Six spoons of fresh snow peas

I've been spending a lot of time with phonetics and phonology lately - the study of sounds in language. My professor directed us to this website - the Speech Accent Archive - and I can hardly tear myself away from it. It is a treasure trove of accents in the English language. I've always enjoyed checking out the accents wherever we've lived (both in the US and out) but never have I been able to browse accents and compare them so easily at my leisure.

Check it out - you can choose which accent to listen to by the native language of the speaker, or by clicking on a map. All the speech samples use the same elicitation paragraph and most have an IPA phonetic transcription if you're into that kind of thing (I AM).

What was most interesting for me was that after listening to a lot of clips from all over the world, I went back and clicked on the sample speaker from Hillsboro, Oregon, which is very close to my hometown. I was amazed at how normal it sounded to my ears. I thought that over the years perhaps I had talked myself into thinking that Oregon had its own special pronunciation ever since my fifth grade teacher told me that newscasters use the English of the Pacific Northwest as a kind of received pronunciation (I have had no further verification on this point in the 20 years since then). But no - there really are differences in pronunciation, even within the Western United States. (Of course, I always knew Utah was special, but I thought maybe California/Washington/Oregon were a wash. Not so, apparently.)

Here are some of my favorites. The aforementioned Hillsboro, Oregon clip. SO NORMAL to my ears, people. I don't get to hear this variety of English very much any more.

Syracuse, New York- when we first moved to Ithaca, I called the accent of the residents there "a wonky brogue." True, true.

After listening to West Jordan, Utah, you cannot tell me that guy is NOT Mormon. There's something so special about how Utahns speak. Just listening to it makes me think of big hair and Cafe Rio.

I think Edinburgh, Scotland is my favorite for pure entertainment value.

Hahahahaha, San Diego, California. Way to reinforce the heavy-lidded surfer stereotype.

I kid because I love. I am so fascinated by this stuff. And I didn't even get into the non-native speaker speech samples. Have a go and let me know what you think!

And if you've ever wanted a really comprehensive list of minimal pairs in English (a pair of words where one sound difference changes the meaning), look here. Just FYI.