Serbia 3

Listen to Serbia 3, a 46-year-old woman from Belgrade, Serbia, who spent much of childhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 46

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 11/01/1978

PLACE OF BIRTH: Slavonski Brod, Croatia

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Serbian/White

OCCUPATION: LSO (Law Licensing Process) candidate and articling student

EDUCATION:

The subject has a master’s degree in criminal and corporate law from civil jurisdiction from the University of Belgrade (Serbia) and a master’s degree in Canadian Common Law from Osgoode Law, York University, in Toronto, Canada.

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

The subject was born in Slavonksi Brod, Croatia. That city and Bosanski Brod, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, are basically one city divided by a river. The subject lived in both cities on a daily basis. (Her parents worked in one, and she went to school in the other.) At around 7 years old, the family moved to the suburbs of Bosanski Brod until the war began. In 1992, the family moved to Belgrade, Serbia, where the subject remained for the next 20 years. (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia are three of the six republics of the former Yugoslavia.)

She has also lived in Greece and in Toronto, Canada.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

As a child and a teenager, the subject spent winter and summer holidays with her family in Germany. Between high school and university, the subject spent a year in Greece.

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

RECORDED BY: Phyllis Cohen

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 29/04/2024

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

The type of high school I did in Belgrade: Uh, they are called Gymnasiums. It’s a sort of high school that does not give you any practical skills or knowledge. All it does, it prepares you for a higher education. It was quite rigorous and demanding, so we were all prepared for any type of higher education. There was only a few number of such high schools in our country. And even just to go to that type of a high school, we would have to pass entry-level exams. So, it means, for example, after finishing that high school, any student, they were, um, able to enter or apply to any type of university. And to make a decision was really tricky. Then, I don’t know why, but I applied for med school.

And I remember my mother saying, “But, like, why are you doing medicine? Are you sure you wanna do that?” And I was like, “You know what? I’ll give it a try. I can always, you know, change or do something else in life.”

Anyways, I got accepted to med school. Everybody was surprised. But then, maybe two to three weeks before we were supposed to start our classes, I woke up just one day thinking, “I can’t do this. This is not me.” I mean, it’s hard to get to med school, I know, and it’s so cool and great to be accepted. But, you know, like, that’s it. I don’t want to take another step.

And then, somehow, the scale tipped towards the law school. So, I went. I remember going there, a little bit stressed, panicking, asking the registers there to kind of tell me if there is a way I can still switch. Somehow I was there for the last day in order to give it a shot. Then, I took the entry-level exams again for law school without even preparing or anything. And then I remember there were three days of tests: history, national-international-global history, sociology, and philosophy together, and Serbian language.

I had a feeling I did horribly, and I wouldn’t even go to check my, uh, results. And I remember my neighbor and my high school friend, Maya, late in the evening, she got a call from a friend saying, “The lists are out.” She said, “OK, I’m going to check for you.” Then she called me back, and she said, “You are number 11 on the list.”

[The subject speaks the following in Serbian]: Sreca je definitivno stvar izbora. Srecan covek je onaj koji zivi u skladu sa svojim vrednostima. I pitanje koje svako od treba sebi da postavi jeste: Sta su moje vrednosti?

[English translation: Happiness is definitely a choice. A happy person is the one who lives according to their values. And the question we ought to ask ourselves is: What are my values?]

TRANSCRIBED BY: Phyllis Cohen

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 29/05/2024

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

The subject has a general tendency to stretch vowels, giving her prosody a feel of “drag.” There is slight tongue root retraction and little lip-rounding. The jaw feels quite open, with the fronted DRESS sound mostly falling to a more strongly cupped and slightly centralized TRAP sound and the GOAT diphthong beginning from the open-mid back CLOTH vowel.

The subject velarizes /l/ throughout. Plosives /t/ and /d/ are mostly dentalized and regularly replace the voiced /th/ sound as /d̪/ or as /t̪/ in place of the unvoiced /th/. Labiodental fricative /v/ and the voiced labial-velar approximant /w/ are generally replaced with the approximant /ʋ/, most clearly heard when she says ”when” and “vet” in Comma Gets a Cure. Word endings /ɪŋ/ are regularly replaced with /ɪnk/ or /ɪng/, and voiced final consonants tend to be devoiced. Note the slight additional aspiration on initial /h/, most clearly heard when followed by an open vowel in “had” at the beginning of Comma Gets a Cure and “high school,” where /h/ is followed by the initial vowel of the PRICE diphthong in her extemporaneous speech.

COMMENTARY BY: Phyllis Cohen

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 29/05/2024

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).

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.