Germany Two - Text
Female, born Bonn, Germany 1973; German citizen but entirely raised in Brussels, Belgium, speaking French and Flemish. Very interesting hybrid accent resulting from this fact but also from the three years the subject spent in Mobile, Alabama in her early twenties. Teaching assistant at University of Kansas at time of recording by Paul Meier in 1999.
Transcription of Unscripted Speech
I was born in Bonn, in Germany, the same city as Beethoven, so sometimes I am joking about that, I say Beethoven and me, we're a team, but I never really lived in Bonn um, I moved to Brussels almost right away, and Brussels is the capital of Belgium, and I lived there for..a long time, 'till I graduated high school. And then I moved back to Germany and for the first time in my life I actually got a German ID, which was very curious to me, because..I was...according to this ID, a German citizen, but I didn't feel like it at all. I felt more like a stranger when I lived in my country of birth than in any other country I've lived in. Um, I studied there for three years at the University of Münster...and I was not very happy, and so I decided to move to the United States, because that had been a childhood dream of mine, and I..ended up in Mobile, Alabama, and people always laugh about that, they say, "Well, how did you end up in Mobile, Alabama, all places in the world?" Well, it was really conscious decision. I wanted to go to the South, and I talked to some people at the academic exchange programs in Germany, and one man I talked to grew up in Atlanta, Georiga and he recommended the University of South Alabama to me um, that's where I ended up. And I had three wonderful years in Mobile, made really good friends, um, almost all of them were international friends as a matter of fact. That's how I ended up learning Norwegian. Um, and after three years of living in Mobile, Alabama, I had completed my Bachelor and my Master's degree, I decided it was time to get my Doctorate. And so I looked around for some programs, and the one I liked best was in Lawrence, Kansas, and that's how I ended up here where I'm at right now.