MetaFilter posts tagged with dialects

Voices from WWI speak again in British Library

jefficator — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:04:33 -0800

"It is the business of educated people to speak so that no-one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed." Despite efforts by Victorians to eradicate them, dialects of English in Great Britain continue to vary greatly, much to the consternation of many traditionalists. But a recently acquired archive is giving new insight into old dialects--some of which no longer exist. Recorded in a WWI prisoner of war camp on shellac disks, the archive was part of an effort by German linguists to study regional variation in the English language. A report by PRI's The World includes a brief synopsis--and a powerful rendition of a beloved Scottish ballad by a homesick soldier.

Hear and Compare Accents of English from Around the World

Kattullus — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 07:16:40 -0800

Sound Comparisons is a database of different accents in English from all over the world. It provides soundfiles and IPA transcriptions of 110 words in 110 separate dialects and Germanic languages closely related to English. Most dialects and languages are current but there are also reconstructions of older stages of English, Scots and Germanic. That makes for 12100 soundfiles that load directly into your browser. The site can be navigated either by dialect or individual word and there's also a handy Google map of all the different dialects and languages. If you've ever wondered what the difference was between a Somerset and a Norwich accent, New Zealand and Australian, Canadian and American or Indian and Glaswegian, Sound Comparisons is the site to go to.

The Flatter the Landscape the Flatter the Accent

anastasiav — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:39:37 -0800

How The Edwardians Spoke :: BBC documentary via Google Video, about an hour Via Kottke (so sue me)

Is Byyuudua-pessst fahhh?

miss lynnster — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 07:41:09 -0800

Some movie villains aren't necessarily bad, they're just accented that way. But what criteria do we use to determine a truly, uniquely bad film accent? Obviously, it helps if an actor or movie annoys you to begin with, but some bad accents are simply indisputably painful to watch. Kind of like a mashup of everything in The Speech Accent Archive with a little bit of Received Pronounciation thrown in here and there. Yes it's true, even the average American enjoys trying to rock a ridiculously fake British tone once in a while (there are dialects?). But believe it or not, there are average people in this world actually trying to learn how to sound American too! OK well, on second thought, it's more likely that they're just trying to sound less "foreign" while they're here so we don't mock them.

Now here's the obligatory Fun Quiz portion of the post: what American accent do YOU have? Previously.

Animal Accents

pracowity — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 05:19:48 -0800

We're Schleswig-Holsteins, darling. (Ah, from the Low Countries.) Cows have accents. Some other animals with accents: birds, otters, frogs, monkeys.

Aargh!

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 10:45:45 -0800

Aargh!

self-confessed valley girl

kenko — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 14:22:22 -0800

International Dialects of English Archive

Collect Britain

plep — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 07:49:32 -0800

Collect Britain 'presents 90,000 images and sounds from the British Library, chosen to evoke places in the UK and beyond.' Dialects, gardens, sketches, stamps, and all kinds of stuff.

A pronounced deficiency in IQ

QuietDesperation — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 11:05:19 -0800

Redneck ebonics triumphs. Merriam-Webster online now gives "nu-kyu-lar" as an alternative pronunication of "nuclear." While dictionaries have become more descriptive and less prescriptive over the years, shouldn't they at least list it as [idiotic variant]?

Dialecty goodness

stopgap — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 18:03:35 -0800

Do you speak American? The companion website to a PBS series, full of interactive language and dialect tools. You can map your attitudes about regional correctness, guess the speaker's home, learn about American varieties, track the history of certain words, hear samples of regional dialects, and more.
Further reading: Dialect Map of American English [image], Slanguage's local terms, and this collection of local phrases.
Previously on MetaFilter: The Dialect Survey (and results), The Speech Accent Archive, Pop vs. Soda.

More pronunciation quandaries

Carlos Quevedo — Sat, 12 Apr 2003 18:44:00 -0800

Coffee, our nan? Is this "Would you like some more coffee, Grandmother?" or Kofi Annan? Oh and mathowie - are you sure the Irish Haughey is pronounced Howie? [Check out Charles Haughey for the proper way.] Thank you, Voice of America, for teaching us how to pronounce those pesky foreigners' names. And shame on you, BBC Pronouncing Unit, for not being online! [This last link requires Real Audio but is really worth listening to if you have anything against stuck-up English twits.]

Click, Pop and Whistle

Irontom — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 06:33:00 -0800

Khoisan languages of southern Africa [NY Times link]
Do some of today's languages still hold a whisper of an ancient ancestral tongue spoken by the first modern humans? [more inside]

rtimmel — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 07:31:32 -0800

Remember the Dialect Survey ? The results are up.

bl1nk — Fri, 11 Oct 2002 09:06:42 -0800

How do you say "caramel?" Unlike most Internet quizzes and surveys, Dr. Vaux's Dialect Survey won't pigeon-hole you into one of a finite set of types ("Your speech is most similar to Generic West Coast Dot-Commer, but with a trace of Oklahoma Trailer Park.") Which is just as well since folks like George Bernard Shaw, HL Mencken, and David Foster Wallace would tell us that pronunciation varies with the individual, and doesn't quite fall neatly into a standard type with odd variances. Rather, this survey is a purely academic method for collecting information on who says what where, and the maps at the end are interesting to look at. I know that the pop/soda/cola variance has been visited before, but what's up with people using "hosey" to refer to the "shotgun" seat of a car? (requires registration if only to track your answers)

joeclark — Mon, 17 Sep 2001 16:12:54 -0800

Linguistic competency Do you speak Arabic or Farsi? If you meet certain other qualifications, you can now spy for the FBI, whose homepage takes more care than news reports did and specifically lists Pashto, spoken in Afghanistan, as one of the desired language proficiencies.

lagado — Tue, 08 Aug 2000 00:48:47 -0800

Ethnologue Languages of the World is a comprehensive online resource detailing all of the languages spoken in the world today. It has indexes based on language name, language family and country as well as a search facility. Also covered are creoles and deaf sign languages.