Figure 1. Still from Unravel Magazine .   The Speech Accent Archive is a project which was started by Steven Weinberger, a linguist professor at Georgia Mason University in Virginia. The purpose of which is to compare accents – and currently has recordings of individuals of 175 different countries and 381 languages.      So why study accents? Weinberger states that one of our basic abilities is to listen to each other, and it’s one of the first things we pay attention to when meeting someone for the first time. Weinberger relates that people make assumptions  about others as soon as they speak. Once someone says hello, the listener can tell the person isn’t a local based on their unique way of pronouncing certain words in English – or their accent.     einberger says that by collecting the accents of several people around the world, he hopes to, “become more understanding of different kinds of variety of lan...