Arkansas 8

Listen to Arkansas 8, a 21-year-old man from Palestine, Arkansas, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 21

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1982

PLACE OF BIRTH: West Memphis, Arkansas

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: When recorded, the subject was a drama major at university.

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

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

When he was 8 years old, his family moved to Palestine, Arkansas, about 40 miles inland from the Mississippi River. His speech exhibits strong Tennessee characteristics as well as typical Arkansas features. Interestingly, in Voice Production class, this student has consistently ended all his declarative sentences up in pitch, whether talking impromptu or working with text. However, on this recording, there is no evidence of this very Southern feature.

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): 25/07/2003

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I was born in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1982, and for the next three years I was raised in Palestine, Arkansas, until my mother went off to college in Jonesboro, where I lived until the time I was in third grade, and we came back to Palestine. I attended Palestine Wheatley Elementary School, an’ spent the rest of my time there. Uh, see, all through junior high and senior high, I played sports: football, basketball and baseball, and ran track. From the time I was about 15 years old, I got my first truck, and also my first experience with ridin’ around drinkin.’ Um, we would, uh, we, actually it was pretty sad, we actually had a charge account set up at this little store, for a couple of 15-year-olds, so we could charge beer. ’Cause we, we could only come up there with change, and only able to buy a 40-, or somethin’ like that every day. I graduated at the top of my class from Palestine, and received a lot of honors from my student voting, like “Who’s who” in the school, and things like that. My senior year, during, uh, football season, my sister passed away in a car accident. Uh, that was really kinda sad. …

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 02/09/2007

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

The speech has a strongly rhotic coloring. Medial consonants are often dropped (“sentimental”), and the middle “t” in the word “treatment” receives a glottal stop treatment typical of the Ozark region. Vowels in “much” and “once” are elongated and pronounced farther forward in the mouth. Words like “nearer,” “mirror” and “porridge” are pronounced as one syllable. The subject’s vowel in “car” and “Marty” is typical of Southeastern Arkansas and East Texas. The /l/ in the final position in “little” becomes an “oh” sound. The subject uses the characteristic Southern monophthong for words in the PRICE lexical set. Vowels are occasionally diphthongized, as in “accident” and “kit.”

COMMENTARY BY: Mavourneen Dwyer

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 25/07/2003

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.