A Gold Mine of Accents for Actors!

Are you an actor trying to master an accent for an audition?  Are you wishing you could just click on a button on the computer and hear every accent there is around the world?   Here it is!  Your dream come true!

I couldn't believe I found this:  A Linguist's Dream, The Speech Accent Archive.  It was created by George Mason University.

I had so much fun listening to Yiddish, French, Minnesota, Alabama accents and New Jersey accents.  I couldn't stop, I was rolling on the floor laughing.  They are all recorded by native speakers of places like Memphis and Madagascar!  This is the real thing, and they were all reading the following sentence:

"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."

It is a thorough compilation of English accents online. You can even make your own recording if you have an accent.   In addition to audio samples of each accent, the Speech Accent Archive keeps track of biographical and regional data. Each clip has a readout of the sample paragraph next to the phonetic transcription.  WOW!

For every accent, it also has a list of  linguistic distinctions for the accent.  For Example, I listened to the Greek accent.   It described the consonant vowel and syllabic mistakes.  With a little practice you can begin to master any accent, and you don't even have to go there!

This relatively simple idea has provided a structure for a unique set of data. In addition to being a fun site to casually explore, it provides a resource for speech pathologists, actors learning an accent or even engineers training speech recognition machines. If that wasn’t enough, all the files are released under a Creative Commons License.  You can use them!

Have fun!  It iz zee best zing vee have foun!