England 65

Listen to England 65, a 50-year-old man from Woking, Surrey, and Brighton, Sussex, in southeast England. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 50

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1957

PLACE OF BIRTH: Woking, Surrey

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: white

OCCUPATION: local government officer

EDUCATION: He received an A-Level education (until age 18), at a local grammar school.

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

The subject also lived in Addlestone, Surrey; worked overseas; and has lived in Brighton, Sussex, for 25 years.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject recalls that his accent was closer to “pure” RP when growing up in Surrey than in its current incarnation. Brighton is a student city, and the influence of many younger Estuary English speakers is probably significant. His occupation also entails a fair amount of telephone-based conflict resolution, and he admits to regularly micro-adjusting his natural dialect in both class directions in order to better establish a rapport with colleagues and complainants.

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

RECORDED BY: Marina Tyndall

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 06/2007

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, um, I was born in Surrey, in 1957, and, uh, in a little town called Woking. Ah, I lived with my parents, ah, for three years in a … caravan on a caravan site, um … until the birth of my brother, when I was about 3, er, and then we moved into the … gamekeeper’s cottage on an estate, where my grandfather worked; my grandfather was the gamekeeper on the estate. Er, and we lived there for a couple of years.  Um, just in the, this little little cottage on the estate looking at watching the animals, I remember my father chasing a fox in the garden, and I remember there being lots of dead animals around, that had been shot, by the gamekeeper, my grandfather gamekeeper.  Anyway we lived there for a while, and then my father got, er, a house, in Addlestone, near Addlestone. And we lived there until I … got a permanent job, which involved me living, working, overseas in other parts of the world, and then, eventually moving down to Brighton, and I’ve been here … about … 25 years, or more, I think.

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

The following sounds heard in the recording are fairly typical of a shift away from traditional toward relaxed RP: slight centring of GOOSE vowel with fairly relaxed lip rounding relative to advanced RP; retraction and lowering of first vowel in FACE diphthong; raising of first vowel in MOUTH diphthong; retraction of first element of PRICE vowel, sometimes smoothing it into a monophthong; CURE and SQUARE vowels often realised as monophthongs; and affricated intervocalic /t/. Also, the intermittent occurrence of a labiodental or weak “r” is a feature of the speaker’s idiolect and not particularly characteristic of either of his regions of origin.

COMMENTARY BY: Marina Tyndall

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 06/2007

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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