How could you expect me to learn something from this when it's not in the form of a twenty-five question quiz?
My Quiktime player needed to be updated and then the updated one required me to restart my computer and so I gave up.
I like the British Library's site:
http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/Accents-and-Dialects
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Survey-of-English-dialects
The one flagged for NC is pretty close to mine.
The Chicago one is spot-on for my relatives (including my dad, whose accent reappears approximately five seconds after stepping foot in Illinois). I don't think I sound like that at all anymore, but I've had people tell me I have a residual Chicago accent on words like "sock" and "bag".
Now I'm on a different computer. I sound nothing, nothing! like the one nearest North Florida, but I do feel like I know a thousand people who sound like that.
I guess I sound more like the South Florida one, which I think is free of any accent. (I kid.) Anyway I just sounds like meself.
Good lord. Am I misunderstanding something, or is one supposed to be able to read phonetic spellings? I cannot do that. I'd hoped to be able to hear representative pronunciations.
Perhaps I've missed something.
Apparently you are supposed to be able hear something. Where do you click to hear something?
Clicking on the little red flag just shows me the elicitation paragraph and the phonetic transcription. Oh well.
Parsimon, I'm using a tablet, but the play button for me is right above the elicitation paragraph.
Ah, I see no play button. Possibly the various blocking things I have enabled. I'm off now, though. May try tomorrow; I do find accents very interesting.
Yeah, my browser blocks the Quicktime plugin by default, so I don't see the play button but do get a message asking if I want to enable Quicktime. So far I haven't for this site.
Boston is not mine. The problem is that my Dad was born in Buffalo and raised by people from Western New York even though he spent much of his childhood in Massachusetts.
I'm sure that my mother's father and grandfather would have had upper crust Yankee accents, but those have disappeared even as some of the working class ones have remained.
I'd be really interested to learn something about how immigrant cultures change the way they talk depending on where they wind up. Do Haitians in Boston sound different from those in New York even in the first generation?
Listening to the George Mason recordings, I don't think the Glasgow sample sounds particularly Glaswegian. Although mine isn't that different. It's a sort of generic Scottish accent.
On the British Library site, my local accent would be:
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-Dialects/BBC-Voices/021M-C1190X0043XX-1301V0#_
and the 'old' accent from the area would be: