England 43

Listen to England 43, a 34-year-old man from Salford, Manchester, in northwest England. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 34

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 16/03/1967

PLACE OF BIRTH: Salford, Manchester

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: mixed

OCCUPATION: soccer player

EDUCATION: N/A

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

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject’s mother was from Sligo, Ireland, and his father from London.

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

RECORDED BY: Paul Meier

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 2001

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Well, I was born in Manchester on the 16th of March 1967. Uh, Manchester is, is a big town, famous for football, either Manchester United or Manchester City, two big footballing teams. I was brought up in a little city called Salford, uh, which is within a city if you can possibly understand that. Uh, Manchester and Salford have their own cathedrals, so that’s why they say it’s a city within a city. Uh, I was brought up in a middle-class family, just on the old cobbled streets. Uh, my mother was from Ireland; my father is from England; my mother is from a place in Ireland called Sligo, on the west coast of Ireland: uh, a little town called Tubbercurry, which was, uh, out in the west; nothing really going through there, maybe one bus a day, a really really old town; (and) she come over to Manchester when she was 16, lived there for a while, then moved to London and met my father, and that produced me; so, I mean, I basically started off going to the local primary schools; my brothers and sisters, uh, three brothers and one sister, you know; then I started, uh, into the sports when I was very young, probably 5 or 6, uh, started off in goal, uh, in soccer, as in football in England, soccer in America, and then, as from there I got into athletics. I like my running, which I enjoyed a lot, and then it just, uh, one thing led to another with the football. I wasn’t really interested in the football; for a long while, it was just more or less the running and the, the athletics part of it which was very interesting for me ’cause it was a kind of a loner sport, and I, and I liked to be alone; I was a very shy lad, so I didn’t mind, uh, running on my own and running in competitions against other people, so it was very interesting; and then I remember one day playing for the school. Uh, the primary school was playing football for the primary school, and the teacher turned around and said you’ve got a bit of a talent, Mr. Phelan. I said a bit of a talent, what, what would that be, football, soccer, as they say; so I said, well, I only play it for fun; my ma- main reas- sport is athletics, so he said, well, maybe you should try playing football a a little bit better, a little bit more. So I said, well, I only play in the playground, uh, which is like a yard in the schoolyard, or the school playground, just kicking the ball about; that was as far as I used to go. Uh, so he turned ’round and said, maybe you should try playing for the, th- the school football team, and I said to myself, well, yeah, I’ll have a try of it; it cost nothing, you know, my m-, uh, my mother didn’t really have a, a lot of money, and then to buy football boots and to buy football kit, so you know it was a, it was a big gamble; the gamble paid off because in athletics I run in bare feet for the school, so you know it didn-, it didn-, and we had our kit from the school, so it didn’t cost my parents much money, uh, whereas the football was a little bit more expensive ’cause you had to have football boots and you had to have a football and you had to have shoe pads. So I said to my mother, “Would it be possible to have a pair of football boots?” So she said, “Well, you going on a school holiday, so you’ve got a choice. You got the school holiday, or you got the football boots.” So I picked a 5-pound pair of football boots, so, you know, and I, and I treated them like they was gold. They never went out my sight; I cleaned them every night. And that was, uh, when I was probably 8 or 9, playing for the primary school, and then it just took off from there, really.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Christian Jensen

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 02/2005

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

He was discovered to have a talent for soccer at age 9, was encouraged (despite that his family could hardly afford his first pair of football boots), and eventually became a professional playing for many of the top English football clubs. Despite his cosmopolitan life as a highly paid and well-known player, traveling all over the world, he retains much of the dialect of his formative years. However, he has learned the art of interviewing and is able to present himself in vocabulary and dialect that is intelligible to a wider audience, and this is what he does in this interview, conducted in London in 2001. Among the other dialect features, notice the use of “f” for “th” in words like “athletics.” For more information on British dialects, visit PaulMeier.com.

COMMENTARY BY: Paul Meier

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 2001

The archive provides:

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• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
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