55 hours of audio documenting British spoken English


I found this on while listening to the National Public Radio's Weekend Edition. (You can hear the excerpt here.)

The British Library has released their archives as part of their COLLECT BRITAIN website.

The good news is that you can sample the many accents and dialects of (British) English accents and see how they've evolved in different areas in the last fifty years. Each entry's page also lists extensive explanation on what's being heard etc.

The bad news of course is they've chosen a non-downloadable version of Windows Media Player media to serve the audio.

And why is this bad? Well speaking for me, I am still VERY hesitant to rely on 'live internet' connections for classwork. To say nothing of the fact that much of my work occurs in businesses and such where no internet connection is available, Murphy's Law will dictate that even the fattest pipe will clog to a trickle when attempting to use it in class for major presentations. If I can download it, then I can work with it and use it offline. I guess Collect Britain is for reference use only and is not into lending.

Pity that.


Posted: Mon - March 7, 2005 at 08:44 PM            

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