New Zealand 12

Listen to New Zealand 12, an 18-year-old woman from Auckland and Invercargill, New Zealand. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 18

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

PLACE OF BIRTH: Auckland, New Zealand

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: college

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

As a child, the subject lived in Invercargill for four years.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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): 2007

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Well, I’ve spent most of my life on the North Shore in Auckland. It’s a fairly nice area of Auckland, I suppose. It’s quite multicultural, especially. We have a lot of people in — where I live from South Africa and also, from, Asian countries, like Japan, or China, or Korea. And there’s also a lot of, like, New Zealand Europeans, but there’s not so much of a Maori or Pacific Island community.  It’s quite small. Um, yeah. [Subject laughs.]

I love what I’m studying. I’m studying costume construction here, and so I have a big passion for the history of costume; and, yeah, I just love it. [Subject laughs.] Um, I love, I want to know everything about what everyone wore back from human existence, really. If I, if that was possible to know, and I want to — I’m really interested in ethnic costume, as well, from all around the world. I just think the decoration and how, and the embellishment is just so beautiful, and, yes, it’s just something I’m really passionate about.

Um, I really hate racism. That’s something I really can’t stand. [Subject laughs.] [Interviewer:  You’ve had experience with racism?]

Well, at the school I went to, we had a really large population of Asian students. We had many people from, um, many exchange students, really, and sometimes, they did get discriminated against. It used to really piss me off when teachers, or even other students, would start talking to an Asian student and just presume that they didn’t have good English. And then, as soon as they’d open their mouth, they’d start coming out with this completely New Zealand accent, and then that person would get a big surprise, and it was like, “Well, you know. What’s in a face? What’s a…” It just really pissed me off, and so I was on the multicultural committee and all involved with trying to bring diversity to the school and [laughs] I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, it’s just one of those philosophical ideas, like, “What is an American?” “What defines a New Zealander?” I mean, um, yeahI had many friends who had been living here their whole lives. Born and raised in New Zealand, and because their ethnicity was perhaps Malaysian or Korean, sometimes they would get treated differently, and that would really upset me, as their friend, because I didn’t see why that was necessary, yeah.

TRANSCRIBED BY: David Nevell

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

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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