Dialect Maps

Phonemica is a really interesting map of Chinese spoken stories. The project was conceived as a way to preserve spoken stories in China as spoken in the local vernacular.

Anyone can record a story at home and submit it to the map. Different Chinese languages and dialects are differentiated on the map by different colored map markers. You can also filter the results shown on the map by location, keyword and language / dialect.

If you click on a map marker you can click through to listed to the submitted story recording.


The most popular interactive webpage on the New York Times website last year was How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk. This interactive feature asks you a series of questions about your pronunciation and use of certain words and from the answers creates a personal dialect map. The resulting heat-map shows you which areas of the US have dialects similar to you.


Back in 2010 the British Library asked people to map their voices in order to create a Google Map of how English is spoken around the world.

The Map Your Voice project is a Google Map of recordings made by people while reading the children's story 'Mr. Tickle' by Roger Hargreaves. This particular story was chosen for the range of English sounds it contains when read out loud.