Want to hear different accents?

[erratio]

I know I do!

http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php

A lot of the speakers are way too fluent though. I would have liked to have heard thicker accents. And I'm slightly disappointed that they don't have different accents of English speakers on file (Australia, US, etc).

Sorry for all the linguistics-related posts people, this is what happens when I start trying to do my linguistics essay - I get caught up in all these tangents that are *way* more interesting than my essay topic

Comments

[erratio.livejournal.com]

I'm examining Australian Questioning Intonation - it's features, purpose and all that jazz. It's not too bad but all this stuff I keep finding accidentally while trying to look up studies is absolutely fascinating. Ah well, at least it keeps reinforcing my interest in the field given that this semester's course has been fairly dull and has featured fun-filled terms such as "universal implicational tendency"

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting! Especially since Australian intonation tends to go up on the final syllable somewhat anyway. Also, many questions in interrogative situations are rhetorical ("Who did you think you were?", etc) and may feature no pitch modulation at all. Are you making an argument, or reviewing the scholarship (or both)?

That's a fascinating website that you linked to, by the way, but strange that they were all speaking English. I listened to a few of the Hebrew ones but was a bit disappointed by their lack of variation. What happened to the arsim of Holon!? Hehe. Also, they seem to list some of the word-initial ps and bs as being unaspirated: I've tried and tried and cannot reproduce this! Any idea what's going on?

PS: I think that if you go in for making new blogs, you should make a purely linguistic one as well! Just to make people like me happy...

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's Australian Question Intonation - not the rise accompanying a question but the rise accompanying a statement. It's generally believed that the function of it is to confirm that the listener comprehends the speaker and also functions as a floor-holding device. It's a fairly recent phenomenon too (last few decades) and is thought to have coincided with the massive influx of migrants post-WW2. (that's two thirds of my essay content right there :P)

Sadly, I'm at uni at the moment and out of cable internet quota so looking at the website again is going to have to wait until I get home

I like this idea of making my hypothetical new blog devoted to linguistics. It would kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, and I wouldn't feel so much like I was boring the people who read my blog with all this babble about accents and so forth.