Mauritania 1

Listen to Mauritania 1, a 24-year-old man from Kiffa, Mauritania. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 24

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 27/05/1989

PLACE OF BIRTH: Kiffa, Mauritania

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Moorish

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: The subject was a graduate student at the time of this interview.

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

The speaker had never lived outside Mauritania until he came to the United States a few months prior to this interview.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject began his acquisition of English when he was 18. His undergraduate degree in Mauritania was in English, so he studied it extensively.

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): 03/12/2013

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 Mauritania. Uh, it’s a country in northwest Africa. And, um, I came here to the United States in July, the beginning of July. And … as a Fulbright scholar, so I came here to study global and international studies at the University of Kansas. Before that I was in, um, Arkansas for six m-, six weeks, sorry, to elect to, ah, kind of a pre-academic program. So, um, so I’m living here in Lawrence and I’m studying at KU and I’m very Jayhawk. In Mauritania, we have different communities, and, of course, we have different languages. We have, um, Arabic as an official language and also French as an official language, and we have a dialect of Arabic called Hassiniya, and it’s spoken by the majority of, ah, people. We have also three other languages. We have Woluf, um, Polar, and Soninke, and these are also spoken by, um, a big community, African community. So that’s basically the number of languages in Mauritania. I started learning English late, like when I was 18 or like 18 years old, ah, so it was different from someone who started learning like as a child because you would, like, acquire the language easily, so I started, um, just, at like a school for English, and then I moved to the university, studying it as a major in my bachelor degree. So it was challenging because I wasn’t, like, in an English environment, so I would have to create this environment, so I would, I would go to like the Internet, um, surf like the Websites and like specifically the Websites for, um, chatting in English, and also I had some friends on Skype that I would talk to, so that’s how actually I managed to create this environment for my English.

This proverb is:

الِّ ما يصرگ ما تخلعُ الگصَّاصة
Eli mayeṣrug matekhel‘u elgaṣṣaṣṣa

Um, it means the one who doesn’t steal is not afraid of investigation or people investigate who steal, so. And the second is:

الِّ وصّاك اعل امّك حگرك
Eli weṣak e‘le emmuk ḥugruk

Whoever, like, asked you to take care of your mother, this is, like, considered denigration or something because you are supposed to take care of her without anybody else telling you to take care of your mother.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Paul Meier

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 07/12/2013

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:

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• 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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