With a click of the mouse, it’s possible to discover tons of accents from around the world. Just visit Map Your Voice to give it a try! English speakers from any country in the world can record their voice into the system by reading a predetermined paragraph.
Then, these people will enter their location to populate the site’s world map. Many include where they originate from, which helps to categorize their accents even more!
The system still needs some tweaking, though. While looking for local accents, I happened to find that some dots had been placed far from their speaker’s origin. While a “Spokane, Washington” entry was placed 250 miles to the east in Seattle, I found the “Washington State (Pacific Northwest)” entry in the middle of the Australian Outback.
Overlooking the improvements that need to be made, this site is quite interesting! Maybe in the future, we’ll have a site with user-generated content, such as this one, to hear excerpts spoken in thousands of languages.
Lifehacker: Map Your Voice helps you learn any accent in the world
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