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Speech Accents Archive of non-native English Speakers

Oct. 15th, 2006 | by Kaly

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.

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