From an extensive archive of speech accents, whose purpose is summarized thus:
Everyone who speaks a language, speaks it with an accent. A particular accent essentially reflects a person's linguistic background. When people listen to someone speak with a different accent from their own, they notice the difference, and they may even make certain biased social judgments about the speaker.The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers.
I don't know the total number - there appear to be many hundreds of recordings of this single paragraph by people all over the world (all speaking English). The accents variations are not extreme, but interesting. You can explore by clicking on this map.
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