Summary: Audiotapes of English dialects

[Barbara Pearson]

Dear Infochildes,

On Thursday, March 18, 2004, at 11:53 AM, I asked
for your help:

> Dear Infochildes,
>
> I've been asked by a non-linguist who is trying to organize
> a program on language awareness for an audiotape of
> different English dialects.  (She's in the US, but I guess
> if there's one of British dialects, that might be useful,
> too.)
>
> She's already familiar with the video American Tongues,
> which would have been my first response for her.
>
> Any ideas?
>
Within hours, I had the following list, which covered what my
colleague needed and more (as follows).

Infochildes Query 3/18/04  Responses 3/19/04

1.  Carolyn Chaney <cchaney at sfsu.edu>
International English by Peter Trudgill and Jean Hannah (1982) (Edward
Arnold publishers) is pretty good, and it comes with a book...I don't 
know
about its current availability.  And for teaching students to play 
around
with accents, I've succesfully used the "Acting with an Accent" tapes 
and
booklets by David Stern (Dialect Accent Specialists, phone 
802-626-3121),
although these are not authentic accents, but rather stage versions.
Still they can be pedagogically useful.

2.  velleman at comdis.umass.edu (Shelley Velleman)
Yes, I've often assigned my phonetics students to "translate" the
"Acting with an Accent" instructions into phonetics terminology, and
sometimes I offer learning to speak with one of these accents as an
extra credit activity as well.

I have a book on British dialects by Foulkes and Docherty called "Urban
Voices".  It comes with an audiotape or CD. 

3.  Catherine Snow <snowcat at gse.harvard.edu>
--the followng two websites are both goldmines of streaming
dialectical audio

<http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/>
<http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonoatlas/#maps>

4.  Stefka H. Marinova-Todd  <stefka at audiospeech.ubc.ca>
There is also a web-page (http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/)  called 
Speech
Accent Archive hosted at the George Mason University which contains a
collection of audio-files of various foreign accents of English,
including about 60 samples of English dialects from across the US, as
well as Britain, Australia, New Zealand and other English speaking
countries. In all the samples, the speakers are asked to read the same
paragraph in English, which provides for a good comparison across
accents/dialects.

5.  Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu>
One interesting resource on dialecct variation is the IViE (Intonational
Variation in English) project.  They have a very systematic survey of 9
British dialects.  They have a web site and you can also find materials 
at
http://talkbank.org/media/IViE

6.  Judith VanderWoude <jvwoude at calvin.edu>
A book and audiotape I really like on British dialects is "English 
accents and
dialects: an introduction to social and regional varieties of English 
in the
British Isles" by Arthur Hughes and Peter Trudgill.  You can purchase a
separate accompanying audiotape that includes conversations transcribed 
in the
text.

7.  Ulrike Gut <ulrike.gut at anglistik.uni-freiburg.de>
John Wells' book "Accents of English" comes with various
recordings. Also, if she is interested in English accents
around the world, there are the various ICE (International
Corpus of English) corpora.

>  (Infochildes to the rescue again!)
>

> Many thanks,
> Barbara
>
>
> *****************************************
> Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D.
> Project Manager, Research Assistant
> Dept. of Communication Disorders
> University of Massachusetts
> Amherst MA 01003
>
> 413.545.5023
> fax: 545.0803
>
> bpearson at comdis.umass.edu
> http://www.umass.edu/aae/
>
>
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