North Carolina 18

Listen to North Carolina 18, a 65-year-old woman from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and also Georgia, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 65

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1935

PLACE OF BIRTH: Macon, Georgia

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: housewife and tax preparer

EDUCATION: university

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

The subject was born and raised for 12 years in rural Georgia, in the central part of that state. She left Georgia for Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and has returned to Georgia only for visits since that time. She lived in Alaska for 13 months and Rapid City, South Dakota, for over a year, and has also lived in Winston-Salem for 41 years.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

Despite the travel, the subject’s Georgia accent has never left her.

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

RECORDED BY: Pat Toole

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 11/2000

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

My father’s family moved in ru- uh, settled in m- [pause] middle Georgia, rural middle Georgia soon after the Revolutionary War. Daddy was born there in nine-, in eighteen eighty-nine; went to school, went to high school later in Macon, Georgia; graduated from Mercer University, went west and worked on the Denver Post, and came back, fought in World War One in France, and then came back and settled where he had started out, in rural middle Georgia. My mother grew up [pause] probably about sixty miles from that in Eatonton, Georgia, which was a lovely Southern town. She was born in a house that was built in the early eighteen-hundreds: Greek revival with white columns. Went to school in Eatonton and then went to college in Milledgeville, Georgia. When Daddy got home from the war, he went over to Milledgeville to see his baby sister and just happened to meet Mother, who was her roommate. He went home and said to his father, uh, “I have met the woman I’m going to marry,” but it was not to be that easy. Mother was invited to stay on [pause] after she graduated (she had majored in home economics), and she was invited to stay on as a teacher, and somehow she ended up in Atlanta, Georgia, with an office in the capitol building as an executive with the G- Geo- Georgia Department of Education, which was most unusual in the nineteen-twenties, for a [pause] lady to have that kind of a job) But, anyway (finally), after eight years Daddy s- won and moved her to rural middle Georgia, into his grandparents’ home. Um, eight years later I was born. At that time Mother was 37 and Daddy was 47. I, um [pause], lived there surrounded by maiden aunts and great aunts, and then, when I was 5 years old, Mother taught me the first grade. I had a February birthday so, then- and when I was 6 years old I entered public school [pause] at the [Twigs-Wilkinson?] Consolidated School. This brought all the children from a two-county area on five school buses to school every day. Most of these children came off farms (their parents were either tenant farmers or sharecroppers) and the first and second grades were huge. They had one section with about probably thirty or thirty-five children.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Evan C. Grosshans

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:

The subject prepared taxes professionally for several years by choice and not economic necessity. Her husband was a very successful corporate executive until his retirement. She still shows elements of her Georgia dialect. The diphthong in words like “time,” white” and “light” loses its second element, becoming a single vowel. The subject consistently changes the endings of “-ing” words to “-in’,” as in “workin’,” “likin'” and “surprisin’.” Note the elimination of the “r” in syllables preceded by a vowel, as in “north,” “here” and “born.” The diphthong in “face,” “plain,” “name,” “came” and “day” is preceded by a schwa. The pure vowel in “fleece,” “see” and “scene” “is likewise preceded by a schwa. This tends to retract the following vowel. Vowels may be lengthened either by elongating of the true vowel sound as in “medicine,” “college” or “kit,” or by inflecting the vowel, as she does in “stressed,” “vet,” or “lunatic” (the final vowel) and “on.” Note the vowel used in the words “choice,, ‘born” and boys.” Note too that those words have become two syllables. This is distinctive. “Force” and “north” are also two syllables, as is “bad,” “there” and “rare”. The vowel in “foot,” “put” and “woman” is retracted and may be elongated, as is that in “lovely” and “Douglas” and “duke” and “school.” She uses a front vowel as part of the diphthong in “tower” and “thousand.” The vowel sound represented by “-y,” as in “very,” “sorry” and “Mary,” is very short and in “Mary” almost disappears. Finally, there are several distinctive pronunciations: “thing,” “all,” “on,” “because” and “story.”

COMMENTARY BY: Pat Toole

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 11/2000

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