The archive was set up to exhibit “a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds”. Native and non-native English speakers are recorded – or record themselves – reading the passage, chosen because it contains most of the consonants, vowels and clusters of Standard American English.

You can search the online archive by language or geography, or just enjoy a browse; alongside each recording is a phonetic transcription. So, for example, you can compare the accent of a female native Afrikaans speaker aged 27, who learned to speak English at nine, with a 43-year-old man, from a different region of South Africa, who learned English at four; or you can hear accents of native Arabic speakers from Egypt, Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Syria.

The archive is used for teaching and research. As well as linguists and phoneticians, groups who use it range from teachers of English as a foreign language, and engineers training speech recognition machines, to speech pathologists and actors who need to learn an accent.

See:  Guardian.co.uk