American English-Dialect Recordings: The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection

"The Library of Congress' American Folklife Center debuts a new presentation, "American English-Dialect Recordings: The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection," as part of the Library's American Memory collections website today. The collection can be found at memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/linguistics/. The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection comprises 59 audio recordings (118 hours) documenting North American English dialects. The recordings include speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations and excerpts from public speeches drawn from various archives and from the private collections of some 50 linguists, dialectologists and folklorists. They were submitted to the Center for Applied Linguistics as part of a project titled "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. Made from 1941 to 1984, with the bulk being recorded between 1968 and 1982, the collection includes recordings from 43 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and parts of Canada."