Minnesota 3

Listen to Minnesota 3, a 48-year-old woman from Monticello, Minnesota, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 48

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1957

PLACE OF BIRTH: Laverne, Minnesota (near South Dakota border)

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: N/A

EDUCATION: college degree

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

She was raised in Monticello, Minnesota, and has lived in other cities in the state, including Wyebrook, Northfield and Minneapolis, where she was living at the time of this interview.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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): 10/2005

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 in Laverne, Minnesota, which is a tiny little town on the very southwest corner of the state, near South Dakota.  My family didn’t live there long.  The town that we actually lived in was called Beaver Creek, and the house that we lived in is no longer there.  It’s — a highway’s been put through.  And, after that we moved to Wyebrook, Minnesota, and lived there till I was through Kindergarten.  And my brother was born in that area also.  My father was the high school principal in that town.  Then we moved to Monticello, Minnesota, and I lived there most of my childhood till I graduated high school.  After that I lived in Northfield, Minnesota, where I went to college at St. Olaf’s,  graduated with a degree in Theatre from St. Olaf’s.  At that point I moved to Minneapolis, and I have been living in Minneapolis ever since. When  you talk about a Minnesota accent, the first thing I think of is the accent the people have who live up in the — what we call “the Range,” which is the Iron Range area of the state, it’s north, uh, central part of the state.  There’s a lot of, uh, people whose families were originally immigrants, uh, from Scandinavian countries there, and they talk, uh, with real hard sounding TH’s, that sound like D’s, and kind of a Norwegian accent.  A little bit. I also have been told that Minnesotans sometimes have real, what I would call, sort of bright vowels in their sounds, uh, in their words, similar to what I think — what people from Wisconsin sound like.  Um, they say things like “Wiscansin,” that sort of thing. I, of course, don’t think I have any accent at all, but my brother told me differently.  I’ve never really realized, or had anyone tell me, that the people in the southern part of the state, which is where Mankato is, have a different accent than people in the Metro area.  But I don’t typically think of those people as having a different kind of accent than the people in this area.  It’s only, um, couple hours away, so it’s not far.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 28/06/2008

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:

• 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).

 

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