Over at Metrolingua I found a fun toy today, a Speech Accent Archive. It’s a product of extensive research:
The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.
I could spend a lot of time listening to the same paragraph so many times! I just wish the notes (and transcription) were complete on each sample.
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.
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