Speech Accent Archive

I just happened across an interesting data source: the George Mason Speech Accent Archive. Accent and dialect classification can improve speech recognition approaches and automatically labeling native tongues would make our friends by the airport happy. The archive, as of 1 March 2006, contains 502 recordings of individuals reciting the same paragraph of English text. Here's an excerpt:

"Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob."

One of my favorites is a recording made by a native Wolof speaker from Senegal. At UMBC, we offer language courses in Wolof that I am considering auditing.