I just found out about a really neat accent database which has samples of speech from around the world. All have the same phrase, in English, in common. It starts out with “please call Stella” and continues with some sort of nonsense phrases.

It seems as though the paragraph was constructed to get a maximum amount of different sounds within a relatively small speech, much like the sentence about the lazy dog getting jumped over by a quick fox works out all the letters in the alphabet. Instead of using a variety of letters, however, the silly, nonsensical paragraph is a string of phrases to play through most of the major phonemes.

It is quite interesting to hear how different people across the world pronounce things.

Oh, just as a note: The site requires Quicktime to listen to the clips. I’m not sure which version of Quicktime it needs, but it may play fine under Xine or MPlayer on Linux. (Of course, then there’s always the Crossover plugin stuff or using a Mac or Windows box, if you have one.)