• Click on the flags of the maps to hear the same statements read by people of various regions of the US. http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_maps/namerica.php
• Here you can hear various samples of Accents from regions of the US.http://web.ku.edu/~idea/northamerica/usa/usa.htm
• Can you guess where my accent is from? Play the game on the Language Trainers Website: http://www.languagetrainersgroup.com/accent-game.php
• American Dialects http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/linguistics6e/pages/bcs-main.asp?v=chapter&s=09000&n=00010&i=99010.01&o=|00030|00060|00050|00010|&ns=0
According to O’Grady, accents refer only to pronunciation, unlike dialects, which are subsets of the same language (pp. 486-7). Since English spelling is frequently not the guiding factor in pronunciation, people who are separated by geography, class, or other factors can diverge in the way they pronounce phonemes. Playing the different accents on the Language Trainers game, I could tell that the speakers had different accents, and all the words were understandable, but I could not place the location in 80 percent of the samples. Phonemes which are similar can shift regionally until that becomes the standard for that area, for example a long /o/ sound becomes a shorter /o/.
When I try to determine accents, usually the first thing I concentrate on is the vowel pronunciation, because vowels seem to allow for the most variation within the pronunciation of the word. I think that the IPA is very helpful when studying accents. While audio recordings are also very useful, seeing the variation in print through the IPA helps the most when analyzing accents for patterns within a geographic area. On the George Mason University website, I liked to compare the different accents by looking at the IPA while listening to the speaker. It helped me notice the differences better.
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