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.
posted on Mar 5, 2008 - View this thread

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]
posted on Mar 24, 2003 - View this thread

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.
posted on Sep 17, 2001 - View this thread

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.
posted on Aug 8, 2000 - View this thread