Mississippi 5

Listen to Mississippi 5, a 52-year-old woman from Gulfport, Mississippi, and Texas, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 52

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 23/07/1959

PLACE OF BIRTH: Gulfport, Mississippi

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: piano teacher

EDUCATION: B.S.

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

The subject lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the first 22 years of her life, specifically in Harrison County in the town of Gulfport. She moved to California for four years, living in Southern California until she was 26 years old. She then lived in Illinois for a year before moving back to California. She lived there until she was 32. She then lived in Texas for roughly twenty years and now has spent the last year in Fairfield, California.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

She claims she is a city girl, so her Southern drawl is not quite as thick as those in the more northern parts of Mississippi.

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

RECORDED BY: Danielle Amick (under supervision of David Nevell)

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 26/03/2012

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’m from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I grew up there, and I moved when I was in my twenties to California, and from California I lived in Texas for about, uh, twenty years, and now I’ve moved back to California. Ummm, I can remember growing up in Mississippi. My grandmother had a farm, and, uh, she had some chickens, and she didn’t like when the chickens would try to sit on the eggs to hatch ‘em. That made her mad, and so she would steak them out. She would first … would give ‘em a, a firm spanking, and then she would tie a string around its ankle and tie it to a tree out in the chicken yard far away from the other chickens so they would be shamed into letting her gather the eggs without a fight. And I had many memories of growing up on the farm with the animals and her milking the cows, and not that I’d want to, to live there, but I do have fond memories of growing up in the South. Well, I have two sisters, and we talk on a, a weekly basis. And, um, my mother just passed away last year, so up until then, ah, I would go every year to visit my family. And my husband can tell a, a difference when my sister calls as opposed to a friend that calls … a, I, a, it just is automatic … you just … the accent becomes more thick when you’re talking to someone who’s from the South. So I do have contact with my Southern relatives all the time. No, actually he was a Navy brat, and he grew up in, in many different places. I met him in, um, Gulfport when we were in high school, and, um, that’s when we started dating. So he, he has picked up some, some sayings and just the way I say things, just from being with me for so long it, it, it’s, but he does not have a Southern accent. Well, you know, like if, if, uh, you’re not eager to do something, you’re not “jumping stumps,”  just the way of saying putting, like putting the glasses away we, uh, you would, um, let’s see, put up the glasses, or, uh, the is … I’m having difficulty remembering some of ’em right now; it’s just kind of, but, um, it’s just, it’s natural; and I try not to say them in front of my daughter because she would say them at school, and they wouldn’t understand what she was; she would have to explain herself so …

TRANSCRIBED BY: Danielle Amick (under supervision of David Nevell)

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 26/03/2012

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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