American Memory

If a pedigree chart were compared to the bones of the body of family
history, the flesh and life of the body would be the stories and history
of the people. But have you ever wondered how your ancestors' speech
sounded? Have you ever explored the American
English Dialect Recordings of The Center for Applied Lingu... in The
Library of Congress, American Memory? The website describes the
project as follows:

The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects. The recordings include speech samples, linguistic interviews,
oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches. They
were drawn from various archives, and from the private collections of
fifty collectors, including linguists, dialectologists, and
folklorists. They were submitted to the Center for Applied Linguistics
as part of a project entitled "A Survey and Collection of American
English Dialect Recordings," which was funded by the Center for Applied
Linguistics and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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