Dance and Theatre: Dance & Theatre Videos

IDEA 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.

VADA 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 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.

Listen 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.

The 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.

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.