Links
Paul Meier Dialect Services provides reliable links to other sites of interest in acting, theatre, film, phonetics, accents and dialects, theatre training, etc. Paul has professional connections with many of the organizations listed. If you know of a site that belongs here or wish to suggest a reciprocal link, e-mail Paul.
Actor's Tools
- Log It! Track It! Book It! The standard in performer organizational tools
Actor's Unions and Associations
- Actor's Equity
- AFTRA (American Federation of Television & Radio Artists)
- SAG (Screen Actors Guild)
Dialect Resources Online
- Accent Help
- American Dialect Society
- BBC Voices project (1200 recordings of British and Irish voices)
- British Library Archival Sound Recordings/Accents and Dialects
- Center for Applied Linguistics (Interviews with subjects in most US states and territories, and two Canadian provinces)
- Dialect Resource (Dialect tapes by Gillian Lane-Plescia)
- Dialectology at Leeds (Information on the Survey of English Dialects)
- Dictionary of American Regional English
- General American Accent (Kate DeVore)
- IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive)
- Irish slang
- North Carolina Language and Life Project
- Scots language -- a guide
- Speech Accent Archive (Foreign-language speakers reading the same English text)
- Stoller System (Dialect Coaching and Design by Amy Stoller)
- Telsur Project (A Phonological Atlas of North America)
- Vincent Voice Library (Many thousands of voice recordings of people both famous and obscure; many playable online)
- Yorkshire Dialect Verse (Native Yorkshire poets reading their compositions in dialect)
Drama Schools and Acting Training
- Association for Theatre in Higher Education (Theatre departments in US universities)
- Conference of Drama Schools (British Drama Schools)
English Language-Teaching Websites
Film Resources
Languages
- Babel Fish Translation (Translate a block of text from any language into any other)
- In Search of the First Language (A PBS Nova TV program transcript)
Pronunciation Dictionaries
- The Free Dictionary (Provides a recording of each word, pronounced in American English)
- J.C. Wells, Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, London, Longman, 1990. (Provides both American and British English pronunciations of over 40,000 words, in IPA)
- Kenyon, John S., and Thomas A. Knott, A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, Merriam, 1944. (Has been revised and updated, and provides pronunciation in IPA)
Recording Software
- Audacity (A free, open-source, easy-to-use program that let's you record and edit sound files in a variety of formats including mp3; be sure to also install LAME, essential if you are also making mp3 files)
- WavePad (a free, open source, easy-to-use program that let's you record and edit sound files in a variety of formats including mp3)
Rhetoric
- Silva Rhetoricae (The Forest of Rhetoric; a glossary of rhetorical terms and figures, compiled by Professor Gideon Burton)
Shakespeare
- Shakespeare's Complete Works online
- Shakespeare Text Search (Type in a phrase, find if Shakespeare used it, and where)
- Shakespeare's Words (David and Ben Crystal's unsurpassed resource; providing the full text of the plays and poems, a searchable glossary integrated with the text, lists of characters, plot synopses, graphic representation of the characters' relationships in each play, and more)
Singing
- Vocal Process (Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher)
Theatre Associations
Voice, Speech, and Phonetics Sites
- Fitzmaurice Voicework
- International Phonetic Association
- IPA Handbook
- IPA Keyboard (No download required; allows you to create phonetic unicode text, which you may then simply cut and paste into your own document)
- Kristin Linklater
- Knight/Thompson Speechwork
- SIL International (Phonetic fonts and more)
- SAMPA Computer readable phonetic alphabet
- University of Iowa Phonetics (Great animated graphics of the speech tract in action)
- VASTA (Voice and Speech Trainers Association)
- VASTA Professional Index
- Voice + Speech (Website by Eric Armstrong)