Germany Five - Text
The subject is a white male in his forties, born in Castrop-Rauxel, but raised and educated in Essen, which is Germany's sixth largest city. He tells us that that his speech contains influences and echoes of the various tribes that settled Germany in the 11th century; he characterizes it generally as High German. He received his doctoral degree in Mathematics from the University of New Mexico, taught briefly in Germany, and finally emigrated to the United States seventeen years ago. He currently chairs the Math Department of a large university in the south. Many of the characteristic sounds of this dialect are found in its consonant substitutions: [v] is substituted for[w] in the initial and medial positions so you hear "ven" for when and "skvare" for square, [d] changes to [t] in the final position so it's "birt" for bird and often a final [z] will be heard as an [s]. In the [r] and its derivatives you hear an educated speaker who is modifying his back trilled [r] and dropping them at the ends of words. Vowel changes include short [a] to short [e] as in "beck" for back, and relatively pure [o] and [e] (ay) vowels which would be treated as diphthongs in American speech. Edited and Recorded by Daydrie Hague Jan.26, 2001. Running time: 00:04:37
Transcription of Unscripted Speech
I was born in September 1957...close to the town where I grew up, which is Essen, in Germany. My parents were born in 1925, in Dortmund, which is in the same area, the Ruhr area, the two towns are separated by about 25 miles. The language spoken in the Ruhr area is basically a mixture and--of various dialects, because people have immigrated from many parts of Germany, there my maternal grandfather was coming from Northern Germany, and my paternal grandfather was coming from Pomerania, which is now Poland...I don't have that information on my grandmothers, so I cannot tell you that. I..have been living in Essen, which is the sixth biggest city in Germany for 20 year--almost 20 years, 4 years I lived in Castrop-Rauxel, which is a very small town outside Essen, somewhere between Dortmund and Essen. I always joke, my family has made best of migration, first my parents traveled 10 miles west from Dortmund, then another 10 miles, then I traveled then 5,000 miles west from Germany. I attended school in Essen, and finished in 1976, what is called the gymnasium, that is the equivalent of a high school in Germany. After that, I studied for 4 years mathematics at the University of Essen, where I received a master's degree in 1980. After finishing my studies, I went to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where I stayed for 2 years, and received a Ph.D in mathematics. After my stay in Las Cruces, which I enjoyed very much and I learned to love America, I decided to return to Germany, and, I worked there for 1 year in the University of Duisburg, which is also in the Ruhr area, another 10 miles west of Essen. Well, unfortunately, the job situation in Germany at that time was very best--bad, I since enjoyed being in America and had connections to American universities, and I thought my English was more or less okay, except that I can never pronounce a 'w' correctly, if I think about it, *laughs*, unless I think about it very..very carefully. I decided to return to the United States, I stayed for a year--almost a year in West Virginia, then I came down to Auburn, where I have been since 1984. I'm working at the math department at the moment and somewhere I presume, I will retire from Auburn at one point.