Speech Accent Archive

I came across this website today which I thought was very very cool. It for a project called the Speech Accent Archive. I think it confirms that I am a dork, but I don't really care. It is hosted by a professor, Steven Weinberger, from the Linguistics program at George Mason University here in Northern Virginia. This is a little description about the website:

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 are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.

They have 576 recorded samples, some from people whose native language I have never even heard of. There are 177 samples for native English speakers alone, covering accents for people from the US, Canada, the UK, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, various Carribean locations, and more. They point out that the archive may be useful not only for teachers, linguists, phoneticians, and speech pathologists, but also for actors who need to learn an accent. Check it out!!!