Arkansas 6

Listen to Arkansas 6, a 26-year-old man from Dyer and Alma, Arkansas, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 26

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1974

PLACE OF BIRTH: Dyer, Arkansas

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: N/A

EDUCATION: university drama graduate

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

The subject lived in Connecticut for four years between ages 7 and 11. He also lived in other towns in Arkansas, including Alma, where he was raised.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The speaker tends, for the most part, not to speak with an Arkansas regional accent of any kind. It is very possible that the four years he spent in Connecticut during his formative years had a strong influence on his eventual manner of speaking. The speaker’s fuller resonance and variety of pitch may reflect his training in the Department of Drama.

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

RECORDED BY: Mavourneen Dwyer

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 16/05/2000

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Let’s see: I come from a family of four, and, uh, I have a younger sister. She was born in 1978. And, um, so, she was born in April, and I’m roughly three years older than she is. But originally when I was born, we didn’t live in Alma itself. We, uh, lived in a town called Dyer, which is outside of Alma. It’s off in the country. And, um, it was much smaller, but we still went to Alma schools, because it, you know, it’s not a very large town. Um, I remember when I was younger, we had two horses and one of — one of them was named Sunny. I cannot remember what the other one was named. Well, we kept horses — those two horses, you know, for a few years, when I was young. And I guess we got rid of the two horses, probably some- somewhere around the time my sister was born. We lived — we lived a fairly — fairly good ways outside of Alma, proba- probably about ten minutes. Um, my dad, my father, his name’s Wes. He was born and raised in the town called Danville, which is a very sma- Danville, Arkansas, very, very small community. And my mother was raised in a town ten minutes outside of Danville, called Havana. Which was even smaller. I think the most they had at Havana, from what my grandmother tells me, was about a train station and a little grocery store. But, they grew up, I guess, about ten miles away from each other. I believe they got married in probably around 1965. Well, no, probably ’68 or ’69. That’s probably about it. Um, so they’re, they were from, not from the city, I’ll say that much. Um, my mother was an only child. My grandmother, she immigrated to this country from Ireland, when she was probably about 15, around that age somewhere. And her father, my grandfather, was a Major League baseball pitcher. And, back in the ‘30s, and he pitched for, uh, the St. Louis Browns, and the Detroit Tigers and the Toronto Bluejays. And also for a minor-league team in Texas.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 02/10/2007

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

His accent is strongly rhotic. The “i/e” substitution is evident in words like “centuries,” “spend,” “many,” “friends” and “get.” Medial consonants occasionally get dropped (“twenty”) or glottalized (“didn’t”). There is some consonant-cluster reduction in words like “apparently” and “miracle.”

COMMENTARY BY: Mavourneen Dwyer

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 16/05/2000

The archive provides:

• Recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select.
• 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).

 

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.