Diacritiques

An interesting site: Les Accents des Français:

We — the authors of this site — are two students at the École des Mines [a prestigious civil engineering school — C.W.] in Paris and victims of the speech “standardisation” that these pages are concerned with… since we speak “accent-free” French. We recognise that a heritage is in peril: the wealth of regional pronunciations of our language. This site understands itself as a modest but enthusiastic initiative to “defend and illustrate” the idioms of our country before all of us speak with a Parisian accent!

[Nous - les auteurs de ce site - sommes deux étudiants de l’Ecole des Mines de Paris, victimes de la “standardisation” du parler qui sera évoquée dans ces pages… puisque nous parlons un français “sans accent”. Nous constatons qu’un patrimoine est en péril, la richesse des prononciations régionales de notre langue. Ce site veut être une initiative - modeste mais enthousiaste - pour “défendre et illustrer” les parlers de notre pays, avant que nous ayons tous l’accent de Paris!]

This is obviously the work of amateurs; the site favours the phonetic characteristics (eschewing all technical or academic terms) over lexicon or syntax. It offers a coherent collection of recordings of speech samples harvested in 14 regions of France, with transcriptions and brief introductions.