Australia 13

Listen to Australia 13, a 77-year-old woman from an area of New South Wales near Scone and Sydney, Australia. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 77

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1925

PLACE OF BIRTH: Terrigal, New South Wales (near Sydney)

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: retired

EDUCATION: school-leaving certificate

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

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

As a young woman, the speaker took elocution lessons.

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

RECORDED BY: Geraldine Cook

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 13/05/2002

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 lived in Sydney till I was married in ’49. It’s about two-hundred odd miles from Sydney, and we lived on a property about twenty-five miles out of Scone. Well, it started off quite large, but it ended up very small because of conditions. And originally the property was eighteen thousand acres, but then it … we ended up with about two and a half thousand acres, in that area.  My son used to have a very nice speaking voice, but I feel with the work he’s been doing over the years that he’s rather lost it, because he keeps on forgetting his G’s, and um, well it just doesn’t sound right to me. But still, he doesn’t seem to mind.  Friend of mine had a French cousin out from France. And when he came to Sydney, he went to an English-speaking, ah, school to learn as much English as he could. But when he came up he used this word, “I wannabe … something.” And Janette said to him: “What’s that word you’re saying?” And he said “wannabe.” He said, “We were taught that at the school in Sydney.” Which we thought was rather a hoot. How would he ever learn to speak correct English?

TRANSCRIBED BY: Mitchell Kelly

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/01/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

This speaker is an example of an older Anglo-Australian sound that is being lost, certainly in the cities and among the younger generation. (She was raised in the Sydney area, near Scone.) Notice that her low back vowel in “dance” is closer to Standard British English than the contemporary Australian. In the unscripted part of her talk, she speaks about her elocution lessons in her private school in Sydney and bemoans the loss of good English speaking in Australia today.

COMMENTARY BY: Geraldine Cook

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 13/05/2002

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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