Massachussets Nine - Text
The subject, a Caucasian female of Irish descent, was born 1977, and raised in South Boston. She talks of how South Boston was predominantly populated by people born and raised there when she was a child, and how this has changed. She talks of how, when moving away to graduate school, she became conscious of her accent, and was stigamatized for it, and so moderated it in favor of General American. She claims to be able to "code switch" back and forth, and in her reading of Comma Gets a Cure, performs in a what she perceives to be a more typical Southie accent. The listener will notice her erratic rhoticity in the NURSE lexical set, but the general absence of rhoticity in all other vowel + R sets.
Recorded November 11, 2005 in a phone interview with Paul Meier, edited by him that same day, and processed with a noise reduction program. Running time: 04:57
TRANSCRIPTION
I was born in South Boston, and-- in 1977. I think right after the time of bussing, and that was a time when there were not a lot of people in South Boston who were not from here. (Um) It was a very family-oriented town, and everybody had a strong accent, in which they didn’t pronounce their Rs. So (um) that was very normal for me growing up.
I grew up in a single-family home, (um) raised by my mother, who worked a lot of jobs to support us. And (um) I went to college here at Boston University (um) with a very diverse crowd of people. I then took two years off. I traveled around a place. I walked in Mexico, and I bartendered here and there. Then I went to grad school in Indiana. I went to Indiana University of Bloomington for two years, to get my Master’s in Speech Therapy.
(Um) I am now a speech therapist working in the Lynn public schools, which is a city right outside of Boston. (um) I-- I have a special spot for my Southie accent, which comes out (um) here and there when I’m hangin’ out with my old Southie crew, or when I’ve had a couple cocktails. However, I think that, when I went to Indiana University, (um) and maybe even a little bit before that, when I was working in a-- a touristy section of Mexico, (um) I just got really frustrated with the stigma that I feel like the South Boston accent brought on. (Um) I think a lot of people (um) give you a bit of a stereotype. (Um) With the accent, people love to make fun of it. People constantly want you to tell them that “you pahked yah cah in Hah-vahd Yahd.” You know, and they-- they just think it’s great, whereas we just kinda think it’s our normal speech, not anything too funny about it for us. But I-- I guess I really just got sick of people makin’ fun of the accent, so I think I-- I did a bit of goal switchin’ and I developed more of a standard American-- standard American accent. And (um) that is what I generally use, although I-- like I said, I switch back and forth.