India 6

Listen to India 6, a 21-year-old man from a small town on the southernmost tip of India. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 21

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1981

PLACE OF BIRTH: small town on southernmost tip of India

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: N/A

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: Subject was attending college at the time of this interview.

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

Subject was living in Kansas, in the United States, at the time of this recording.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

Subject speaks both Tamil and Malayalam.

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

RECORDED BY: Jeffrey Gockelas (under the supervision of Paul Meier)

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 26/11/2002

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Uh, I was born in, uh, a small town in the southernmost part of India.  Uh, if you, if you have seen India, uh, on a, on a, on a map, looks like a triangle; I come from the very tip of the triangle.  Uh, lived, uh, ten minutes off the beach.  Um, was raised a Christian.  Uh, my mother tongue is, um, Tamil, um, but I live right off the border of another state that speaks a different language.  So, I can speak that language, too – it’s called Malayalam.  And I can speak, uh, this, uh, I can speak English, too, uh, well, uh, as you can see (laughs).  Uh, so, I, I, I, I can like speak four languages.  I can read and write in two and two of them are just dialects that I can speak and understand but not write.  I can say this four line prayer that my mom taught me when I was a kid.  I think the translation would be…you know, uh, prayers, they’re in complicated written Tamil – spoken Tamil is very easy and a lot (laughs) different from written Tamil.  So I’m trying here to translate that to English.  I think it means “My little spirit, pray to God.  My whole spirit, pray to God…” uh, “Do not forget the…the blessings he has bestowed upon you…” something like that.  [He recites the prayer in Tamil.]  “Amen.”

TRANSCRIBED BY: Pete Cross

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/07/2008

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.