Speech accent archive — Professor 'enry 'iggins, your office is calling

"The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples [991 currently] 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."

Free, the way we like it.

I guarantee that all 16 [the number identifiable from public sources — there are many more which you and I will never, under any imaginable circumstances, learn any details of] U.S. intelligence agencies have had an industrial-strength version of this for many years — but hoi polloi take what we can get.

[via Milena]