Netherlands One - Text
The subject is a highly educated woman, a singer, born 1964 and raised in Bergen of Zoom. She had also lived in Utrecht, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam for lengths of time. Her command of English is almost complete, and she speaks with only slight traces of a Dutch accent.
Recorded July 16, 2005 by Paul Meier. Running time: 05:23.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
netherlands1 Kevin Flynn
(* = vocalic pause}
I was born and raised in Bergen-op-Zoom. Um that's the province in the province Brabant in Holland, the Netherlands. Um I lived there until I was about nineteen. Then I left to Utrecht, which is * Utrecht in the middle of Holland, * to study * Arabic languages. * That didn't turn out to be * a big success, so I left to Amsterdam, to pick up * youth welfare. And finally * I found what I was looking for in Rotterdam, at the Conservatory of Music * where I studied um singing, pop and jazz. So now I'm a graduated * singing teacher and singer. And I still live in Rotterdam and now for almost mm seventy years, I think, seventeen. Um I've always been * interested in the * English language. Um at, at home * my parents and * my two sisters and brother are also very, they have a, all we all have a feel for languages. Um we * we used to * imitate everyone on the television, like * funny voices in Monty Python, or um speak English with a Dutch, with a German accent or a French accent. Um in High School I um I became best friends with my best friend * because of * the English lessons. We found out we both * really liked * to speak Cockney, so we turned everything we heard in English class into Cockney, * secretly of course, and we still learn a lot. Um, about Dutch. I don't think the Dutch language is a particularly nice language to the ears. * It has a few very rough um sounds like um the "g"[1] and the "schr"[2] which are very difficult for um * people who come to visit Holland * from from abroad. Um it also has a few funny * vowels like the "ui"[3] and "eu"[4]. * "eu" is also a bit * Scandinavian but the "ui" is really difficult to pronounce, it seems. Um the only thing that's really good about Dutch is that it has so many * different vowels and consonants that um it's easier for Dutch people to speak foreign languages because we almost have all the sounds and vocals, * consonants.