I found out from one of my fellow bloggers that George Mason University has a web site called the Speech Accent Archive. This extract from the home page explains its purpose:

“The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.”

Since I’m a GMU Alumnus, I dutifully made a recording of my voice and sent it off to GMU. Maybe it will end up in the Archive…or maybe not. But it is preserved for posterity (or however long HR’s halfVAST Blog exists) right here.

So do I have a regional accent? And if I do, what region of the US?