
Speech accent archive (English) - siromoney
http://accent.gmu.edu/
======
Wintamute
The paragraph is pretty Americanised ... dropped conjunctions all over the
place. "we will go _and_ meet her _on_ Wednesday at the train station". Most
of the speakers that likely learnt British English trip up over this sentence.

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nmeofthestate
Well spotted; in fact one of the Scots speakers says 'go to meet her' by
accident, and the other one says 'meet her on Wednesday'.

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subpixel
Bummed there isn't an example of old-timey, upper-class peninsular Charleston,
SC accent. By and large, these people don't live there anymore, but it's an
amazing, strange, beautiful accent.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxNZrFyl2DA&t=37m0s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxNZrFyl2DA&t=37m0s)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxkuXg7FZqo&t=0m20s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxkuXg7FZqo&t=0m20s)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJv9t80pufc&t=2m35s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJv9t80pufc&t=2m35s)

~~~
bane
Woah, that's a crazy accent. It's like a Virginia Gentlemen accent had a baby
with an upper class Boston accent and somewhere in there is a French Canadian
grandparent. The vowels are so proper and Southern, but the non-Rhotic finals
are crazy.

I'm listening to
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJv9t80pufc&t=2m35s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJv9t80pufc&t=2m35s)

"Ten Years Ago" is literally made up of pieces of several different accents.
"Tee-un Yee-ahs Ago-uh"

Then every other "r" is said, until he gets to "contributuhs".

I might be mistaken but I think he also rhoticises his final "ls". I bet he
also says "law" like "lawr".

"Fourth of July" turns into "Fowth of Joooo-lie" and then he says "articulate"
perfectly normal.

"ways" -> "wuuh-ehs"

"know" -> sounds like Canadian "knoo"

"mortgage" -> "mow-gayj"

actually I almost can't predict how he'll pronounce one word to another, just
when I start to think I got an ear for it, then he'll throw in something like
"manufacturing"->"man-oo-fact-yoo-rin"

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idProQuo
For anyone who's into this kind of stuff, the International Dialects of
English Archive[1] is an awesome resource. I've used it a lot to practice
accents for acting roles.

[1][http://www.dialectsarchive.com/](http://www.dialectsarchive.com/)

~~~
brickmort
this is absolutely fascinating. thanks for sharing.

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techwizrd
It's interesting and rare to see my university in the news. It would be
interesting to build language and acoustic models for these accents to improve
speech recognition, but there isn't nearly enough data to do that.

~~~
bane
In the last 10-15 years, GMU has _exploded_ as a regional university in the
mid-Atlantic. It's a huge change from the small commuter school it used to be
back in the 80's and 90's. I think it's for the best, Northern Virginia has no
world class universities despite being one of the largest metro-areas in the
U.S. It's geographically in a prime location to assume that mantle.

I have relatives as far afield as Arkansas trying desperately to get their
kids into it, only to be disappointed when they don't and end up having to
send their kids to Georgetown or UMB or something. It's apparently become
quite selective.

Also, if you want to hear about it in the news, a few of the faculty from
literature and a couple other departments are constantly on NPR. Which is
interesting because since NPR is in D.C., you'd expect them to have more
faculty from GWU and Georgetown. I think I hear "George Mason" on the radio at
least once a week these days.

I looked up the rankings
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mason_University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mason_University)

And apparently it's pretty solidly a Tier-1 school now. Kinda crazy, it used
to just be this weird tier-3 local offshoot of UVA.

~~~
techwizrd
As a current student at GMU, I'm not so sure I'd call it a Tier-1 school just
yet. It's still got a lot of improvement to do, but it has definitely grown
incredibly fast even in the time I've been here. My mother is also a graduate
of GMU and my father went to GMU for a short time before completing his degree
at College Park, so I've seen Mason grow throughout my childhood and now into
my adult life.

People in the NoVa area don't really seem to treat GMU the way they treat UVA
or VTech or even VCU. I'm glad it's starting to be treated seriously. It's
just odd seeing GMU cited more and more often as a serious research school in
the same sentence as other more well-known universities when people in the
NoVa university don't share that same level of respect.

