Life & Style | People
1,300 ways to say the same thing
An online archive is collecting English accents to help academics and actors. Could you add yours?
- By David Marsh, Guardian News
- Published: 00:00 June 12, 2010
- Image Credit: Nino Jose Heredia, Gulf News
- "Most linguists believe there is a 'critical period' for humans, when they can acquire a language perfectly. After this age (about 6 years old), humans will learn a language incompletely - this shows in pronunciation" Steven H. Weinberger, Director of linguistics, George Mason University in Fairfax
"Please call Stella and 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 on Wednesday at the train station."
You can hear these words recited 1,300 times at the online speech accent archive at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and every one is different.
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. These make up the archive.
Submit a sample
Steven H. Weinberger, associate professor and director of linguistics at the university, is the administrator of the archive, which has been on the web since 1999. Anyone can submit a sample. "We get them all the time, from people all over the globe," he says. "We ask for CD-quality recordings and get some good recordings. We also get noisy, badly recorded ones, which we discard. If the recording is good and the data are confirmed, we add it to the archive."
Contributors answer questions about their demographic and linguistic background to enable archive users "to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent". If you are, say, a 56-year-old male native English speaker from the north of England and the archive already has a sample matching that background, you will not be rejected.
"All speakers are different," Weinberger says. "If we have 75 Spanish speakers, there are different countries represented. The same goes for Arabic. There are gaps, mainly in the less common languages such as those spoken on small islands [Tahitian, Balangingi, etc] or Native American languages and ASL [American Sign Language]."
Does he have any favourites? "I like all of them but I find the older speakers most instructive. Many of our speakers who are older than 70 seem to have the most ‘archetypal' accents."
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 learnt to speak English at 9, with a 43-year-old man from a different region of South Africa, who learnt English at 4; or you can hear accents of native Arabic speakers from Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Syria.
Deep-rooted connection
There is something hypnotic about the repeated recitation of the passage. The irony is that hearing the same words over and over in the same language says something powerful about how much people have in common despite their differences — it's like the Tower of Babel in reverse.
Crucial to an understanding of accents is that they are "systematic rather than merely mistaken speech", Weinberger says. This can counter what he describes as "biased social judgments" based on people's accents. "When we understand that accents are not due to ‘errors' or faulty learning, we may be more sympathetic to the speakers. But biases are difficult to unlearn."
So how and when do we acquire our accent? "As listeners, we have a fairly automatic ability to listen to a snippet of speech and determine whether that speaker is from our community.
When it comes to foreign [non-native] speakers, there seems to be something that all French speakers share, all Mandarin Chinese speakers share, etc. The French speakers of English are substituting, altering, deleting and adding sounds to their English, making it different from that of a native English speaker. When we distil what they do to their English, we see patterns: French speakers sound French because they use French sounds and structures in English. Studying accents is just like studying native sound systems. But don't get me wrong," Weinberger says.
"There are still lots of other things about accents that may be more idiosyncratic.
"Everyone has an accent and we are biologically wired to have an accent. Most linguists believe that there is a ‘critical period' for humans when they can acquire a language perfectly.
"After this age (about 6 years old), humans will learn a language incompletely — and this shows up most often in the pronunciation of people.
"The archive generally confirms this notion of a critical period. It is only the very young learners who manage to pass for native speakers of English. So a person — let's say Korean — who starts learning English at 11 and lives in the US for 20 years speaking English will still have a Korean accent. But a Korean who starts her English at 4 and moves to the US and lives there for five years will not have a Korean accent. So it is age of onset, not length of exposure, that is crucial."
The archive is used for teaching and research. Along with 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.
Does Weinberger ever get sick of hearing about fresh snow peas and slabs of blue cheese?
"Sure and so do my family and students. But some people like it — just Google "please call Stella". You will find that people have used it for all sorts of projects. "There are ringtones and art projects, you can find it on YouTube and the Irish composer Cathal Roche has written saxophone pieces based on the archive.
"There have been academic papers and masters theses based upon the data too but I think most people just like to listen to accented speech. I am sure there are plenty of games based on the archive!" he says.
Actors' accents
Had the archive been around at the time, we might have been spared the vocal grotesqueries of actors such as Van Dyke and Sean Connery, who topped Empire magazine's poll of the worst accents in cinema history for their work on Mary Poppins (1964) and The Untouchables (1987), respectively. "We get mails of thanks from many actors who are working with scripts that require obscure speech accents," Weinberger says.
So what next? "We are getting ready for another major overhaul: better maps via Google, more searchable sounds and more phonetic inventories from the world's languages. We are also putting together a database of the syllable structures available in the world's languages.
"We have also made a computational device that will automatically compare two accents. It will instantaneously reveal the specific phonological speech patterns that make one accent different from another. It's exciting work and will be available, free, to anyone."
In the meantime, he carries a voice recorder with him all the time: "I never know when I will encounter an interesting accent." Will the archivement ever be regarded as complete? "We don't have an end date. We only have about 300 native languages represented. With 6,000 world languages out there, we have a long way to go."
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