Center for Applied Linguistics Collection
The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects. The collection debuted September 10 on the Library of Congress American Memory website. 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 50 collectors, including linguists and folklorists. The collection includes recordings from 43 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. Some of the recordings are by famous Americans (such as aviator Amelia Earhart, above), but most are the voices of people whose specific identities are unknown, but whose comments represent the richness of the American experience. There are Gullah speakers from coastal South Carolina, sharecroppers from Arkansas, Puerto Rican teenagers in New York City, Basque sheepherders from Colorado, Chesapeake Bay watermen, Vietnamese immigrants from Northern Virginia, and many others. 350 of the collection’s 405 recordings are available on this website; of these, 148 have accompanying transcriptions. The remaining recordings, which could not be posted due to copyright issues and other restrictions, may be heard in the American Folklife Center Reading Room in Washington, D.C.
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