Library Guides: Acting and Theatre: Dialects and Accents

Accents and Dialect Resources

English language -- Pronunciation by foreign speakers

Links to resources with relevant Subject Headings, plus a selection of series and titles in the University of Melbourne Library that may assist in your dialect/accent search

The Lenton Parr Library at Southbank campus holds 21 titles with accompanying CDs from the Paul Meier Dialect Services collection. These includes books with dialects from North America, UK, Australia, South Africa, and Europe

Accents and dialects for stage and screen
Published by McLouth, KS : Paul Meier Dialect Service, 2004.
Dialects for the stage / by Evangeline Machlin
Published: New York : Routledge, 2006.
Accents and dialects for stage and screen : an instruction manual for 18 accents and dialects commonly used by English-speaking actors / by Paul Meier.
Published by McLouth, KS : Paul Meier Dialect Service, 2004.
Accents and dialects for the Australian performer / compiled and introduced by Bill Pepper
Disc 1: Introduction -- Cockney (London) -- Southern Ireland -- Northern Ireland
Disc 2: Yorkshire -- Scotland -- Liverpool -- Wales
Disc 3: Standard American -- General American -- West Coast USA -- Southern States.
Get rid of your accent: the English pronunciation and speech training manual / by Linda James and Olga Smith
Dialectic Resources by Gillian Lane-Prescia
CDs and guides in the collection covering Australian and NZ, Accents for Black Actors, Southern American, British, German, Dutch, Spanish, Russian and more.

Accents and Dialect Collections Online

IDEA - International Dialects of English Archive
The archive provides:
- downloadable recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select
-text files giving the speakers' biographical details
- scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases
and, in most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers' unscripted speech.
more...less...
The archive provides:
- downloadable recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select
-text files giving the speakers' biographical details
- scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases
and, in most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers' unscripted speech.
BBC Voices Project
"The clips are drawn from the BBC Voices recordings – which capture 1,200 people in conversation. Some of the clips are people talking about language – slang, dialect, taboo words, accents. Other clips cover all sorts of subjects and simply offer a flavour of how we talk today."
more...less...
"The clips are drawn from the BBC Voices recordings – which capture 1,200 people in conversation. Some of the clips are people talking about language – slang, dialect, taboo words, accents. Other clips cover all sorts of subjects and simply offer a flavour of how we talk today."
British Library Sound Archives - Accents and Dialects
more...less...
Includes audio files of accents and dialects from the United Kingdom
Paul Meier Dialect Services - Accents & Dialects for Stage & Screen
Includes dialect and accent links, and voice, speech and phonetic sites
Sounds of Speech
Provides resources to assist in understanding the speech sounds of English, German and Spanish.
Visual Accent and Dialect Archive (VADA)
A video archive of English-language accents and dialectics.