I have a hard time distinguishing between the accents of English speakers from various countries, but can't improve my ability to recognize accents because I can't find examples of each dialect. I would like to have a collection of recordings of various people speaking with assorted accents.

The prevalence of MP3 recordings and pod-casts should make this pretty easy, we just need to collect the recordings or collect links to these recordings. This would work well as a collaborative project, where a group of interested individuals simply make note of any such recordings they find, and then organize these notes in some manner.

At first, I thought that a wiki would be good for this, since anyone could edit it and we could include verbal descriptions of the accents also. However, it may be simpler to use del.icio.us or some other social bookmarking system—we would just need to agree upon a taxonomy to use. Perhaps we would use the tag “accent” to indicate that this is an example of an accent, and then also tag each link with the type of accent. It would be nice if we could refer to some linguistic authority to help us label the accents.

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