Western musical intervals are derived from speech tendencies, according to Duke scientists. Specifically, "most of the 12 chromatic scale intervals correspond to peaks of relative power in the normalized spectrum of human vocalizations." A somewhat more layperson-friendly summary of the study is here. [more inside]
posted by univac on Mar 15, 2009 - 42 comments

How The Edwardians Spoke :: BBC documentary via Google Video, about an hour [more inside]
posted by anastasiav on Oct 19, 2007 - 23 comments

Oddcast's Text To Speech Demos let you type in words in 14 different languages. Hear thick accents if you enter English or learn how to pronounce that word you always say wrong in Spanish.
posted by daninnj on Jan 25, 2007 - 23 comments

The Human Speechome Project - "A baby is to be monitored by a network of microphones and video cameras for 14 hours a day, 365 days a year, in an effort to unravel the seemingly miraculous process by which children acquire language.". Selected video clips. Paper (PDF, 750KB). To test hypotheses of how children learn, Prof Deb Roy's team at MIT will develop machine learning systems that “step into the shoes” of his son by processing the sights and sounds of three years of life at home. Total storage required: 1.4 petabytes.
posted by Gyan on Jul 23, 2006 - 21 comments

English Accents and Dialects. The British Library has compiled an online archive of northern speech dating back to the 19th century. The recordings range from from audio from Victorian cylinder dictaphones to 1950s football fans chanting.
posted by Masi on Aug 1, 2004 - 10 comments

Screw Howard Stern. But Save Sandra Tsing Loh!
The radio culture wars have claimed an unlikely victim, and an unlikely victimizer (America's favorite NPR station, KCRW).
posted by wendell on Mar 5, 2004 - 33 comments

It's Not What You Say, It's The Way That You Say It: George Bernard Shaw famously remarked that every time an Englishman opens his mouth it's guaranteed that another Englishman will despise him. This website offers a motley and unintentionally hilarious collection of the many, ever-growing pronunciations of the English language. The variety is so wide you could almost be listening to different languages. But is a particular accent still an anti-democratic barrier, strictly revealing your position on the socio-geographic ladder, as it was in the days Nancy Mitford discussed U and non-U vocabulary? Or have upper-class accents in the U.K. and U.S. (note the Boston Brahmin samples), once coveted and preferred, now become the opposite: unforgivable impediments? Does posh speech exist in Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand as it does in the U.K. and U.S.? In other words: Does it still matter? (Quicktime Audio for main and fourth link; Real Audio for third.)
posted by MiguelCardoso on Sep 20, 2003 - 50 comments

The Speech Accent Archive, with 264 audio clips of native and non-native English speakers reading the same paragraph. Wonderful sounds if you love languages (and who doesn't?), including Bambara, Vietnamese, Uzbek, Quechua and the instantly recognizable Synthesized. [via Tara Calishan's invaluable ResearchBuzz]
posted by mediareport on Aug 14, 2003 - 22 comments

Remember the Dialect Survey ? The results are up.
posted by rtimmel on Oct 28, 2002 - 10 comments

"Language Gene" found... (link to arstechnica discussion) "A group of Oxford University researchers presented findings in this week's Nature that they isolated a gene called FOXP2 that appears to be involved in both speech and language development." this is intriguing... that so much can start from so little.
posted by zerolucid on Oct 5, 2001 - 7 comments

15 of the 18 sentences beginning with the word "Well" in this transcript mark a speaker responding to a question or taking his/her turn. I'm sick of it.
posted by Mo Nickels on Feb 23, 2001 - 27 comments

This reminds me of a quote, or, well, there are different version of this. "If dolphins are so smart, why don't they get a job?" Was it on Simpsons? or? Ohh well.
"Janik, a Scottish biologist now at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, said that the signaling pattern of the dolphins is similar to what experts believe happened when ancient human beings first began organized speech."
posted by tiaka on Aug 25, 2000 - 4 comments