Kentucky 4

Listen to Kentucky 4, a 19-year-old woman from Paducah, Kentucky, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 19

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1981

PLACE OF BIRTH: Paducah, Kentucky

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: African-American

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: Subject was a university freshman, studying theatre, when recorded.

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

She had been living in Louisville, Kentucky, for about 10 months, as a freshman at the University of Louisville, at the time of this interview.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject traveled around the area while growing up and was exposed to a variety of cultures because of her father’s television job.

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

RECORDED BY: Rinda Frye

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 31/01/2000

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Hello, I’m from the wonderful town of Paducah, Kentucky, located in the western part of Kentucky. Um, as a child growing up, I grew up in a, in a very nice neighborhood. Um, I have two parents: a mother and a father. Uh, my mother is now the head-division human-resource manager of a plant called USIG. Uh, it used to be called Lockheed n’ Martin; before then it was called Union Carbide, so they’ve had a couple mergers, and now they’re called USIG. Uh, my father is, um, he’s a newscaster. He has his own television segment back in Paducah called “Burge’s Bag.” Uh, before it was called “Burge’s Bag” it was called “The People Beat.”  So growing up as a child I got to go on these nice, adventurous excursions with my father to Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois, and those that are, that were in, uh, Kentucky.  We would travel around, finding just like little oddities in life, people who have like a three-legged dog that did tricks or caught frisbees. Or a woman that made uh, human sculptures out of pecan shells. Um, so as you can see I had a pretty exciting childhood growing up.  I guess my, my favorite People’s Beat or Burge’s Bag story that my father did was when a woman did a sculpture of me singing on the back of a crushed can; it was a recycled can, and, uh, it wuh- it didn’t really look like me, but it was nice to think that she thought it looked like me. Um, I got to do a lot of television, uh, plugs and networking and, uh, radio plugs as I was growing up. My father and I, uh, we’d go do benefits for KET and PBS a lot, which are like local news stations for Kentucky in the, Paducah, uh, viewing area. So I had lots of fun growing up.  I would do commercials with my father all the time.  I still get teased to this day with my aunt.  Uh, there was a commercial that my father and I did for the Paducah Library, and I was like, maybe 5 years old.  They used me because I was young and tender — I didn’t know any better.  I had two little, uh, afro puffs in my hair, and I walked over to my father with this big huge like, Encyclopedia Britannica book, and I said “Daddy, read to me!” So to this day, I’m 18 years old and people still rag on me about “Daddy still read to me!” So, um, right now I’m at the University of Louisville; my anticipated major is mass communications.  Um, I’m enjoying it a lot.  I came to U of L in the summer of 1999.  I’m a graduate of the class of 1999. Um, I’m doing theatre right now, which I absolutely love.  I did a little bit of theatre back home, but not much.  Um, there’s not a strong theatre program back home; I did a couple of community plays but nothing other than that.  Um, but here at the University of Louisville I’ve done, I think maybe four productions, and this is just, this’s been, it was in my first semester so I’m pretty, pretty excited about that.  I did uh, one play under my director who’s now filming me and she’s now grinning with, uh, with delight.  So we had fun doing that.  That was my first — that was my debut here at the University of Louisville as far as my theatre performances. I’m looking forward to do — doing much more.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Tom Duncan 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:

Listen for the use of a glottal stop for the medial “d” in “didn’t,” a sound typical of speech from areas much farther south than Louisville, and for the elongation of single syllable words like “did” into two syllables with the use of a “schwa” after the vowel.

COMMENTARY BY: Rinda Frye

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 31/01/2000

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.