France Six - Text
White male, born 1943, Alsace, France. Did not learn French until learning it at school as a second language, having spoken the Alsatian dialect of German at home with his non French-speaking parents. Is a chemical engineer by profession and has traveled extensively. Has lived in Ottowa, Canada, in England, in Italy and in Kansas, USA, where Paul Meier recorded this interview March 16, 2000 and edited it a few days later. Subject demonstrates both the Alsatian dialect of German and also High German.. Notice the devoicing of final voiced consonants, more a feature of German than French accents. Otherwise the subject exhibits clear features of French accents. Running time: 00:03:07.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
I was born some, uh, fifty-five years ago in, uh, uh, Alsace. Alsace is on the northeast part of, uh, France. I was born at the end of World War II. I grew up on a farm in a little village. About, uh, one hundred homes. Everybody living from agriculture. And I grew up, um, until the age of six speaking only the Alsatian dialect. My parents did not speak French, or hardly any French at all. And everybody else at the village spoke this, uh, Germanic Alsatian dialect. I had to learn French as a foreign language when I went to school. And at the time, you had to write lines if you got caught speaking Alsatian on the schoolyard. Uh, twenty-some years passed. I studied in, uh, Strasbourg at the University. Studied chemistry. And got married and then we started to travel with my wife. We lived for three—two years in Canada after my—I had finished my PhD. We came back to the real same, uh, town—uh, Strasbourg in—in Alsace—where we stayed for, uh, fourteen years. We had two children. One of them was actually born in Canada. And then we really started to travel. We stayed, uh, three years in England working for the same company, uh, I worked for in Strasbourg. Then we moved to Italy close to Milano and—where we stayed for four years. And then we came to the United States where we stayed now for six years, and we are preparing our planned return to, uh, to go back to our home country. (Continues speaking, unclear, presumably in Alsatian)
UNSCRIPTED SPEECH TRANSCRIBED BY JOHN WRIGHT 15 AUGUST, 2008