Came across an interesting site today, The Speech Accent Archive. It’s a website that compares different english accents.

George Mason University carried out an interesting research aimed at comparing accents of non native english speakers. Several non native and some native speakers(scotish, irish) were asked to read same paragraph of text. Readings were recorded and compared to american english. Currenty site hosts allmost 600 different samples with including around 200 different accents.

I was not that much into study results but had some listening to some of the accents; check out samples below:

• hindi accent
• russian accent (check out russian8, it’s funny)
• sicilian accent
• or this Chineese female

Apparently there is quite a demand for this type of database, it is used by:

• ESL teachers who instruct non-native speakers of English
• Actors who need to learn an accent for the movie
• Engineers training speech recognition machines
• Linguists doing research on foreign accent
• Phoneticians teaching phonetic transcription
• Speech pathologists

Share your thoughts in comments.