An Archive of English, Spoken in Many Different Accents

03 August 2011

Xavier Chavez, a teacher of English as a second language, teaching a summer history class at Benson High School in Portland, Oregon

This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

Steven Weinberger is the director of linguistics in the English Department at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Professor Weinberger says students in his beginning phonetics class are mostly interested in teaching English as a second language. They wanted to study how non-native speakers pronounce different sounds.

STEVEN WEINBERGER: "So we sent the students out to record non-native speakers, and we compared those speakers to each other and to native speakers of English."

Professor Weinberger wrote a paragraph for all of the speakers to read. The paragraph uses common words but contains almost all of the sounds used in English. Here is that sixty-nine-word paragraph read by our own Bob Doughty:

BOB DOUGHTY: “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.”

In nineteen ninety-nine, Professor Weinberger put the recordings online. The Speech Accent Archive is for anyone who wants to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.