English is spoken by so many people all around the world but, because there are such a range of different accents, this can make it very difficult to understand.

The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds.

Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and they are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers but as Nik Peachey suggests, in his Daily English Activities Blog on Friday, 24th July 2009, used appropriately speech accent archive can help ESOL, ESL, EFL learners aware of the differences; this can, in turn, help them to understand more. It is about raising awareness not about changing their accents.

Take a closer look, sorry that should be listen, at http://accent.gmu.edu/index.php.

Note: The archive was constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It was meant to be used by linguists as well as others who simply wanted to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers. The Speech Accent Archive allows users to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent.