Turkey 2

Listen to Turkey 2, a 25-year-old man from Erzurum, Turkey. 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): 10/11/1982

PLACE OF BIRTH: Mersin, Turkey

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Turkish (exact ethnicity unknown)

OCCUPATION: graduate student

EDUCATION: He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and is pursuing his master’s.

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

The subject lived most of his life in Erzurum, in eastern Turkey. He attended high school in the United States for one academic year. At the time of this recording, he was studying in Istanbul, Turkey.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject went to high school at Shawnee Heights High School in Topeka, Kansas, United States, as an exchange student. He first started learning English in elementary school. He states that he always had an enthusiasm and a great willingness to properly learn English and to speak it fluently, and that his stay in the United States probably had a tremendous effect on developing his English skills. His English is excellent and his Turkish accent almost undetectable. His father is a doctor and his mother an English teacher.

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

RECORDED BY: Subject

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 04/04/2008

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 was born in November 10, 1982, in Mersin, which is a coastal city in Turkey. It gets very hot in Mersin, especially in summer; you can’t stand to walk in the streets. But I lived most of life in Erzurum, which is a small and nice city at the very east of Turkey. It has a strong, cold climate. Once it snows, it won’t go away, and you would see the snow for like seven months during the whole year. In Turkey, you would come across different climates in different regions, which makes it a really interesting country. I studied elementary, middle school and high school in Erzurum. And when I was in high school, I participated at a foreign-exchange student program. I went to high school in … I went to high school for one year in Topeka, Kansas. I had a very different experience during my stay in the States. I had … I was exposed to the American culture, had learnt lots of new things, improved my English, so on … in Turkey the English language is given a lot of importance. They start to learn English from, from very young ages. I for instance started learning English since elementary school. But we just basically repeated the same subjects until high school. And, and in high school it was just a bit more advanced. Actually learning English for Turkish people is very difficult, because it’s a it’s a different language altogether. When I went back to Turkey, I took the university exam and moved to Istanbul to study university. And I’m currently studying master’s degree in civil engineering in this city. Istanbul is the largest city in Turkey. And it’s also the best known city in Turkey for foreigners. The second largest one is Ankara, which is at the same time the capital city. Turkey’s not very well-known country for most people. But it’s one of the European countries. It has the largest area. That’s all.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Subject

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

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:

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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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