Trinidad 8

Listen to Trinidad 8, a 48-year-old man from Princes Town, near San Fernando, Trinidad. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 48

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 02/02/1971

PLACE OF BIRTH: San Fernando, Trinidad

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Afro-Indian-Chinese-Caribbean

OCCUPATION: unemployed

EDUCATION: college

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

The subject grew up in Princes Town, near San Fernando, in south Trinidad. But he lived in St. Maarten from 1996 to 2013 before moving to the United States (Brooklyn, New York City) in 2013. He had been living in New York City for six years at the time of this recording.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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

RECORDED BY: Tshari King

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/08/2019

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

We grew up in a, in a era where there was more outside activities than just staying inside like kids do today. Yeah, we would play marble pitch, tree hole, hopscotch, soccer, football, cricket. OK, was a big sport in my time, during my time — cricket was really huge; yeah, we grew up on people like Brian Lara, you know, and then we had Hasely Crawford, the first person in the Caribbean to win the 100-meter dash. We had even had name a stadium after him, so you know Trinidad was doing pretty nice. I was doing pretty OK, I guess. And the best part for me in growing up was being able to be outside, to climb the fruit trees, climb the mango trees, climb the — besides mango, what we got, we had all different types of fruits; yes, we had mangos, plums, chennet, oranges; we had everything in our yard.

My favorite, my favorite thing was limes. I used to pick up limes by the crate. I love lime juice. So I used to collect limes, go home, make lime juice. We never had a lemonade stand; we had a lime juice stand, none no lemonade. Trinidad people: We would never, we never said lemonade because lemonade was foreign-people thing. Lime juice, sell lime juice during the summertime; after that we would take our money, and then we would go for vacation.

Our summer vacation was based on family. Our family was so big; it had eight weeks for vacation, so, like, you would spend a week by each family; that is how you tell how much people, how big our family was. And every family you go by was a different experience. The guys would sleep on the floor, and the girls would sleep on the bed, but there’s always an activity to do when you get up. There’s all the aunts, and all the, all the aunts would be in the kitchen preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The uncles would be outside; the boys would be in the yard in the back of the house playing, or we’d of go down to the basketball court or the cricket ground, play some sports for the day, come back home, have lunch. In the afternoon, we’d play games. It was, it was mostly about family bonding, growing up when we was small because that’s all we had actually. All we had was family, and it was a really nice thing because as you get older, family is very important, and you pass it on to your kids. So that’s just, that how I was brought up.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Tshari King

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/08/2019

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:

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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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