Louisiana 6

Listen to Louisiana 6, a 43-year-old man from Plaquemine, Louisiana, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 43

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 16/03/1970

PLACE OF BIRTH: Plaquemine, Louisiana

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian (with German, Indian, Cajun, and French roots)

OCCUPATION: warehouse manager

EDUCATION: high school

AREAS OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

At the time of this recording, the speaker had been living in Panama City Beach, Florida, and for 10 years.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: none

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

RECORDED BY: Kris Danford

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 05/11/2013

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 Plaquemine, Louisiana. I have four children, and my profession now is, uh, I’m a warehouse manager, and I live in Panama City Beach. Come from a family of 12, and my mama had 19 children. Uh, her sister had 19 children and they – we’re all from the South. And my heritage is German, Indian, and Cajun, and some French. My children’s 8, 19, one 17, and one 15, and one 14. Very smart.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Kris Danford

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 03/11/2013

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

• When L  precedes another consonant OR is at the end of a word, it is barely pronounced.  The tongue does not come very close the alveolar ridge  (“children,” “hold,” “all”).

• The “middle O,” as in the words “long,” “office,” “off,” and “cloth,” drifts toward the diphthong in the word “low” in Standard American.

• The speech is non-rhotic; r is absent at the ends of words.  We hear this in “square,” “mirror,” “tire,” “course,” “warehouse,” “sister,” and “we’re.”

• The diphthong in the word “times” elongates, becoming almost purely the “middle a” and leaving off the second stage of the diphthong.

• “-ing” endings tend toward “-in.”  We hear this in “surprising.”

• Words ending with [i] relax to something closer to a schwa.  We hear this in “unsanitary.”

• “th”, both voiced and unvoiced, is very relaxed, possibly drifting to dentalized d or t.  We hear this in the phrase “in the mirror.”

• The pitch range is relatively small.  The speaker tends to stay at the bottom of his vocal range.

• The treatment of consonants is less precise than in Standard American or, certainly, RP.  The resonance tends to center in the back of the mouth.

COMMENTARY BY: Kris Danford

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 05/11/2013

The archive provides:

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• 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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