Accent Attack
Help in understanding English accents.
Have you ever wondered what a Korean person speaking English sounds like? What about a South African? Or someone from Mexico? Well, now you can hear hundreds of accents at the “The Speech Accent Archive” – an online database of native and non-native speakers of English.
The project is managed by the George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA. The university started collecting recordings in 1999 and it now has 1,300. Every contributor has to record the following paragraph:
“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.”