Mongolia One - Text
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Age: 19
Date of Birth: 08/8/1989
Gender: Female
Ethnicity: Mongolian
Occupation: Student
Educational Level: College Freshman
The following voice recording of the text “Comma Gets a Cure” is read by a Mongolian native female. She was born August 8th, 1989 making her 19 years old at the time of the recording. She is currently a student at the University of Kansas and her highest level of education at this time is the United States’ equivalent of a college age freshman.
She was born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and subsequently has lived there for almost her entire life, occasionally traveling throughout Mongolia. For the past nine months, she has been living in Lawrence, KS, studying at the University of Kansas. She began her studying of the English language while in Mongolia while she attended the United States’ equivalent of high school. However, the main focus and learning of the English language has been achieved at the University of Kansas.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
I was born in Mongolia. I am 19 years old. I study in the University of Kansas. I just came in last August. And I miss my home a lot. My home, my summer house is located in near located right next to the forest so it’s very nice during the summer to go to the forest and grab some strawberries and I love my home. I have a big family mmm I have my father, mother, and two sisters, and a brother, and my father works in a university and my mother is a housewife. One of my sisters studying in Japan and one of my stu... one of my sister is working in Mongolia and my brothers also working Mongolia and also I have two nephews and they are eight years old and six years old and one of them is learning Russian and one of them is learning Chinese. They are very cute.
From the following Mongolia One recording, I have noted a few of the accent features. I will not be using phonetic symbols in this commentary. Continually the subject replaces her “w” for “v.” For example, “woman” becomes “voman.” With this same thought in mind, the subject pronounces “vet” as “wet.” Another noticeable feature includes the unaspiration of the “t” which usually becomes a “d.” Also, the subject produces a “d” sound or a dentalized “t” to replace the “th” sound such as in “the” becomes “de” and “thought” becomes “tought.” However, when words end in a “t”, the subject hits this sound with extreme aspiration as heard in “a lot” and “eight.” Similar to the “kit” lexical in the Russian signature sounds, the “kit” lexical is replaced with and “e” sound. Near the end of “Comma Gets a Cure”, the subject begins to pronounce the “ed” and adds an extra syllable to the words “wiped” and “managed” making “wiped” a two syllable word and “managed” a three syllable word. A few final feature thoughts include the reverse mistakes that usually occur with non native speakers of English and the stress changes as heard in the word “lunatic.”
SAMPLE RECORDED, SPEECH TRANSCRIBED, AND NOTES WRITTEN BY JACKIE KOESTER ON May 3, 2009.
RUNNING TIME: 03:56