Theatre Resources: Voice and Speech

This site lets you search for the pronunciation of a word in many different languages. It also has common phrases in translation.

This is a website created by linguists to create a structure for exploring diversity in phonetics across language families from around the world.

Offers a dialect map of North America, showing dialect regions, links to samples, and interesting articles. *Commentary by Prof. Bryn Austin: This is the "hobby" site of linguist Rick Aschmann. It is an incredibly rich source of material about North American regional dialects. However, because there is so much information there, you may have to hunt about a bit to discover the treasures that await you.

Interviews with nearly 3,000 “Informants” in 1,002 communities across America. They visited native residents in all fifty states and D.C., collecting local words, phrases, and pronunciations and collected recordings of the informants. These recordings consisted of conversational interviews as well as readings of “The Story of Arthur the Rat” (devised to elicit the essential differences in pronunciation across the country). This fieldwork data provided invaluable regional information for the Dictionary of American Regional English Volumes I–VI (1985–2013) and Digital DARE.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham Oral History Collection contains recorded interviews, recorded between 197 and 1984, that focus on Southern history and culture.

The Samford project S.T.O.R.I. was committed to collecting, preserving, archiving and disseminating oral histories from the Samford community, the Birmingham area, and the state of Alabama.

Georgia State University’s digital collection houses several Oral History projects, including
Collections on Gender and Sexuality, Music and Radio Broadcasting, Social Change, Southern Labor, the Women’s Movement in Georgia, and Religious Life.

Hosted at Louisiana State University, the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History was founded in 1991 to document Louisiana's diverse culture and history through oral history interviews representing multiple perspectives, and to preserve the oral histories collected and make them available to researchers,

Hosted by the University of Southern Mississippi, the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage has collected and preserved the stories of Mississippians from all walks of life. The collection began in 1971 and has over 4,000 entries.

Hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "Oral Histories of the American South" is a three-year project to select, digitize and make available 500 oral history interviews gathered by the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP). These 500 are being selected from a collection of over 4,000 interviews, housed at the Southern Historical Collection.

The New York Public Library Community Oral History Project is an initiative taking place at NYPL branches that aims to document, preserve, and celebrate the rich history of the city's unique communities by collecting the stories of people who have experienced it firsthand. There are a variety of community projects here!

Brooklyn Historical Society’s oral history collections now include over 1,200 interviews. There are a variety of collections housed here.

Fordham's Bronx African American History Project is regarded as one of the premier community based oral history projects in the United States. Founded in the spring of 2002 in collaboration with the Bronx County Historical Society, the BAAHP has conducted over 300 full length interviews with African American political leaders, educators, musicians, social workers, business people, clergy. athletes and leaders of community based organizations who have lived and worked in the Bronx since the late 1930s, along with a small number of their Latino and white neighbors and co-workers.

Hosted at the University of Texas at Austin, Voces Oral History Project is dedicated to recording and disseminating the stories of US Latinas and Latinos and weaving the many perspectives into our historical narrative at the national, state and local levels.

The Houston Oral History Project is an effort to record and preserve the dynamic history of Houston through the stories and experiences of its residents. It is a collaboration among the Mayor’s Office, the Houston Public Library and the University of Houston. There are several collection housed within the project.

Hosted by the University of San Antonio, this collection of more than 1000 oral histories. A variety of collections are available.

This selection of recordings documents the way that people define their own accent. The collection, created between November 2010 and April 2011 by visitors to the British Library exhibition, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices includes descriptions of accents influenced by geography, education, friends, family, occupation, social class and the media. Each person was asked to say where they thought their accent came from, including whatever information they thought was relevant.

This selection of recordings celebrates present-day English accents worldwide. The collection, created between November 2010 and April 2011 by visitors to the British Library exhibition, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices, includes contributors of all ages and embraces varieties of English in the UK and overseas including non-native speakers.

This selection of recordings captures English dialect and slang worldwide. The collection, created between November 2010 and April 2011 by visitors to the British Library exhibition, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices includes local, regional and vernacular forms and idiolectal expressions used within families or friendship groups.

The Listening Project is an audio archive of conversations recorded by the BBC. People are invited to share an intimate conversation with a close friend or relative, to be recorded and broadcast (in edited form) by the BBC and curated and archived in full by the British Library. These one-to-one conversations, lasting up to an hour and taking a topic of the speakers' choice, collectively form a picture of our lives and relationships today.

The Survey of English Dialects (SED) was a groundbreaking nationwide survey of the vernacular speech of England. 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.

During 1998 and 1999, forty BBC local radio stations recorded personal oral histories from a broad cross-section of the population for the series The Century Speaks. The result was 640 half-hour radio documentaries, broadcast in the final weeks of the millennium, and one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe, the Millennium Memory Bank (MMB).

The BBC Voices project provided a snapshot of the linguistic landscape of the UK at the start of the 21st century by encouraging members of the public to contribute their words and reflect on the language they use and encounter in their daily lives.