Sound Comparisons: Exploring Diversity in Phonetics Across Language Families

Sound Comparisons is a website structure for exploring diversity in phonetics across language families from around the world. It already covers hundreds of regional languages, dialects and accents across various language families:

• In Europe: the Romance , Germanic , Slavic and Celtic families, and accents of English.
• In South America: the Quechua, Aymara, Uru and Mapudungun families, and a pilot version for the indigenous languages of Brazil.
• In Vanuatu:  the dozens of languages of the small island of Malakula island, a hotspot of spectacular diversity within the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family.  

Just hover the mouse over any map or table view to hear instantaneously the different pronunciations of the 'same' 100 words or so ('cognates') across that family, recorded in our fieldwork campaigns.

These databases serve as input to linguistic research to measure how phonetic divergence arose through the histories of these language families (e.g. McMahon et al. 2007, Heggarty et al. 2010).

Sound Comparisons offers powerful tools for linguistic researchers to search and filter our database, download all detailed phonetic transcriptions and sound files, create citable links, etc. But is also multilingual and user-friendly, designed for the general public who actually speak all of these languages, many of them endangered.