Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 15:11:34 -0400

From: "Peter L. Patrick" PPATRICK[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.ACC.GEORGETOWN.EDU

Subject: Re: recordings of American English



Bruce Southard was probably referring to the article by Michael Linn

in the ADS centennial volume, "American Dialect Research Research",

ed. our own Dennis Preston. Linn's article, "Resources for Research",

lists 36 collections of various types: folklore archives, dialect

atlas archives, sociolinguistic surveys, etc. #36 is joseph Mele's at

U. So. Alabama. As Maggie also noted, CAL's collection samples and has info

on ca. 200 extant archives. Linn also, w/M-H. Zuber, published a 1984

survey of speech recordings available from commercial sources (NCTE

published this, "The sound of English", at Urbana IL). Someone else

noted the Linguistic Data Consortium records, online at U. Penn. I

haven't used LDC, but note that it is not free-- while scholars do get

a break compared to commercial users, and the annual fee is a bargain

considering the massive work involved, it's still far beyond the reach

of most individual scholars, I believe. Also it's a different sort of

data with a diff. purpose.

Forgive me for posting this if most of you know it! since it's

in the ADS volume. But probably some folks are unfamiliar with that

extremely useful book, so...

--peter patrick

georgetown u.