The languages we speak provide insight to our personal and cultural identities, but so do our accents. Through the DRAWL project we are creating a dialect map of British Columbia to describe the variety of regional English accents found across the province. Using computational techniques in linguists’ and musicians’ toolkits, we are developing an online system to allow for the recording of rural B.C. speakers. We use a custom-written short story with specific words of interest, and record various narrators from throughout B.C. The results are analyzed and used to create an accessible repository for researchers and communities. Overall, this project will further our understanding of how social and regional identities intersect with language, which is important in a globalized society, and may also give us a sense of how regional B.C. accents change over generations.

If you are interested in contributing to this project as a narrator, please follow the directions on the Get Involved page to obtain a file number and record your reading of the supplied story. Participants will receive UBC swag in return for completing and submitting a recording of the story.