France 6

Listen to France 6, a 57-year-old man from Alsace, France. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 57

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1943

PLACE OF BIRTH: Alsace, France

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: German-French

OCCUPATION: chemical engineer

EDUCATION: university

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

He has lived in Ottawa, Canada, as well as in England, Italy, and in Kansas, in the United States, where he was recorded.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

His first language is the Alsatian dialect of German.  He demonstrates both the Alsatian dialect of German and High German in the recording. (Note the devoicing of final voiced consonants; while this is a feature more of German accents than French, he otherwise exhibits clear features of French accents.)

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): 16/03/2000

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 was born some, uh, fifty-five years ago in, uh, uh, Alsace.  Alsace is on the northeast part of, uh, France.  I was born at the end of World War II.  I grew up on a farm in a little village.  About, uh, one-hundred homes.  Everybody living from agriculture.  And I grew up, um, until the age of six speaking only the Alsatian dialect.  My parents did not speak French, or hardly any French at all.  And everybody else at the village spoke this, uh, Germanic Alsatian dialect.  I had to learn French as a foreign language when I went to school.  And at the time, you had to write lines if you got caught speaking Alsatian on the schoolyard.  Uh, twenty-some years passed.  I studied in, uh, Strasbourg at the university.  Studied chemistry.  And got married and then we started to travel with my wife.  We lived for three — two years in Canada after my — I had finished my PhD.  We came back to the real same, uh, town — uh, Strasbourg in — in Alsace — where we stayed for, uh, fourteen years.  We had two children.  One of them was actually born in Canada.  And then we really started to travel.  We stayed, uh, three years in England working for the same company, uh, I worked for in Strasbourg.  Then we moved to Italy close to Milano and — where we stayed for four years.  And then we came to the United States, where we stayed now for six years, and we are preparing our planned return to, uh, to go back to our home country.  [He continues speaking, unclear, presumably in Alsatian.]

TRANSCRIBED BY: John Wright

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/08/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

If you are a dialect researcher, or an actor using this sample to develop your skill in the accent, please see my instruction manual at www.paulmeier.com. As the speaker in this sample is a unique individual, it is highly unlikely that he will conform to my analysis in every detail. But you will find it interesting and instructive to notice which of my “signature sounds” and “additional features” (always suggested only as commonly heard features of the accent) are widely used by most speakers of the accent, and which are subject to variation from individual to individual.

COMMENTARY BY: Paul Meier

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 13/11/2016

The archive provides:

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• 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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