Speech Across Dialects of English: Acoustic Measures from SPADE Project Corpora, 1949-2019

The SPADE project aims to develop and apply user-friendly software for large-scale speech analysis of existing public and private English speech datasets, in order to understand more about English speech over space and time. To date, we have worked with 42 shared corpora comprising dialects from across the British Isles (England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland) and North America (US, Canada), with an effective time span of over 100 years. We make available here a link to our OSF repository (see below) which has acoustic measures datasets for sibilants and durations and static formants for vowels, for 39 corpora (~2200 hours of speech analysed from ~8600 speakers), with information about dataset generation. In addition, at the OSF site, we provide Praat TextGrids created by SPADE for some corpora. Reading passage text is provided when the measures are based on reading only. Datasets are in their raw form and will require cleaning (e.g. outlier removal) before analysis. In addition, we used whitelisting to anonymise measures datasets generated from non-public, restricted corpora.