Scotland 13

Listen to Scotland 13, a 22-year-old man from Isle of Skye and Edinburgh, Scotland. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 22

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1980

PLACE OF BIRTH: Isle of Skye, Scotland

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: When recorded, subject was a university student.

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

The subject lived in Edinburgh and Glasgow for two years and was again living in Edinburgh when the recording was made.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

This speaker was raised in Skye, though his parents came to live there from elsewhere. He, therefore, has no Gaelic-speaking background. There may be a further dilution of the accent because the speaker went on to live in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

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

RECORDED BY: Ros Steen

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 2003

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 come from, and was brought up on, the Isle of Skye. Em, I was brought up on the Isle of Skye and have lived there up until I left school, when I moved to Edinburgh for two years and then to Glasgow two years after that. Em, Skye must seem quite a strange place to people from, who don’t come from Skye, but, em, to me who grew up there it seems, it seemed very normal and the city seemed a very, very strange place to come down to. Life on Skye’s very, very different. It’s, em, everything moves at a slower pace. Everything’s, nothing seems to change between one time and another time. You go back to Skye, and everything’s kind of the same as it was when you left, and everything’s got a very much, dunno, relaxed air about it. I lived, well, originally I was born in the north end of the island: the first home birth on the island since the Clearances, apparently, so they say. And after that I moved to Edinbane and lived there for about eleven years, I think, and then moved to Skeabost, where I lived for another three or four years before leaving Skye and coming down to Edinburgh. Mm, my main interest, which stems from Skye as well, is, em, climbing, which has, em, kind of gone on the back burner recently but I’m starting to get back into it as, em, I get a wee bit more free time. Em, and, course, well Skye is the perfect place for that because you can go back make use of the Cullins and stuff, so, that’s my, my main other interest. I’m trying to get into leading, which is, em, the first step towards mountaineering and ice-climbing, which is where, where my dreams want to take me: up, em, up unexplored mountains. Well, not unexplored mountains. To start off with: nice safe, nice safe faces somewhere, but yeah, start in *Glencoe, that’s, that’s what I want to do.
[* = vocal pause]

TRANSCRIBED BY: Kevin Flynn

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 07/2005

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

There is none of the central belt “heaviness” in the speech, betraying its island origins. Note the Highland soft /r/ rather than the more muscular tapped or rolled one, and the use of the glottal stop [?], which is prevalent in the speech of most young Scots everywhere.

COMMENTARY BY: Ros Steen

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 2003

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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