Open-source Multi-speaker Corpora of the English Accents in the British Isles

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 6532–6541 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 6532 Open­source Multi­speaker Corpora of the English Accents in the British Isles Işın Demirşahin, Oddur Kjartansson, Alexander Gutkin, Clara Rivera Google Research 6 Pancras Square, London, N1C 4AG, United Kingdom {isin,oddur,agutkin,rivera}@google.com Abstract This paper presents a dataset of transcribed high­quality audio of English sentences recorded by volunteers speaking with different accents of the British Isles. The dataset is intended for linguistic analysis as well as use for speech technologies. The recording scripts were curated specifically for accent elicitation, covering a variety of phonological phenomena and providing a high phoneme coverage. The scripts include pronunciations of global locations, major airlines and common personal names in different accents; and native speaker pronunciations of local words. Overlapping lines for all speakers were included for idiolect elicitation, which include the same or similar lines with other existing resources such as the CSTR VCTK corpus and the Speech Accent Archive to allow for easy comparison of personal and regional accents. The resulting corpora include over 31 hours of recordings from 120 volunteers who self­identify as native speakers of Southern England, Midlands, Northern England, Welsh, Scottish and Irish varieties of English. Keywords: speech corpora, regional dialects, phonology, English, open­source 1. Introduction English is one of the largest languages of the world, with the largest total number of native and foreign language speakers and the third largest number of native speakers (Eberhard et al., 2019). Inevitably, there is a large number of varieties of English spoken by different communities around the world. Historically major English varieties, such as American En­ glish, British English, Canadian English, Australian En­ glish, Irish English, New Zealand English have diverged from one another at different points in history, has gone through different phonological changes and came into con­ tact with different languages (Leith, 1997; Smith, 1998). For other varieties such as Indian English or Nigerian En­ glish, although English is an official language or the lan­ guage of education, it is not necessarily the native language or the primary language of everyday communication for the majority of the speakers (Kachru, 1976; Lowenberg, 1991; Coelho, 1997). In such varieties, additional factors, such as influence from the regional languages, such as influences from Hausa, Yaruba and Igbo on Nigerian English (Olaniyi, 2014; Kperogi, 2015; Isiaka, 2019), come into play. Usually, but not always, there is a dominant variety of En­ glish that the dialect originated from, but it is altered sig­ nificantly enough that it has evolved into a new variety of English (Gut, 2008). Most of the time the speakers have one or more other native languages which interact with their English phonology and vocabulary. The major contact lan­ guages in this case are predominantly the local languages of the region. In addition, there might be influences from other remote languages or other varieties of English. All English varieties differ in a number of ways such …

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