LibGuides: Accents & Dialects for Stage & Screen: Listening & Observing

Introduction

Listening and observing is a crucial first step to developing your facility with accents and dialects. It is important to study both native speakers of the accent you are working on (primary sources) and actors using that particular accent in a performance (secondary sources) to develop your ears and start to pick up the nuances of an accent or dialect.

Explore the audio archives and recordings below to practice listening and get an exposure to different ways of speaking!

Audio Archives & Recordings

The various audio archives and online resources linked below provide examples of different accents and dialects.

The Speech Accent Archive (George Mason University)
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.
The British Library Sounds Collection: Accents & Dialects
Listen to a selection from the British Library’s extensive collections of unique sound recordings, which come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound: music, drama and literature, oral history, wildlife and environmental sounds.
Visual Accent and Dialect Archive (VADA)
VADA is a video archive of English-language accents and dialects gathered from around the globe, providing visual information on English language sound pronunciation for the theater community.
Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE from University of Wisconsin-Madison)
From 1965–1970, Fieldworkers for the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) conducted interviews with nearly 3,000 “Informants” in 1,002 communities across America. They visited native residents in all fifty states and D.C., collecting local words, phrases, and pronunciations. The recordings contain American regional speech samples from all fifty states.
International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA)
The International Dialects of English Archive was created in 1998 as the internet’s first archive of primary-source recordings of English-language dialects and accents as heard around the world. With roughly 1,400 samples from 120 countries and territories, and more than 170 hours of recordings, IDEA is now the largest archive of its kind.

Listening Resources from the Library Catalog

In addition to the audio archives above, check out some of the listening resources available to you through the library catalog. There are many books on accents and dialects that have accompanying CDs (several of which are highlighted on the next page on Identifying & Analyzing), but we also have more general listening resources where you can explore a variety of accents and dialects at once.

Listening to the Past by Raymond Hickey (Editor)
Call Number: Online Resource
Audio recordings of English are available from the first half of the twentieth century and thus complement the written data sources for the recent history of the language. This book is the first to bring together a team of globally recognised scholars to document and analyse these early recordings in a single volume. Looking at examples of regional varieties of English from England, Scotland, Ireland, the USA, Canada and other anglophone countries, the volume explores both standard and vernacular varieties, and demonstrates how accents of English have changed between the late nineteenth century and the present day. The socio-phonetic examinations of the recordings will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics, the history of the English language, language variation and change, phonetics, and phonology.
Do you speak American? Down south by Robert MacNeil
Call Number: Online video resource
Follows Robert MacNeil as he travels down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to Appalachia, Louisiana Cajun country, and the Tex-Mex border to examine Southern dialects and accents and the influences of French and Spanish on American English.

Dictionary of American Regional English This link opens in a new window
DARE does not include words that are commonly used throughout the United States, but rather focuses on the regional aspects of our language, documenting words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one place to another. It includes audio clips and quotations from the DARE Survey conducted 1965-1970, and an interactive map in addition to the maps that were included in the print version. DARE survey data compiled and edited at the University of Wisconsin-Madison