The Global English Survey Project

Bashar · The Global English Survey Project

You know, I feel kind of bad making my second post on this forum something like an advertisement, but I think what I'm putting up here can be a good topic in itself.

And that thing is, the Global English Survey Project which you can find at www.global-english.co.nr .

If English is not your first language, please take the survey. And pass it on to all your non-native speaker friends.

Sorry for the product promotion but this thing seriously needs as many responses as it can get! With more responses, that's more results we can look at. And there's already some results we can look at, in fact. The survey tracks how non-native speakers speak English. It shows how native languages affect pronunciation, and also who's English is more British or American.

So, let's everybody peer at the results and we can predict how different countries' results will turn out later, debate who has the bigger linguistic empire (US vs. UK), tell me that the questions are flawed, and so on.

Liz

Hello,

I've done it but it seems I'm the only Hungarian to have done it so far. As the results are 100% compatible with my own results, I don't think it's representative of Hungary. I doubt the results would be exactly the same if a considerable number of my fellow countrymen had taken it.

Liz

Oops...sorry. I have to retract what I said above as I've just checked the results of my country. Now, the percentages and figures are much more realistic. The day before yesterday (when I took it) the results were only mine. Well, we are two now -- not much but leastways the other person speaks English a wee bit differently from the way I do.

Have a good week.

Pauline

Hi

i've made the test. The answers are 100% my ones

Please can you explain us the colours: red, blue, orange, green etc.. which is for the correct answer?

Tiorthan

There is no correct answer

The different standard versions are marked as such.

Bashar

I'm really enjoying looking through the results pages. I first decided to do this back in February, took a long time deciding what the questions and possible answers would be, and then actually designing the program and typing the code took weeks. Now that it's done I love seeing all the answers roll in!

Most of the "influence of native language" questions are turning out as I expected, although I'm seeing more people select the "standard" answers than I thought. I didn't think too many non-natives would be able to make the /^/ sound (as in "cup") differently from any other vowel, but so far 3 out of 6 Germans say they can. Meanwhile, 5 of the 6 Germans say /æ/ (as in "cat") just like the e in "met." That is exactly what I expected.

And the colo(u)rs are totally arbitrary. The first answer is always red, the second always blue, and any other answers are totally random.

David

Here's an interesting site, which I really like, that has recordings of spoken English from around the world:

http://web.ku.edu/idea/index.htm