Online accent archive

You can hear the 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"

spoken 1300 times on an online accent archive, which has been set up by the George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. The idea of the archive is to have a collection of as many speech accents as possible from as broad a range of language backgrounds as possible -- native speakers, people who learnt to speak English as an adult and those who learnt English as a second language early in life. The paragraph was specially composed, as it contains most of the sounds of Standard American English.

The archive seems to confirm the generally held belief among linguists that there is a cut-off point, after which it is hard to learn a language without having a 'foreign' accent. Someone who learnt English at the age of 11 then spent the next twenty years living in the USA will have more of a 'foreign' accent than someone who learnt English at the age of four, spent the next five years living in the USA, then moved away. This second person is more likely to sound like a native English speaker.

You can listen to lots of different accents, or submit your own recording of the above paragraph for inclusion in the archive here. You can read more on the story here.  

Comments

[The daughter]

Amy Walker is making a name for herself on YouTube with a performance of 21 different accents:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UgpfSp2t6k

[Virtual Linguist]

That's a brilliant video clip. She doesn't just do the accents, but manages to portray national stereotypes too! Thanks for the link.

[maxqnz]

Very impressive. She *ALMOST* gets the Kiwi accent right. Since the measure of success is how accentLESS she sounds to a native speaker, she did well. She slipped in an Australian "and", though, but other than tha, she was pretty much spot on.

On the subject of accents in general, I would suggest some clarification on the use of the phrase "native speaker" in the context of accents. A friend of mine took his NZ-born son home to Nepal to meet his grandparents last year. The boy was about 7 at the tmie and grown up in a family that spoke only Nepali at home. He is without question a "native speaker" of Nepali. Nevertheless, for the first two days he was at his grandparents house, his father had to repeat everything he said because the grandparents could not understand his NZ accent.
Likewise with the large Panjabi community in my town. Most families take their children home every 2-3 years in an (ultimately futile) attempt to rid them of their Kiwi accents when speaking Panjabi. These are children born here and raised in households where only Panjabi is used, making them truly native speakers, but to Panjabi-born ears they STILL have a "foreign accent".

[Virtual Linguist]

Thanks, Stuart. That's a good point re native speakers and accent.