Australia 14

Listen to Australia 14, a 47-year-old woman from Terang and Geelong, Victoria, Australia. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 47

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1955

PLACE OF BIRTH: Terang, Victoria

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian (Anglo-Australian)

OCCUPATION: ESL teacher

EDUCATION: post-graduate work

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

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

She attended a boarding school in Geelong that put a lot of emphasis on cultivated speech.

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 grew up on a farm in country Victoria, uh, and lived there till I was 11.  And then I went to boarding school in Geelong.  I suppose one of the things that I can see about my childhood, if you’re talking about the influences on, on me and my, and my speaking voice, is that my mother was not a farm person.  She wasn’t from the country, and she grew up in Adelaide and she was always very particular.  But my father, who was a country person, had such an ability to adjust so he would … here’s an example: He would spend the day with the stock and station agent, come to check some rams or some sheep or something for sale, and he’d come in at lunchtime and tell my mother, “Oh well, they’re coming next Tuesday [pronounced TYOOZ-dee] and they’re collecting them.”  And my mother would be furious!  How could he say this?  “It’s Tuesday, [pronounced TYOOZ-DAY] John.”  And he always maintained that you speak and you keep pace with the people you’re with and you fit in with them.  But she was always very particular, so I remember that.  But she had a, she had a very good speaking voice, so I suppose that had some influence.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Lynn Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 01/04/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

This speaker has a fairly consistent cultivated or educated Australian dialect. She teaches English to migrants, and this may have contributed to her more pronounced way of speaking, although she told me that her private school put a lot of emphasis on speaking well. She speaks about her upbringing in county Victoria in the unscripted part of her talk, as well as the influence her school had on her speech.

COMMENTARY BY: Geraldine Cook

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

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).

 

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