survey of North American Dialects

[Margaret Florey]

Date:  Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:51:26 -0400
From:  Claire Bowern <clairebowern at GMAIL.COM>
Subject: survey

Hi everyone,
Some colleagues at the University of Auckland and I are conducting a survey
on North American English and trialling the use of flash web recording for
phonetic analysis. We are doing a short survey collecting examples of as
many different types of American English as possible. We are aiming for a
few thousand responses from all over the US. We're also aiming to be as
representative as possible for age, gender, geography, ethnicity and class
(as representative as we can be given we're using an internet-based survey
system). If you would like to participate by recording a short wordlist,
please visit NorthAmericanDialects<http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Eclb3/NorthAmericanDialects/>for
further information and instructions. The survey is open to anyone who
grew up speaking English and will take approximately five minutes to
complete. If you could help us spread the word by forwarding this to
friends, family, networks, students, etc, that would be great!

While this is an English survey, I hope our survey will be representative of
US English in all its varieties, and that includes English as spoken by
Native American, First Nations, Alaska Native and other Indigenous groups.
The second (and perhaps more important) is that this survey will be a
large-scale trial of a flash-based web recording program for phonetic and
linguistic research, and that is potentially of relevance to the work we do
here with distance-based language work. I hope to be able to share some of
the results from that side of the project too. Our trials over the last few
months showed that the mp3 format that we're using it good enough for fairly
reliable format tracking, perhaps formant bandwidth measurement, and
duration measurements. In terms of clarity, it depended heavily of course on
microphone placement and computer volume but on the whole was pretty good -
certainly better than I was expecting.

For any questions regarding this project, please contact Dr. Claire Bowern,
Department of Linguistics,
Yale University.
Phone: - 203.432.2045,
E-mail: claire.bowern at yale.edu.

Have a good weekend!
Claire


-- 
Margaret Florey
Consultant linguist
Director, Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity <www.rnld.org>

Email: Margaret.Florey at gmail.com
Ph: +61 (0)4 3186-3727 (mob.)
skype: margaret_florey
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