New York 31

Listen to New York 31, a 21-year-old woman from West Babylon, Long Island and Queens, New York, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 21

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 28/05/1993

PLACE OF BIRTH: Long Island, New York

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Haitian

OCCUPATION: unemployed

EDUCATION: high school graduate

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

The subject has never lived outside the New York City metropolitan area.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

She was born and raised in West Babylon, on Long Island in New York. At age 14, she moved about 20 miles west to the neighborhood of Jamaica in Queens, New York, where she was still residing at the time of this interview. Her mother is from Haiti, and her father is from Alabama.

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

RECORDED BY: David Nevell

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 12/10/2013

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Never, never. I was supposed to go last summer, but there was a hurricane, so I wasn’t allowed to go. No, my mother came from Haiti, and they moved from Haiti to Louisiana, and my dad is from Alabama, so … my dad’s parents grew up in Alabama, so when — my dad came here when he was 17, to New York, so, yeah. Certain things he says is, like, weird. Like, he says, like “electricity”; he doesn’t say electricity. [laughs] You know, “garbage,” you know. Um, my dad was from the Bronx. Bronx I think, that’s Gun Hill? Gun Hill? Yeah. And my mom was — when she came over here, she moved to Astoria. So, yeah.

They have like certain values, like, the double standard between men and women. Like, they always think that a guy has more freedom than a women should have, you know? I don’t know — I feel like that’s only my family. [laughs] You know? I have five brothers and two sisters, so, I don’t know, I just want that freedom; like, when I was younger they could go to the park — I couldn’t go to the park. I had to ride my bike up and down the block. And then even with that, I had to stop at a certain point; like, I couldn’t go all the way down the block, you know? So, it was like, it sucked. I mean, because it’s funny because the table’s turned now. My brother’s in jail, and I’m free, so it just — I don’t get it.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Shawnia Keith (under supervision of David Nevell)

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 20/06/2014

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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• 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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