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- Dialect & Accent Resources
Drama: Dialect & Accent Resources
Drama resources including production resources, digital collections, image collections, costume resources, plays and monologues.
Drama Library Resources
The Drama Library collects tapes and CDs for actors and directors to use during rehearsals or productions. The most detailed material includes a discussion of the phonetic alphabet, vowel sounds, and word stress. Many dialect tapes also include information on breathing, use of the tongue, and positioning of the jaw. Most resources provide frequent opportunity to practice as you listen.
Suggested Resources:
- UW School of Drama faculty Judith Shahn's Dialects of the world series on audio cassette
- CDs by Gillian Lane-Plescia
- Real Accents on CD
- Paul Meier's Accents and dialects for stage and screen 2nd and 3rd editions which consist of a book plus accompanying CDs
Plays with Dialect:
Have a particular dialect in mind, and looking for a play that features that dialect? A good source is Play Index located in Drama Reference Z5781.P53. In the online version type the dialect you're looking for in the search box, for example, "dialect Scottish" or "dialect African American".
Online Resources
- IDEA International Dialects of English ArchiveIDEA was created in 1997 as a free, online archive of primary source dialect and accent recordings for the performing arts. Its founder and director is Paul Meier, author of the best-selling Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen, and a leading dialect coach for theatre and film. All recordings are in English, are of native speakers, and include both English language dialects and English spoken in the accents of other languages.
- Visual Accent & Dialect ArchiveVADA is a video archive of English-language accents and dialects gathered from around the globe, providing visual information on language sound pronunciation for the theater community.
- The Speech Accent ArchiveThe speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.
- BBC VoicesListen to 283 conversations about language recorded by BBC Nations and Regions as part of the nationwide BBC Voices survey of 2005. Voices arranged by county.
- Survey of English DialectsThe Survey of English Dialects (SED) was a groundbreaking nationwide survey of the vernacular speech of England, undertaken by researchers based at the University of Leeds under the direction of Harold Orton. From 1950 to 1961 a team of fieldworkers collected data in a network of 313 localities across England, initially in the form of transcribed responses to a questionnaire containing over 1300 items. The informants were mostly farm labourers, predominantly male and generally over 65 years old as the aim of the survey was to capture the most conservative forms of folk-speech. Almost all the sites visited by the researchers were rural locations, as it was felt that traditional dialect was best preserved in isolated areas. It was initially the intention to include urban areas at a later date, but this plan had to be abandoned on economic grounds.
- Sounds Familiar?76 sound recordings and over 600 short audio clips chosen from three collections of the British Library Sound Archive: the Survey of English Dialects, the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects and the Millennium Memory Bank.
