech Accent Archive can help to answer.
The Speech Accent Archive (accent.gmu.edu) is an ongoing project of the Linguistics Program in the Department of English. It contains close to 1,000 speech samples of English from speakers of 250 language backgrounds. Each sample contains the audio, the phonetic transcription, and the demographic information of the native or non-native speaker reading a simple English paragraph. The uniform paragraph contains virtually all of the English sounds, and visitors to the Archive can compare and analyze the speech of a variety of English accents.
The Speech Accent Archive gets almost 1 million hits every month, and is used by linguistic researchers, ESL students and teachers, speech recognition engineers, and actors. Weinberger receives email from people all over the world who send in samples and use the archive for serious research and entertainment. Students have used the data for their dissertations, people have read the paragraph on You Tube, and Artists have been inspired by the accents. Faculty artists at the Austin Peay State University in Tennessee produced an installation based upon the Archive. “Please Call Stella” was presented at the Trahern Gallery there in August 2008. In Ireland, a composer is producing a saxophone ensemble piece with data from the Archive.
The site has won numerous awards, and was featured in venues such as The New York Times, The National Geographic (online), The Voice of America, the American Library Association, National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, WAMU’s Metro Connection, Virginia Public Radio’s With Good Reason, and WNYC’s Brian Leher Show in New York.
“Everyone who speaks a language speaks it with an accent,” according to Steven H. Weinberger, author of the Archive. “People love to listen to the variety of speech and they delight in trying to guess where some speaker of English originated”. Weinberger is an Associate Professor and Director of the Program in Linguistics at GMU.
October 28, 2009