American English Dialect Recordings

The Library of Congress' American Folklife Center has produced a new presentation, American English-Dialect Recordings: The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection, as part of the Library's American Memory collections. The 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. The collection includes recordings from forty-three states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and parts of Canada. They were made from 1941 to 1984, with the bulk being recorded between 1968 and 1982.