• Question: How would your CD help us to analyse our own accents?

    Asked by beckyxxx to Damien on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Hi beckyxxx!

      I would make the CD with a computer program on it which would do the analysis. What you would do is, you would make a recording of some text (I would probably give you a specific text to read out loud), and then the program would analyse your recording and make something like a map of the vowels that you used. It would look something like the diagrams in this website:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_diagram

      Then you could compare that to a diagram of someone with the Queen’s accent (for example) and see how it was different. It would be a way of demonstrating the science behind something that most people know instinctively, which is how to recognise different accents in English – the science behind the fun!

      What accent do you have, or what accent do you think you have? Do you notice it’s different from other people’s at all? (I have no idea where you’re from, so I don’t know what your accent might be!)

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