Oh the wonders of the web. Linguist Steven Weinberger of George Mason University administers and maintains the wholly impressive Speech Accent Archive, a collection of recordings of native speakers of a myriad different languages (currently 210) reading the same passage in English:
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.
Here are some examples from native speakers of Georgian, Urdu, Norwegian, and Tamil.
There are currently 661 samples and more are added regularly. Many of them include phonetic transcriptions of the recording and are annotated with phonological generalizations, general rules that help to describe a given speaker’s accent. Samples also include biographical data on the speakers, including age, sex, place of birth, age when they started learning English, the learning method, and a number of other interesting facts.
The interface is very easy to use and there are a number of ways to browse through the archive including by language and region. The search function is quite powerful as well. Seasoned linguists and dabblers alike can spend lots and lots of time on this site. Take a look. (Thanks to Jim of bavatuesdays for the tip.)
You gotta love del.icio.us! Glad you found this one useful, Mikhail. I first got directed to it by Paul Fallon, a Linguist here at UMW.
I know this archive, remebering it as a fun thing to listen to!
As a non-native speakers who’ve lived in the U.S. for over a decade, I think accent is a fascinating topic too. That’s why we made it very easy for anyone to record “please call stella” at our site (http://www.kantalk.com), so he or she can get feedback from others. Feel free to check it out.
You’ll like IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive, http://www.ku.edu/~idea), another similar resource, put together by people who want to document dialectal variation in English for… actors! Both of these are excellent teaching resources for courses on phonetics and phonology.