Scientists in Scotland have recently created a database of accents after exposing tongues to one ultrasound after the other—1,500 tongues in all from 16 countries—as part of the “Dynamic Dialects” project (which was done in coordination between the University of Glasgow, the University of Strathclyde, and Queen Margaret University in London.) To give you an idea: here’s a woman from Georgia, a man from Bhopal and a woman from Orkney saying “goose.”

The study was “more about resource creation than research,” Eleanor Lawson, a professor at the University of Glasgow and expert in English-language dialectology, told Quartz. “But the idea to make these resources came about after many years of research using ultrasound tongue imaging.”

“We have been focusing on the postvocalic R,” as in car, farm, sort, share etc., “in Scottish English, which seems to be weakening and might be in the process of disappearing for some Scottish speakers,” she noted. “We also found that speakers from different social groups were using fundamentally different tongue shapes to produce R.”

It’s all a bit My Fair Lady. “We know that the way R is pronounced is one of the most salient ways that Scottish speakers indicate their socioeconomic status,” Lawson explained. “The two different ways of producing R might come from Scots and Anglo-English respectively. There are some early elocution manuals and phonetics handbooks that give some interesting advice to Scottish speakers about R production; what to avoid, what to aim for. They can maybe give some clues about why R production diverges among the social classes.” More.

See: Quartz

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