Manchester Voices: Accent and Dialect Recordings from Greater Manchester

Manchester Voices is a sociolinguistics project exploring accents, dialects, and identities across the ten boroughs of Greater Manchester. It includes video and audio recordings from a mobile recording studio where participants reflected on their speech, plus audio from a virtual studio and a pronunciation task. The dataset was created by Robert Drummond and was last updated in May 2026.

Use Cases

• Train accent recognition models based on audio recordings from the Accent Van and Virtual Van.
• Analyze dialect perception and identity through participant reflections mentioned in the video recordings.
• Study regional pronunciation patterns using the audio recordings from the pronunciation task.
• Map perceptual dialect boundaries using the associated labels from the online 'draw a map' task.

Strengths

• Includes multimodal data with video, audio, and map-based annotations.
• Focuses on a specific geographic region covering ten boroughs, providing a localized sociolinguistic snapshot.
• Data collection involved both a physical mobile studio and a virtual online version, potentially increasing participant diversity.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and self-selection bias inherent to the voluntary participation method.

Provenance

Source

Robert Drummond via figshare.

Collection Method

Recordings gathered via a mobile 'Accent Van' studio, a virtual online version, and an online map-drawing task.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-28 17:26:49; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Greater Manchester, United Kingdom (covers ten boroughs).