Democratic Republic of the Congo 1

Listen to Democratic Republic of the Congo 1, a 58-year-old man from Kisantu, DRC (formerly known as Zaire). Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 58

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 25/04/1954

PLACE OF BIRTH: Kisantu

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: black African

OCCUPATION: associate professor of theatre studies

EDUCATION: doctorate

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

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

Subject learned English in school as a child.  He is fluent in French, Lingala, Kintandu and Kituba.

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

RECORDED BY: Annette Masson

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 09/07/2012

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 always think about my old grandma … was my father’s mother. I was very close to her and, ah, since reaching about 6th grade, ah, elementary school, that’s elementary school back home, not middle school like here, uhm.  From that time to … I would say roughly, uhm, my, uh  eleventh grade, I would spend every single vacation in the village, to visit with her.  And, ah, that was probably the most delightful time in my life ’cause I always expected, I always wanted and I would prepare myself all the time, during the school year I would just wait for that moment, when the school closes, and I would jump and take the lorry that would take me back to the village to meet with her, and we would stay together — just she and I in her house — and she would teach me a lot of things about our traditions, about our ancestors, about, uhm, traditional responsibilities, about how to hold some of the, ahm, power insignia in my clan, for example, because, ahm, without modernity, I would have been one of the traditional chiefs in my clan; so she would make me hold, ah, stuff that I never saw again; ah, you know, all of them were insignias for only me could handle them, she and I; nobody else in the family was allowed to touch them, because the people who were handling them — the one who were allowed to handle them — had passed long time; and so she was the guardian of that, and so she keeping them for me.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Annette Masson

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 09/07/2012

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:

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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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