Paul Meier Dialect Services provides reliable links to other sites of interest in acting, theatre, film, phonetics, accents and dialects, theatre training, etc. Paul has professional connections with many of the organizations listed. If you know of a site that belongs here or wish to suggest a reciprocal link, e-mail Paul.
Actor’s Unions and Associations
- Actors’ Equity
- Audio Publishers Association
- SAG/AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild/American Federation of Television & Radio Artists)
Dialect/Accent Resources
- Accent Help
- Actors in Accent. A collection on Pinterest assembled by Pamela Vanderway of DialectCoaches.com. See how well-known actors have approached their dialect roles.
- African Accents: A Workbook for Actors (audio samples of accompany 11 African accents and dialects)
- American Dialect Society
- Audio Eloquence (pronunciation, dialect and speech resources for audiobook narrators)
- BBC Voices project (1200 recordings of British and Irish voices)
- British Library Accents and Dialects of the United Kingdom
- Center for Applied Linguistics (interviews with subjects in most U.S. states and territories, and two Canadian provinces)
- Detroit Historical Museum (voices from Detroit, Michigan, United States)
- Dialect Resource (dialect tapes by Gillian Lane-Plescia)
- Dialectology at Leeds (information on the Survey of English Dialects)
- Dictionary of American Regional English
- Dynamic Dialects (an accent database, containing an articulatory video-based corpus of speech samples)
- General American Accent (Kate DeVore)
- International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA)
- Macquarie University’s Australian Voices (research site devoted to Australian dialects, accents, and linguistics)
- North Carolina Language and Life Project
- Scots language — a guide
- Speech Accent Archive (foreign-language speakers reading the same English text)
- Stoller System (dialect coaching and design by Amy Stoller)
- Telsur Project (a phonological atlas of North America)
- Visual Accent and Dialect Archive (video archive of English-language accents and dialects from around the world)
- Voices of Oklahoma (a site devoted to preserving the oral history of Oklahoma)
- Voices of the UK (a project of the British Library, a research tool for finding specific online UK dialect recordings)
- Yorkshire Dialect Verse (native Yorkshire poets reading their compositions in dialect)
Drama Schools and Acting Training
- Association for Theatre in Higher Education (theatre departments in US universities)
- Backstage.com (career and casting information for actors; this article features Paul talking about dialect as cultural memory)
- Conference of Drama Schools (British drama schools)
Film Resources
- Internet Movie Database
- MeierMovies (a rating and ranking system for theatrically released motion pictures, by Paul Meier Dialect Services Vice President Cameron Meier)
- PrimeTime Reels (your go-to editor for performance clips and reels)
Film Festivals and Events
- The 48 Hour Film Project (the world’s oldest and largest timed filmmaking competition)
- Love Your Shorts Film Festival (a festival held every February in Sanford, Florida, that showcases short films from around the world)
Languages/Linguistics
- American Voices (a unique site devoted to comprehension of native English-language speakers)
- Babel Fish Translation (translate a block of text from any language into any other)
- Cockney Rhyming Slang dictionary
- EnglishClub (one of the top free sites for students and teachers of English)
- In Search of the First Language (a PBS Nova TV program transcript)
- Linguistic Society of America
- Sona Software (Russian grammar)
Pronunciation Dictionaries and Resources
- Forvo (look up any word in any language and hear it pronounced by a native speaker)
- The Free Dictionary (provides a recording of each word, pronounced in American English)
- J.C. Wells, Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, London, Longman, 1990. (provides both American and British English pronunciations of over 40,000 words, in IPA)
- Kenyon, John S., and Thomas A. Knott, A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, Merriam, 1944. (has been revised and updated, and provides pronunciation in IPA)
- Macmillan Pronunciation Dictionary
- Namecoach (make a recording of your name and embed that recording in your e-mail or social-media account)
Recording Software
- Audacity (a free, open-source, easy-to-use program that let’s you record and edit sound files in a variety of formats including mp3; be sure to also install LAME, essential if you are also making mp3 files)
- WavePad (a free, open source, easy-to-use program that let’s you record and edit sound files in a variety of formats including mp3)
Rhetoric
- Silva Rhetoricae (The Forest of Rhetoric: a glossary of rhetorical terms and figures, compiled by Professor Gideon Burton)
Shakespeare
- LitCharts: The Bard’s Lexicon (words coined by Shakespeare) and other Shakespeare vocabulary resources
- Performing Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation, by David Barrett
- Shakespeare’s Complete Works online
- Shakespeare Pronunciation (an iOS and Android app, by Shane-Ann Younts and Louis Scheeder, to guide your pronunciation of over 5,000 words in the canon)
- Shakespeare Text Search (type in a phrase, find if Shakespeare used it, and where)
- Shakespeare’s Words (David and Ben Crystal’s unsurpassed resource; providing the full text of the plays and poems, a searchable glossary integrated with the text, lists of characters, plot synopses, graphic representation of the characters’ relationships in each play, and more)
- Ultimate Shakespeare Resource Guide (a summary of some of the best Shakespeare resources online)
Singing
- Vocal Process (Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher)
Software & Ebook Design
- Sona Software (website of Curt Ford, who designed Paul Meier’s iTunes and Windows/Mac ebooks)
Theatre Associations
Voice, Speech, and Phonetics Sites
- Fitzmaurice Voicework
- International Phonetic Association
- IPA Handbook
- IPA Keyboard (no download required; allows you to create phonetic unicode text, which you may then simply cut and paste into your own document)
- Kristin Linklater
- Knight/Thompson Speechwork
- Physclips (multimedia introduction to the basic operation of the human voice)
- SAMPA Computer readable phonetic alphabet
- Seeing Speech (speech articulation)
- Shane Ann Younts (a leading instructor of voice and speech, based in New York City)
- SIL International (phonetic fonts and more)
- Speech and Voice Disorder links catalogued on IDEA
- University of Iowa Phonetics (great animated graphics of the speech tract in action, now in app form)
- University of New South Wales: Sounds of World English
- VASTA (Voice and Speech Trainers Association)
- VASTA Professional Index
- VASTA links (a great list of voice/accent/language resources provided by VASTA)
- Voice + Speech (website by Eric Armstrong)
- VORG, The Voice Over Resource Guide (the industry’s oldest and most definitive voice-over publication)
