Louisiana 1a

Listen to Louisiana 1a, a 28-year-old man from New Orleans, Louisiana, United States (the same subject as Louisiana 1b). Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 28

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1972

PLACE OF BIRTH: New Orleans, Louisiana

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: African-American (with Creole and Puerto Rican heritage)

OCCUPATION: actor/teacher

EDUCATION: an MFA in acting

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

He lived for four years in New York City, and also two years in Louisville, Kentucky, while completing his MFA.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

He identifies himself as Creole, but while his father is Creole, his mother is Puerto Rican and he was bilingual as a small child, learning Spanish before English. While much of his speech sounds like educated Southern Black, African-American listeners will probably detect some Spanish rhythms.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Rinda Frye

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 21/04/2000

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Well, I grew up in New Orleans. Um, New Orleans is famous for food, women, wine and Mardi Gras. Um, during Mardi Gras, that’s the season that everything really starts to going, and that’s where everybody in New Orleans comes out. Um, my favorite story is, uh, one … the first year I was … rode in the parades on Mardi Gras Day. Um, it starts off you get up at 4 o’clock in the morning. You have to get in costume. You have to get on the float. And, uh, the parade doesn’t start until 9 o’clock in the morning, but you’ve been up since 4 o’clock, at the parade site, gettin’ in all these costumes. And this one Mardi Gras, the first year, uh, my parents had spent, oh, about four-hundred dollars on beads and stuff for me to throw. And before the parade even started, I had given away about half of my beads, to, to people just walkin’ up and down the site. I wasn’, maybe, 14 years old at the time. And, my parents just got angry, because I, I didn’t have much left to throw. By the halfway through the parade, I was diggin’ in their bags and other peoples’ bags. But I … it was really fun. We had, uh, that was my first experience in, um … that was a parade called Zulu, which is a all African-American parade. It’s the only African parade in Mardi Gras, so, that was, um, my first adventures in Mardi Gras. It was wild. They had people lined up, showing, uh, body parts to me for beads and stuff. I … my parents were upset, but I enjoyed it, and that’s how I grew up.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 16/01/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

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• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

 

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