Kentucky 1

Listen to Kentucky 1, a 17-year-old girl from Paducah, Kentucky, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 17

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1982

PLACE OF BIRTH: Hamblen County, Tennessee (but raised near Paducah, Kentucky)

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: The subject was ready to start her senior year in high school when recorded.

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

The subject has never lived outside the region, making this a good example of local speech, with a medium-strong dialect.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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): 1999

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 in Albion County, Tennessee, and then shortly after moved to Kentucky, lived there all my life. Um, I attend Reidland High School. I’ll be a senior this August. Afterwards, I plan to go to community college, then transfer to a state college after two years. I wanna be a English teacher. I don’t attend church as often as I should. [laughs] We’re not regular members. I work at the Country Club of Paducah. I work in the tennis center. Um, I don’t do much; I get paid to watch TV, pretty much. Um, I have to serve drinks and food whenever someone wants ’em. They don’t pay with cash; they have to fill out a ticket and they get billed at the end of the month. Um, I’m in charge of the tennis courts. I hafta take the water jugs and make sure they have plenty water and ice, and fill ’em up at nighttime. I have ta sweep the clay courts, um, make sure all the tennis balls are picked up and all the trash cans are empty. Each year we have a Paducah summer festival and they get — a lot of the time they get acts that are just new on the scene, and then after they come to Paducah, they hit it big for some reason. And one year, about three years ago, we had 98º and no one had ever heard of ’em, and now they’re humongous. And this year we’re havin’ people like The Moffets and Mulberry Lane and Lonestar. And, uh, a friend of ours runs it, so we get to meet anybody we want that’s in it. [laughs] Ah, pretty much everybody in Paducah comes down to it one night. This year it’s gonna be ten days long. Major topic in the news lately has been the school shootings that have been happening across the country, and Paducah has been one — it was one of the very first along with Pearl, Mississippi, and although I didn’t go to Heath High School, I had a couple of friends that went there. They weren’t injured. They didn’t even really get to see it; they were in different parts of the school. But it affected them along with everyone else, and of course the worst one that we’ve had is the Columbine one, um, but af- couple months after the Heath High School one, I wrote a poem called “What Has Happened to Our Society.” It says:
Life’s insanity is beginning to fade
Day by day new graves are being made
What has happened to our society?
Children are killing others amongst their own age
We are losing all control, sending us into a mad rage
Birth, childhood, teen years, adulthood, retirement, death
Is how our lives should be
Birth, childhood, teen years, killing, jail
A lifetime of not being free
What has happened to our society?
Parents wonder what they did wrong
Why can’t our kids just get along?
Did we fail to succeed?
Is there any way our children can be freed?
Freed from the pressures, gangs, and drugs
And welcomed home each day with a warm, loving hug
What has happened to our society?
Is the world coming to an end?
Or are we being killed before we have a chance to begin?

TRANSCRIBED BY: Rebecca Segal and Sandra Lindberg

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 06/04/2008

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).

 

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