Sri Lanka 1

Listen to Sri Lanka 1, a man in his 20s from Colombo, Sri Lanka. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

Both as a courtesy and to comply with copyright law, please remember to credit IDEA for direct or indirect use of samples.  IDEA is a free resource;  please consider supporting us.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 20s

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

PLACE OF BIRTH: Colombo, Sri Lanka

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: N/A

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: The subject was studying finance in college at the time of this recording.

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

At the time of the interview, he had lived in the United States for two years.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

He has been bilingual all his life, speaking both Sinhalese and English since a child. His parents are also bilingual. Subject has a slight accent with strong British influence (e.g., the lexical set “bath” and words like futile).

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

RECORDED BY: Julia Guichard

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

Well, I’m from Sri Lanka, and I grew up there for 20 years of my life … and I still have my grandma and my brother, who live there, but that’s pretty much the only family I have left back home. Um, I have an aunt who lives here … um … well, that’s pretty much it, all I guess [laughs] I live near the beach, which is really nice, so, I mean, every evening we go to the beach and jog..stuff like that, and all my friends live really close by, so it is really nice. Well, see, uh, I live really close to my school, and if you’d like to, jumped over the wall, it’s a beach *laughs* so, yeah. Uh, the ocean is really nice um, it’s not. …l ike … the pictures you see of the waters and stuff where it’s in Hawaii where it’s like crystal-blue … it — it was darker, and..it was really safe there because it is like a little cove, so you could just wade it, and it was really, really nice. Well I’m currently finance major, but I definitely do want to go into banking, and hopefully own a bank [laughs] so, we’ll see how that goes uh, but if not — well right now I think it’ll be on hold for a while because … it’s really hard to establish a bank … so, it’s easier to make more money uh, with other businesses than trying to get into banking — But I’ll probably work in a bank to see how they work, and how they operate and stuff like that. I think the financial sector is obviously more developed, so I have a lot learn and take back home, so I think I would like to work here for a while–but I’m definitely going back, I really like this town, the people are really nice, especially the older folk … cause … I really feel at home here … um. There was this professor who was looking for — well, not really but there was a play the professor was directing, and there was a Sri Lankan part in it, and that I should try out for it, but after I did I found out that it was a female role [laughs] so, I didn’t get that, but … that’s pretty much how — but I had no plans of getting involved with theater once I came in, and I-I actually wanted to keep away, because I did take part in plays back home, and I really messed up my studies so … yeah. And I made the same mistake again because [laughs] I messed up this semester.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Faith Harvey

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 01/03/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

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).

 

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