In case you were wondering to explore the accent of people from different countries, Localingual is the answer to your idea — a website created by a traveller. The website presents you with an interactive and colourful world map, which can be used to select the country which you want to check out for local accents. “The idea for Localingual came to me while I was on a backpacking trip in Europe. I was wandering around in Ukraine while trying to learn a few words. I practised (the language) by making a few voice recordings of Ukrainians I befriended. Soon afterwards, I had the idea to post the recordings I’ve made online in an appealing fashion,” says David Ding, creator of Localingual.
How does it Work?
Clicking on a particular country will open up a panel on the right-hand side of the window, allowing you to hear the country and its capital’s name in different accents from across the globe. Apart from that, there is also a ‘chat bubble’ icon on top of every different language. Clicking on that will lead you to a new popup, which also includes words/phrases spoken in a particular language of your choice. Apart from country and capital name and words/phrases spoken in unique accents, the website also allows you to listen to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in different languages and dialects. You can even hear the national anthem of any country, simply by clicking on the music note icon beside the country’s name on the right-hand side panel. “My dream for this site is for it to become the Wikipedia of languages and dialects spoken around the world,” he adds. Being a crowdsourced website, if you wish to then you can add to the database by reciting a particular country or its capital’s name or some word/phrase — simply click on the microphone icon on the right-hand side panel, located beside the country’s name to do that. The website is populated by user-contribution, so you might find recordings some languages missing and some to be absurd, but from my experience, most of them sounded authentic. The website allows internet users to experience accents and languages from around the world, understand how people speak the same language (say: English) in different parts of the world. The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