My comments about rarely hearing GMU's name were more targeted towards how
much I hear it in the news. I listen to NPR on a daily basis and broadcasters
or guests on different shows frequently name studies from universities like
Princeton and Yale and Carnegie Mellon but I've only started hearing GMU's
name come up on non-University topics within the past month or so. I've heard
studies cited by GMU in different fields cited 3-4 times this week already.

~~~
bane
I wasn't really aware GMU had a major research arm - is this relatively new? I
grew up in the D.C. Metro Area and really just remember it as that weird local
commuter school with a basketball stadium that the circus came to and the
performing arts center. Growing up we had a grad student who rented a room and
was in the choir. We used to go to her performances every once in a while.
I've been the campus a few times in the last decade or so, and I used to visit
the old weird library on the quad to study when I was in High School.

If they're growing their research arm, that can have a huge impact on the
academic reputation of the school. It'll get them lots of name recognition.

But yeah, it definitely doesn't have the local reputation yet because we all
remember it for what it used to be, a kind of community college that happened
to offer 4-year programs.

I was really surprised when my relatives and friend's kids who are college
aged started bringing it up in conversation about applications alongside of
much more recognizable school name. I guess in the high-school guidance
departments it's gotten quite a good name.

Times change I guess?

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cschmidt
Very cool. I wonder where the quote came from:

    
    
        Please call Stella.  Ask her to bring these things with her from the    
        store:  Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, 
        and maybe a snack for her brother Bob.  We also need a small plastic 
        snake and a big toy frog for the kids.  She can scoop these things into 
        three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.
    

Is it some sort of "the quick brown fox" quote, that tests a complete range of
sounds? Anyone know the history?

~~~
eugenejen
I think it is a tongue twister designed for observation of pronunciation. I
read Edith Skinner's "Speaking with Distinction" and there are a lot of
similar tongue twisters for practicing vowels and consonants clusters.

Also you can find out a lot of old tongue twisters for English in elocution
textbooks in 19th century from archive.org..

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rooodini
The samples presented aren’t always representative of the accents of the
region. For instance, english57 is much closer to a ‘typical’
Birmingham/midlands accent than english2.

Awesome archive all the same!

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shmerl
Interesting archive. I also found an audio archive for Yiddish dialects:

* by location: [http://eydes.de/UsrAA1E0667HF/index/li/li.html](http://eydes.de/UsrAA1E0667HF/index/li/li.html)

* by words: [http://eydes.de/UsrAA1E0667HF/index/wi2/wi2.html](http://eydes.de/UsrAA1E0667HF/index/wi2/wi2.html)

* main page: [http://eydes.de/UsrAA1E0667HF/index/](http://eydes.de/UsrAA1E0667HF/index/)

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snapey
I would be very interested to see if providing speaker locale as a feature to
a machine learning algorithm would increase its performance for speech
recognition.

~~~
eugenejen
that's probably a wrong assumptions. it is more related to the first language.
locale may give wrong correlations.

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adnam
The guy from Henley on Thames was the best (speakerid=70).

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It is interesting. To my ear he's got a pretty standard Southern (West London
to Oxford) accent but with, I think, a bit of poor North London creeping in
there too ("we also need").

Before I noticed the biog I guessed he was ~70 (it says 69). Would have been
great to have more biographical information - often you can hear a few accents
in someone's speech and sometimes guess their geographical progression (in the
UK at least).

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afsina
Quicktime fail.

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romanlevin
Quicktime?

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veganarchocap
Distinct lack of Derbyshire accents!

~~~
tehwalrus
and I couldn't find a single Geordie, either! (I'm not one, so I can't provide
anything but a simulated, and almost certainly wrong, sample.)

~~~
BgSpnnrs
No Cornish either, shocking! I would submit a sample but I don't fancy being
an exemplary case - accents are serious business!

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fbnt
How about all those people who learned english as a second language and then
went to live in various english speaking countries? My accent is a weird mix
of Italian/Irish/Northern UK sounds, it wouldn't fit anywhere in that list..

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tehwalrus
I listened to too many before stopping myself (maybe 40 or 50)... I was struck
by how similar they all were. When I try to imitate an accent, I think I must
exaggerate the differences from my natural speech too much. Interesting.

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liam_ja
There's also the British Library's archive of Accents & Dialects.

[http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects](http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-
dialects)

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ptr
I don't know much about accents, but I wonder if it'd be possible to match
different accents and see how well they'd understand eachother.

