California 16

Listen to California 16, a 19-year-old woman from Palo Alto, California. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear her.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 19

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 07/11/2002

PLACE OF BIRTH: Palo Alto, California

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: White

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION:

The subject graduated high school and was pursuing a bachelor-of-the-arts degree at the time of this recording.

AREAS OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

She lived in New York, New York, for nine months at age 13 and in Santa Monica, California, for eight months at age 19.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

There are no notable factors that have impacted the way the subject speaks.

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

RECORDED BY: subject

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 04/07/2022

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’m 19 years old. I was born in Palo Alto, in California, and I’ve lived in, the, Palo Alto for all of my life besides briefly, in — when I was 13 — I lived in New York City; and then I moved back to Palo Alto, and then I have lived in Santa Monica, California, for the past eight months or so, and now I’m back in Palo Alto. Um, I — the last two years of high school, it was the pandemic, so didn’t really go out much, much. Um, graduation was, like, not in person, all that type of stuff. I — where’s my family from? I’m, um — both of my parents were born and raised in, um, the United States, speaking English. English was my first language, and I learned French in school. Um, my, my mom was born and raised in Southern California, and my dad was born and raised in, um, Queens, New York, and, he has a little bit of an accent I guess, but I, um — he doesn’t speak any other languages. My mom speaks Spanish, but she learned it in school, but she majored, she minored in Spanish, I think. Um, yeah, I don’t know — there’s not much more to that. I, I’m not really exposed to many — a lot of people here speak, um, Chinese and Japanese, so they’re, like, I think it was like 54 percent of my class at my high school was Asian, so there’s a lot of, um, Asian languages around me.

TRANSCRIBED BY: subject

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 04/07/2022

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

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

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.