Alabama 5

Listen to Alabama 5, a man from Brewton, Alabama, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: N/A

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1980

PLACE OF BIRTH: Brewton, Alabama, near the state’s border with Florida

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: farmer

EDUCATION: high school

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

The subject has lived in Alabama all of his life.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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

RECORDED BY: Daydrie Hague

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

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

’s north of Mobile. Uh, my grandfather and my p- my parents, they’ve lived there all their lives. Um, I’ve helped to raise cows on the farm. And we’re all big football fans. Um, my grandfather he also … um, he raised cotton, and he raised soybeans. And my mother, she has, she has lived there her whole life. Uh, she graduated from the same high school I did. I graduated from, uh, a high school, Flomaton High School with the class of ‘73. Uh, we’re right there on the Florida-Alabama line. It’s, um, the town Flomaton comes from the beginning of Florida, F-L-O, the end of Alabama, M-A, and then town, T-O-N. Um, I mentioned I helped, uh, raise cows. (U) We would, um, we would herd ’em up, we would take ’em to the butcher, and, uh, we’d have ’em butchered, and we would, uh, we would … pretty much our own steaks and our hamburgers would come from the cows that we had raised. Um, again, uh, we were … we did a lot of farming. My father was raised, uh, near, um, where, um, I was bor- I was raised at. It’s a little community called, uh, Deer Range, Alabama. Um, he, he went to a high school called Repton, and, um, he had lived there until he met my mother, and they married and, uh, moved back to where my grandparents lived, um, and we’ve lived ever since. We live probably about 50 yards from each other. We live on a dirt road, and, um, if anything ever happens, we can, we go back and forth, and, you know, pretty much talk to each other, if we need to. We, um, uh, we do do a lot of hunting. Uh, we deer hunt. Deer huntin’ is a, is a big thing, um, where I’m from. Um, a lot of people take it real serious. Um, we, we turkey hunt. We hunt for … hunt for dove. We hunt squirrel. Um, and we, I, I like to hunt. I turkey hunt. I deer hunt. I don’t do too much squirrel or dove hunting, but I do like to deer hunt. And we, we do, um, we do eat what we kill, so, and, uh, we usually, we, we, we mount our heads of our deer, that we kill, and we keep our turkeys’ beards and things like that, so …

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 20/01/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

It is interesting to note that subjects Alabama 5 and 6 grew up not far from each other, are about the same age, and, while they share similar family backgrounds, have markedly different dialects. Most obvious in this subject’s speech is the hard, almost swallowed [r], which keeps the resonance area moving toward the throat. Typical in southern speech is [shtr] for [str] so your hear “shtroke” for stroke. In this subject, you hear a consistent dipthongalized treatment for neutral vowels, such as “kee ut” for “kit,” and a loss of the dipthong in words like “life”; you hear “laf” instead.

COMMENTARY BY: Daydrie Hague

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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