I’ve just discovered a cool website that lets you listen to people talking with different accents and dialects from around the world.

If it takes off, this could be worth its weight in gold. I hail from the city of Sheffield in the county of Yorkshire in England. About 35 years ago I moved to the city of Huntsville in the State of Alabama in the USA. I moved here for the night life (that’s a little Alabama joke for you to savor right there).

Yorkshire has a dialect called Broad Yorkshire that has roots in Old English and is influenced to a greater extent by Old Norse than by Standard English. People from the rest of England find it difficult to understand someone speaking with a full-on Broad Yorkshire accent.

Sheffield has its own dialect called Sheffield Tyke. This is like Broad Yorkshire on steroids. Even people from the rest of Yorkshire need someone to translate full-on Sheffield Tyke (you can read more about this in my column: To Get a Good Job, Talk Posh, Not Sheffield Tyke!).

But we digress…

On Tuesday evenings I meet up with a bunch of American guys to watch the English science fiction TV series Doctor Who. We always have subtitles on to give my friends a clue as to what’s going on.

Similarly, my wife (Gigi the Gorgeous) and I often watch English television programs on BritBox. Programs like The Last of the Summer Wine, Vera, Father Brown, and EastEnders. Once again, we need to use subtitles for Gigi to follow the plot.

Every now and then, I’ll mention something in passing, like the fact that my great grandfather had a Bristolian accent (from the city of Bristol in the southwest of England), or the fact that I enjoy hearing someone speak with a Geordie accent (from the Tyneside area of northeast England).

Gigi will respond by asking me what this sounds like. That’s like asking me what cheese tastes like because I can’t “do accents” to save my life.

Well, I just found the answer to at least some of my accent-related problems in the form of a website called AccentBase. This is great – they have short examples of people talking in different dialects. They started in 2017. It looks like they are still trying to ramp things up (and they have been for some time), but this could grow into being a tremendous resource if it takes off. I have my fingers (and toes) crossed for luck.