Sample sound files

Sample files from A Sound Atlas of Irish English

This section allows you to access the sound files based on recordings of speakers from different parts of Ireland which were made by Raymond Hickey during several years of field work. The data made available here is only a very small section of the total amount contained in A Sound Atlas of Irish English (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004). In all there are over 1,500 recordings stemming from nearly 1,200 speakers in the sound atlas. There is also sophisticated processing software (written by the present author) which will allow you to extract information from the atlas using parameters which you specify yourself, for instance you could look at all female speakers from rural areas above 50 or all males under 20 from urban centres. You can also consult the realisations of lexical sets with speakers from different parts of the country. There are stretches of free text as well, again read by speakers from various parts of the country.

The data in the atlas is presented in tree form, somewhat like that in the Windows Explorer, and allows you to navigate among the many files with ease. There is also a carefully designed audio interface which permits you to listen very carefully to small stretches of speech. The sound files of the atlas can be processed further with different software, for instance you could do a formant analysis of some of the sound files if you wanted to.

Provinces of Ireland with countries form which extract are available here.

Distribution of speakers in A Sound Atlas of Irish English

Variants of syllable-final /-r/ as recorded in A Sound Atlas of Irish English

Starting in the north-east corner, in Co. Antrim, the recordings presented here are from countries arranged in clockwise direction around the rim of Ireland.