Massachusetts 11

Listen to Massachusetts 11, a 70-year-old man from Everett, Massachusetts, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 70

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 10/08/1948

PLACE OF BIRTH: Chelsea, Massachusetts

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: property manager

EDUCATION: undergraduate degree

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

The speaker has lived in Massachusetts his entire life. He was born in Chelsea but grew up in Everett, a town directly north of Boston. He has also lived in two other towns that are located slightly north of Boston: Methuen (for nine years) and North Reading (for six years). He also resided for nine years in Quincy, which is located directly south of Boston.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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

RECORDED BY: Bryn Austin

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 01/03/2019

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Basketball is a sport that I love. I’ve played it for, oh, about 40 years. I still play it. And when I was younger, I wasn’t very good at it. In fact, I was terrible at it, until I was 17 years old. I was terrible at basketball, which I believe is a sport that you develop later, not as a, uh, teenager. But when I was 18, I started to get good at it, because why? Because I played it for 12 hours a day, for three months: June, July, and August. My father told me I wouldn’t do that; he challenged me; he said, “You’ll go to the beach.” And I said, “No, I won’t. I’m dedicated to basketball.” So for June, July, and August, I practiced basketball 12 hours a day. He put a spotlight in the backyard. I had a basket in my backyard, and I played for 12 hours a day for June, July, and August. And then came try-outs my senior year, and the coach that knew me: He couldn’t recognize me because I became so good, and the bottom line is, I became so good that I was MVP of Everett High School, and I got a scholarship — several scholarships — to college for basketball. So the moral of the story is you can be good at anything if you really put time in, and I did. Twelve hours a day, for three months, is all it took for me for basketball. So I hope that’s a lesson for some people that feel like they don’t excel at any sport: You gotta put the time in.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Bryn Austin

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 07/03/2019

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

As is common for many Boston residents, the subject exhibits both rhoticity and lack of rhoticity. The rhoticity tends to occur when the General American “R” sound would be present at the end of a word, but he drops the rhoticity frequently in the middle of words, such as “yard.” Also, his atypical pronunciation of “Comma” is likely due to his not being used to seeing that word as a proper name.

COMMENTARY BY: Cameron Meier

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 11/03/2019

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.