Gansu 4

Listen to Gansu 4, a 24-year-old woman from Lanzhou, Gansu Province, China. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 24

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 08/03/1990

PLACE OF BIRTH: Lanzhou, Gansu, China

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Chinese

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: PhD student

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

Subject has in lived various places within China, including Lanzhou, Wuxi, and Hangzhou. At the time of this recording, she had been living in York, in the United Kingdom, for nine months.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The speaker started to learn to speak fluent English during her first year of university, back in 2008. She has personal contacts with Americans and Africans. She has had contacts with American friends in Hangzhou, where she picked up her more American accent. She also has quite a few experiences in public speech and animation dubbing. She also has spent a lot of time watching American movies and listening to VOA and CNN. However, because she went to the UK to pursue a master’s degree in speech science, her accent is undergoing some changes.

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

RECORDED BY: Chen Shen

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 04/07/2014

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

My hometown, Lanzhou, is the capital city in Gansu province in China. It’s a lovely city, not too big, not too small; it’s just quite all right for you to live there. It’s convenient enough for you to buy food and go anywhere, um, because it’s basically the connection of a lot of trains running from the east to the west. So it’s literally in the middle of the map. And, um, I, I like the fruits there, ’cause during the summer time, the sun shines quite bright, and you’ve got fruits with really sweet flavor — for example, melons, berries, and stuff, um. Apart from that, there is a special kind of noodles that is really famous in my hometown; it’s beef noodles, and people, people might eat it as breakfast, lunch, or dinner. So it’s basically a meal that is fitable [sic] for, um, for the whole day, which is quite convenient. Um, well, I myself, um, started to learn English when I was in primary school, with Chinese teacher, and after that, um, not until I went to college I started to talk to foreigner. Um, and I’ve been here, living in the UK and studying in York for nine months. Um, that’s probably just it.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Chen Shen

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 16/12/2014

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.