South Africa Four - Text
A 22 year old Caucasian speaker from Germiston, Johannesburg, who speaks about his life growing up in Germiston, holiday pasttimes, his family, school and church activities. Notice the flattened "i" in the first syllables of "physically", "physicists", "little" and "difference" - all pronounced with a slight schwa. Also the tendency to not use contractions in multi-syllable words such as "considerably" is typical. Recorded 5.23.2000 by Yvette Hardie, edited by Paul Meier 7.17.2000. Running time 00:03:31.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
Okay, well, Germiston is possibly the most horrid place in the whole of Jo’burg. (uh) It’s a very urban sort of settlement with very dilapidated homes – nice, big gardens, though. (uh) Fortunately we had a pool, so we grew up in a very sort of wild atmosphere with bicycles and swimming pools and lots of braai [ed: barbeque grills] and people sitting around fireplaces and smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. (um) I went to a nice sort of community-based school called Germiston South Primary, (um) where we participated in sports, we got a regular education sort of set for us.(um) Which is great. (unclear) many friends, (uh) lots of water sports, (uh) going to Germiston Lake, rowing, lots of swimming, lots of biking. (um) I’ve lived with my family the whole of my life, my parents are still together, (um) we’re very strongly attached. I have an older brother, his name’s Greg, and, (uh) I have two adopted brothers who are Martin and Mark. (um) Well I must be an outsider in my family because I decided to become an artist, but (um) most of the people in my family are sports orientated which means that most of our time is spent on soccer fields as my brother kicking a soccer ball. Wow! Everyone’s parents were (uh) slowly but surely getting a little bit pie-eyed, which is drunk. Lots of (uh) jumping in rivers, lots of (uh) bicycle riding as I’ve said, lots of (uh) letting other people tie us down. What we did for holidays was basically sit around and watch TV. We used to get a lot of videos. (Um) We, my father used to love (uh) nature conservation tapes, so we used to watch a lot of that, otherwise just videos that have come out, (uh) on the new circuit. (Um) We spent hours and hours in a swimming pool. Oh and making tree houses, we used to make huge, huge tree houses in the tree of our back garden, which was pretty amazing. Oh and we also grew up with chickens and ducks, this is all coming back to me. (chuckle) Chickens and ducks, we used to have chickens and ducks in the back garden which used to freak us out. You had sheep in the back garden. (uh) You must understand this is a very sort of community-based house so we used to wake up with chickens and ducks cockle-doo-doo-doo-ing in the middle of the morning, which is quite fascinating. So we used to spend our holidays running off the chickens and my father used to try, he tried one day to cut a chicken’s head off because he wanted to open a business with chickens, but, (uh) it didn’t work because he felt very sorry about cutting the chicken’s head off because it’s body started running around the garden with no head. (um) My mother. (uh, ma, uh) I must say my dad’s disabled as well, I suppose, he’s physically disabled. Broke his back at work. (uh) My mother is the bread-winner in the family, she is loony, she is nuts, she’s the one with the chickens and the ducks and who insists on having them…
UNSCRIPTED SPEECH TRANSCRIBED BY ELIZABETH TERREL, ASSOCIATE EDITOR FOR TRANSCRIPTIONS, April 24, 2008.