South Carolina 3

Listen to South Carolina 3, a 25-year-old woman from Gadsden, South Carolina, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 25

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 25/07/1979

PLACE OF BIRTH: Columbia, South Carolina

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: African-American

OCCUPATION: computer operator and student

EDUCATION: some college studies

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

The subject was raised in the small town of Gadsden, South Carolina. The only other place she has lived for longer than a year is Charlotte, North Carolina, about 100 miles north of Columbia, South Carolina.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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

RECORDED BY: Derante Parker

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 03/04/2005

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Hmmm, it’s just something I’ve always felt destined to do, I feel like I been destined to do. Um, I was born under the sign of Leo and I like the limelight. I like just being in the limelight; I like being in the midst of a crowd, all attention on me, so I just love being out there; um, I just like it. I want to be an actress and always just if, if it’s something that you just wake up wanting to do and you try your hardest doing it whatever it is, then I think you should just go for it and that’s just something that I wanted to do. The book name came to me about sometime last year; I was, I like to read a lot of black authors, and I was just reading a book and I was like, OK, I all these stories are the same thing and if they can write all stories with ten books that’s the same, then I can write a book and get paid just as much as they do and be called the best novelist, so why not, and I tried, and I read it to a lot of my friends and they read it, and Miss Jocelyn also read the first chapter, and a lot of people like it so far, so I want to finish it and see what I get out of it.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Erica Tobolski

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 10/09/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

The subject speaks with vowel and consonant changes that are typical in the Southern United States. In the reading and interview, final consonants are often dropped, and some medial consonants are dropped along with internal syllables, though this is not consistent. Some examples of lost final consonants can be heard in “working,” “liking,” “being,” “district,” “kept,” “stressed,” “odd,” and “just.” Omitted syllables occur in “immediately” and “diagnosis.” Listen for elision between words, as in “last year” and “remembered an.” A characteristic of many African-American (as well as white) speakers of the South include dropping the medial “l”; this occurs in “old,” “hold,” and “always.” Substitutions include /f/ for unvoiced “th” /θ/ heard in “north” and “mouth,” and occasionally /d/ for the initial voiced “th” /ð/ heard in “that” and “then.” Becoming more common, and heard in this subject, is an insertion of “sh” /ʃ/ in the “str” blend. A particularly Southern characteristic is to use the title “Miss” in front of a woman’s first name as a form of respect. Note this as the subject refers to “Miss Jocelyn” in the unscripted portion of the recording. Also heard are glottal stops at ends of words and a “cracking” at extremely high pitches. These characteristics are unique to the subject and not indicative of the regional dialect.

COMMENTARY BY: Derante Parker and Erica Tobolski

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 10/09/2008

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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