Arkansas Six - Text
The subject is 29 year-old Caucasian male, a graduate of the Department of Drama at the University of Arkansas/Fayetteville. Both he and his parents were born and raised in small neighbouring towns in Arkansas, although from the age of 7 until 11, the subject and his family lived in Connecticut. The speaker tends, for the most part, not to speak with an Arkansas regional accent of any kind. It is very possible that those 4 years in Connecticut during his formative years had a strong influence on his eventual manner of speaking. His accent is strongly rhotic. The "i/e" substitution is evident in words like "centuries", "spend", "many", "friends" and "get". Medial consonants occasionally get dropped ("twenty') or glottalized ("didn't"). There is some consonant cluster reduction in words like "apparently" and "miracle". The speaker's fuller resonance and variety of pitch may reflect his training in the Department of Drama.
Recorded by Mavourneen Dwyer, 5.16.2000, and edited by Paul Meier 3.14.2003. Running time: 00:04:59.
TRANSCRIPTION
Let’s see… I come from a family of four, and (uh) I have a younger sister. She was born in 1978. And (um) so, she was born in April, and I’m roughly three years older than she is. But originally when I was born, we didn’t live in Alma itself. We (uh) lived in a town called Dyer, which is outside of Alma. It’s off in the country. And (um) it was much smaller, but we still went to Alma schools, because it-- you know, it’s not a very large town.
(Um) I remember when I was younger, we had two horses and one of-- one of them was named Sunny. I cannot remember what the other one was named. Well, we kept horses-- those two horses, you know, for a few years, when I was young. And I guess we got rid of the two horses, probably some-- somewhere around the time my sister was born.
We lived-- we lived a fairly-- fairly good ways out-side of Alma, proba-- probably about ten minutes.
(Um) My dad, my father, his name’s Wes. He was born and raised in the town called Danville, which is a very sma-- Danville, Arkansas, very, very small community. And my mother was raised in a town ten minutes outside of Danville, called Havana. Which was even smaller. I think the most they had at Havana, from what my grandmother tells me, was about a train station and a little grocery store. But, they grew up, I guess, about ten miles away from each other. I believe they got - married in probably around 1965. Well, no, probably ’68 or ’69. That’s probably about it.
(Um) So they’re-- they were from-- not from the city, I’ll say that much. (Um) My mother was an only child. My grandmother, she immigrated to this country from Ireland, when she was probably about fifteen, around that age somewhere. And her father, my grandfather, was a major league baseball pitcher. And, back in the ‘30s, and he pitched for (uh) the St. Louis Browns, and the Detroit Tigers and the Toronto Bluejays. And also for a minor league team in Texas.
UNSCRIPTED SPEECH TRANSCRIBED BY JACQUELINE BAKER, ASSOCIATE EDITOR FOR TRANSCRIPTIONS, October 2, 2007