Louisiana 3

Listen to Louisiana 3, a 20-year-old woman from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 20

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 02/05/1985

PLACE OF BIRTH: Ninth Ward, New Orleans

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: African-American

OCCUPATION: university student

EDUCATION: some university

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

She lived in Lafayette, and was displaced by Hurricane Katrina.  At the time of recording, she was a nursing major at Dillard University of New Orleans.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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

RECORDED BY: Allison Hetzel

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 22/11/2005

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 May 2, 1985, in New Orleans, Louisiana, at Charity Hospital.  I grew up in the Ninth Ward, mostly raised across the street from my grandparents. We stayed on Mazant.  It wasn’t the best neighborhood in town, but it was home.  I was attending a Catholic school, called St. Mary’s of the Angels, and, um, I went there from pre-K to eighth grade.  And in the neighborhood, you wouldn’t expect to meet so many nice people, but they were all there.  And after eighth grade, graduating and everything, decided to go to high school, and I attended a historically black school called St. Mary’s Academy.  I didn’t want to go there, but I had to make the best of it.  It was a part of my history, my family history.  My mom went there for high school, so she wanted to keep the tradition going, I guess you can say. Um, I graduated from St.Mary’s Academy in 2003, and from there I decided to go to Dillard University, also in New Orleans.  At Dillard, my major was nursing.  I’ve always wanted to be a nurse.  Well, not really.  I wanted to be a, a pediatrician, and I was like, “Well, maybe that’s too many years of school.”  So, I downgraded to bein’ a neonatal nurse, ’cause I love babies.  I think they’re like God’s gift to every person who can have a kid.  Kids are beautiful. Um, when I went to Dillard, for — I want to say about — this would have been my third year.  And, um, then the storm hit, of course.  Katrina passed through, and I had to change schools and everything, and now I’m in a foreign place, tryin’ to make sense of everything that’s going  on.  It’s like, really hard;  it’s confusing.  You know, I’ve never been so stressed in my whole entire life.  But I, I guess out of all of this, I’ve learned how to appreciate life, how to be thankful, just for breathing every day.  You know, because I, I could have been, you know, still in New Orleans, struggling with everybody else, tryin’ to survive.  But I was blessed that God gave me another chance, and he was like, “You can do it, you can do it.”  So I’m tryin’ to make the best out of this.  But it’s, it’s really hard, it’s very hard.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 27/12/2007

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Some vocal qualities in the interview include: breathiness of the voice, omitted final and initial consonant sounds, and use of a click in the beginning of the interview similar to Louisiana 2, who is her cousin. The subject often substitutes [d] for the voiced /th/ of “there” and “then.” Please observe the pronunciation of “porridge” and “lunatic” as a vocal quality from the Ninth Ward neighborhood of New Orleans.

COMMENTARY BY: Allison Hetzel

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 22/11/2005

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.