Russia 8

Listen to Russia 8, a 20-year-old woman from Rostov-On-Don, Russia. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 20

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1987

PLACE OF BIRTH: Baku, Azerbaijan, USSR

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Armenian/Russian/Azerbaijan, white

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: university

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

The subject was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and moved throughout Caucasus (Southern Russia) and Czechoslovakia in a military family, before settling in Rostov-On-Don in 1992.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject taught herself English from tapes and books, in addition to the regular grammar classes offered in school.

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

RECORDED BY: Colum Morgan (under the supervision of Paul Meier)

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 03/05/2002

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 a military family; that’s why we moved a lot during my life. So I changed like five schools and six classes. I was born in Baku, Azerbaijan; it used to be a part of Soviet Union, but now it separate republics, even though I am Armenian. So then my whole family, they had to move from that country because there was this bad advance between Armenians and Azerbaijans. It’s like history; it still continues. I mean Armenians and Azerbaijans, they don’t live very peaceful with each other. But I’ve been lucky we moved earlier, so we moved because of ourselves not because we had to move. And we went to … I used to live on Caspian Sea. It was just on the coast, so it was very beautiful there. But we moved from there when I was very little and my sister was little too; I have one sister and one brother. We moved to Czech Republic; it was Czechoslovakia. And I went to school there. I can’t speak Czech because it was Russian school. It was for military children. It was just military family district. So we stayed there about five years, and then we moved to Belarus because they moved the forces so my father had to go there. But we stayed there not very long. We stayed there like five month or six month. And I’ve been learning Bela-Russian language over there. So it … I actually did very good, but then I notice that my Russian became very bad. Like grammar was just awful. So I just asked my father’s for permission [she means “I asked for my father’s permission”; she has one father), like, “Can I do not go to that class? Is it OK? Are we going to stay here?” He was like, “No we are going to move. Don’t worry.” So like I … I skipped those classes. And then, so it didn’t influence me, because we moved to Russia any ways. So I had to learn better Russian than Bela-Russian. So we moved to Rostov-on-Don . This is the city on south of Russia. And I still live there. All my family is there. But my mother’s relatives and my father’s relatives, they’re in different cities. So even in Rostov we changed like four places, because we didn’t have our own house yet, so right now we live in our own place. So I don’t know; maybe we’ll move somewhere else from there. My parents, they are like, “Oh, we stayed here for eight years already, like in this city; isn’t it time to move somewhere?” So, I have little brother; he is 4 years old. I always was interested in languages. And the first time I just started learning English, it was in school. It was 5th grade, I guess, 5th or 6th grade. But it wasn’t very serious because usually in school they are like, I don’t know … teachers are not, maybe very good. Even if they’re good, they’re are not very, like, hmm, they’re not very strict.
[Subject speaks Russian, in the form of a letter from Tatyana to Onegin from “Eugene Onegin,” by A. Pushkin. Partial English translation: “I write to you; no more confession is needed, nothing’s left to tell. I know it’s now in your discretion with scorn to make my world a hell. But if you’ve kept some faint impression of pity for my wretched state, you’ll never leave me to my fate. At first I thought it out of season to speak; believe me: of my shame you’d not so much as know the name …]

TRANSCRIBED BY: Colum Morgan (under the supervision of Paul Meier)

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:

She still has the dark [l] in her speech. And her English was more British English influenced, so she still uses [I] in place of the [i] (even = [Iv?n]), and she is heard also using [j] in words like “Duke.” She doesn’t use plosives in her speech with [t] and [d] and can be heard substituting [d] for [ð]. She uses the pure [u] and [e]. She doesn’t substitute [v] for [w], and she makes a very conscious effort to use [?] instead of [s] in the ends of words like “north” but is not always successful. In general, the subject speaks English well, with a slight accent, perhaps partially as a result of being well traveled. However, she still has some of the very stereotypical Russian sounds.

COMMENTARY BY: Colum Morgan (under the supervision of Paul Meier)

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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