The voice is from another time and a place that can't be found on a roadmap. It tells of family, farm life and forgotten ways. The words are resonant and rhythmic, and even to most native Germans, barely comprehensible. They were spoken more than 30 years ago, by a farmer from the former German province of Silesia. Yet they can now be heard anywhere in the world, by anyone with a computer and a modem. Accessible through a website maintained by the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, the farmer's voice is just one item in a rapidly expanding digital archive of "speech events" from nearly all walks of life and German-speaking regions.

With some 15,000 recordings in all, the institute's German Language Archive is the most extensive collection of German dialects and speech patterns in the world. More than 1,000 of its speech samples are now available online, and that number is set to increase to 5,000 by mid-summer 2002. That means a linguist in the United States or China can compare dialects in the Black Forest, Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein, or contrast the accent and vocabulary of a shop girl with that of an engineer.

About a third of the samples in the collection were gathered in the 1950s, when a group of linguists started touring the country, taking a language sample for every 10-mile square of land. They also recorded the voices of German transplants, people from the eastern regions that became part of Poland and former Czechoslovakia after the war. Hanging on the walls of the archive's computer room are maps of old East Prussia and Silesia, bristling with pins, one for every sample taken of dialects that have all but disappeared.

The original tapes can still be found in the archive's basement, but many are in obsolete formats that need special equipment to be played. So the institute started converting them to digital form in 1994, and put the first batch of samples on the Internet this spring. The online archive gives scholars quick access to Germany's rich linguistic heritage. Using a search function, they can find out how a single word is pronounced in different regions. A monitor registering the tone frequencies of each sample allows for visual comparison as well. The archive should also help dispel some linguistic myths. For example, says archive director Peter Wagener, "It is complete nonsense that young people only speak German riddled with Anglicisms." Only linguists will have access to the entire library of recordings, but other Internet users can listen to sample tapes, including the voice of the Silesian farmer, for free.

The online archive can be reached through the institute's website from

http://www.ids-mannheim.de

at http://dsav-oeff.ids-mannheim.de/DSAv/.