NZSED
Find out about a database of New Zealand English and the ways this data can be used in various kinds of linguistic research.
New Zealand Spoken English Database
The New Zealand Spoken English Database (NZSED) is based in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. The NZSED is collecting a representative sample of English spoken in the late 20th and early 21st century New Zealand.
The database will become available as a resource for researchers, applications developers, and teachers in a range of areas concerned with spoken language.
- Researchers and students in phonetcs, for instance, will be able to access digitally stored quality recordings of the speech sounds of New Zealand English in controlled linguistic contexts.
- Researchers interested in discourse, speech prosody, or intonation will be able to study interactions between speakers involved in negotiating a route through a simple map.
- Sociolinguists will be able to study patterns in the pronunciation of certain sounds according to age, gender, and ethnicity.
- Speech engineers and others developing automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech systems for use in New Zealand will be able to access valuable data on the pronunciation of NZE.
NZSED is being constructed in such a way that is easily accessible to powerful search and statistical procedures such as EMU Speech Database System and The Comprehensive R Archive Network.
A brief report submitted to the New English Journal: