Italy 13

Listen to Italy 13, a 72-year-old woman from Partinco, Palermo, Sicily, Italy. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 72

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 23/09/1938

PLACE OF BIRTH: Partinico, Sicily, Italy

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Italian/Sicilian

OCCUPATION: housewife

EDUCATION: elementary school

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

The subject lived in Partinico, Sicily. She then married at 18 and moved to the United States a year later, where she was living (in California) at the time of this interview.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject began learning English immediately after she arrived in the United States, mainly from watching television and going to citizenship school. Despite living most of her life in the United States, her accent is still strong.

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

RECORDED BY: Gasper Spinosa (under supervision of David Nevell)

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 24/11/2010

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

[Reading of Comma Gets a Cure is incomplete.] I’m 72 years old; um, I came from Italy, and, uh, I was raised in the family of, uh, seven kids, and my father and my mother, four brothers and three sisters, uh, we grow up in, uh, a middle-class family; you know, uh, my father, we had some property and house and everything; you know we weren’t poor; we weren’t rich either, so my father used to work in the land in the farm. OK, we had a farm, we had a vineyards and trees, all everything we used to make our own oil, everything you know from, from the, from the compagna, so we were grow up, and, uh, we don’t have like thing that we have now now in United States. We were if we wanted some toys and stuff, used to make our own toys; we make, you know, to play, we make our own, our own with the piece of stone, we cutting pieces and we play, you know, like hopscotch; we used to play with the different things, you know, we made ourselves. So we used to sing in the family; my father used to play the mandolin, and, uh, we sing and my mother used to tell us say the rosary at night, we help play; we used to eat all at the table; we had a nice, you know, what do you say, nice gather every night; when my father come from work, my brothers, we used to sit at table eat all the same time; we don’t eat one at one time, one another my mother cook and we eat all the same time and, uh, we pass the night like my mother used to read to us, uh, like I say, entertain ourselves, you know, in the family we play cards; we, we play different game, and we don’t have TV at the time; we don’t have you know we just entertain ourselves, our brothers and our sisters, if we wanted like play we used to make our own dolls.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Gasper Spinosa (under supervision of David Nevell)

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 24/11/2010

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.