South Africa 20

Listen to South Africa 20, a 21-year-old woman from Nigel, South Africa. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 21

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1984

PLACE OF BIRTH: Nigel, in the East Rand region of Gauteng in South Africa

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian (Afrikaans) South African

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: Subject was in her third year of studying drama at the time of this recording.

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

Subject was living in Pretoria at the time of this interview.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

Living in Nigel would have placed her quite close to a major cosmopolitan area and thus would have exposed her to spoken English from an early age.

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

RECORDED BY: Marth Munro

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 10/2005

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’m a third-year drama student at the Tshwane University of Technology, which used to be the, be the old Pretoria Technicon. I’m a 21-year-old Pisces, and I went, I went to a bilingual high school, so I had class in Afrikaans and English.  Both of my parents are Afrikaans, and so I grew up in an Afrikaans family, which obviously then I spoke Afrikaans the whole time.  I was born in a small little town on the East Rand of South Africa called Nigel. It has always been a little farm town where most of the people only speak Afrikaans. And that’s about it for  me, because I don’t, because I grew up in an Afrikaans family and only when I got to the Technicon, the tertiary institution where I study now, I really started speaking English, more often.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Karina Lemmer

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 12/04/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Exposure to English is evident in her accent, as the typical /R/ sound is not distinct. She is, therefore, a good example of a new generation Afrikaans speaker who has achieved relative neutral fluency in English. Despite this, certain patterns of the Afrikaans accent remains. The /o/ sound is one such example. Also note the articulation of the vowel /ɑɪː/ as in “time” that sounds like / ɑː/. Not only is this a feature of the Afrikaans accent, it is also a typical quality adjustment of the East-Rand area, where mother-tongue speakers sometimes also uses the sound in this way.

COMMENTARY BY: Karina Lemmer

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

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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