The IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive) site has been on-line since 1997 and began as a resource developed to teach actors how to pronounce various accents and dialects of English. Created by theater scholar and dialect coach Paul Meier, the new site has expanded its already fantastic variety of information. The site's new navigation features include a searchable database and a global map that make it very accessible to specialists and non–specialists of English. Performers around the world (the site has over one million hits a year) use the site to research accents and dialects for English-speaking performances. IDEA's audience has expanded beyond theater professionals to users in academe in the social sciences and humanities as well as international business. The site is also relevant for anyone who has an interest in the ways that location and culture influence the spoken English language.

IDEA offers a new streamlined navigation system with easy to read slide menus divided into principal sections, including ‘Dialects and Accents’, ‘Special Collections’ and ‘Global Map’. The site is fully searchable by ‘country, state and province’, as well as ‘ethnicity, age and occupation’. Each area of the website allows the user to explore geographical and regional specific pronunciations of English. Divided into geographic areas according to continent, each area is assigned an Associate Editor who collects the sound file, checks it for accuracy, documents the specifics of the file for the user, provides scholarly commentary for the entry, and manages the overall content of the sections. A cultural anthropologist or an actor wanting to do research on speech cadences and code switching based on class dynamic can search for codes in the description and transcription pages that can help the researcher isolate particular speech patterns, cadences and/or cultural/class references in the speech. For example, if an actor is playing a role of a Bulgarian spy who speaks his dialogue in English, s/he can go to the ‘Dialects and Accents’ section of the website, slide to Europe, and then proceed to Bulgaria. There, the researcher will find two audio files, ‘Bulgaria Female 1’, and ‘Bulgaria Female 2’. A brief description of the age, ethnicity and education of each speaker is given to provide social context for the sound file's capture and content. The site's Senior Editor, Cameron Meier, encourages users to submit files to increase the diversity of each region represented by emailing a sample or becoming an Associate Editor. Submission information is provided in detail in the aptly marked ‘Submissions’ menu.

To maintain the continuity of the archive, each speaker recorded performs a standard text entitled ‘Comma Gets a Cure’ (McCullough et al., Reference McCullough, Somerville and Honorof2000) that allows the speaker and audience to explore the widest range of linguistic sound patterns in English. Many of the older sound files collected on the site use the standard text ‘The Rainbow Passage’ (Fairbanks, Reference Fairbanks1960: 127). Most IDEA recordings last approximately four minutes in length and have both scripted and unscripted components. An orthographic transcription of the unscripted speech is provided. The listener is invited to read along with the text, which is available via a pop-up menu. This feature also allows users the opportunity to follow the text as they learn the speech patterns of the recorded speaker. The accuracy and transparency of the material and information on this site would be just as helpful to socio-linguists, cultural anthropologists, ethnographers and Cultural Studies scholars as it would be to actors and directors. Additionally, applied linguists and educators in English language teaching, such as TEFL and TESOL, may find the site interesting because it offers opportunities to study pronunciation patterns in particular English-speaking countries. Additionally, students preparing for placement exams in colleges and universities, call centers, and technical fields would also find the site beneficial. The uniform pattern for each sound file allows for comparative work to be done across dialects and accents located in the various countries the site covers in Africa, Asia, Australia-Oceania, the Caribbean, Central America, Europe, North America, Middle East, and South America.

The menu section of the website entitled ‘Special Collections’ offers an array of information. General American and Received Pronunciation files of English dialects allow the listener to compare the two most widely described reference accents of English from North America and the UK. Moreover, the North American section challenges conflations of ‘American’ with the United States by including vocal samples from Nova Scotia, Toronto, Arizona, and California. Also included in this section are oral history files on Holocaust Survivors which gestures towards the ways that acts of terror and xenophobia have shaped the repertoire of spoken and written English. Regional recordings of Native American English from the United States and Canada are also found under this heading and provide a resource for indigenous representations of Native American life and the impact of indigenous speech patterns on English in North America. It should also be noted that the collection offers a discussion of speech and voice disorders which considers the conflation of ‘impairment, disability, and handicap’ as outlined by the World Health Organization. The sound files contained in this section consider these various areas of impairment or vocal interruption of English pronunciation. Such strategic focus on complicating the complex variables of communication disorders offer clinical linguists and speech therapists (and their students) resources for comparative analysis of the various components of speech production and pathology.

The ‘Global Map’ section of the site is one of its most exciting features. Upon clicking the slide menu, the user is taken to a world map covered with red ‘geo tags’ that activate pop-up menus that link the user to the selected sample. Geo tags ranging from Iceland to Fiji bracket the dizzying array of sonic samples IDEA offers. Recently, I was doing ethnographic research for a solo performance on female hip-hop artists in South Korea. The sound files were invaluable to me in my process of transcribing and interpreting my interviews. The clarity of the sound files on Korea helped me to train my ear to identify particular vocal cadences and speech patterns of my subject's accent in English. For those that visit the site often, the site editor updates the ‘What's New Section’ regularly to allow the user to identify what new sound files have been added to a particular region.

Overall, the IDEA site is incredibly diverse in its capture of accents and dialects in English. Important considerations of class and race shift in meaning and relevance around the world, yet are intrinsically tied to the ways that English is spoken, understood and received by an audience of one or many. By isolating our senses to sound, IDEA's archive can help all of us to think more complexly about the ways that spoken and written language archive social, cultural, and historical experiences across and between national spaces. In our current deliberation about post-racial discourse and what it means, the IDEA archive allows us to contemplate who has the capacity to cross social, cultural, and national boundaries linguistically based on their capacity to understand the complex factors that shape the English language.