Kentucky Four - Text
The speaker is a nineteen-year-old African-American female, born and raised in Paducah, Kentucky, which is in the southwest part of the state. She has lived in Louisville, Kentucky for about 10 months, as a freshman at the University of Louisville. Listen for the use of a glottal stop for the medial "d" in "didn't", a sound typical of speech from areas much further south than Louisville, and for the elongation of single syllable words like "did" into two syllables with the use of a "schwa" after the vowel. The recording was made by Rinda Frye on January 31st, 2000 and edited by Paul Meier on February 29. Running time 00:03:29.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
Hello, I’m from the wonderful town of Paducah, Kentucky, located in the western part of Kentucky. Um as a child growing up, I grew up in a, in a very nice neighborhood, um…I have two parents; a mother and a father. Uh my mother is now the head division human resource manager of a plant called USIG, uh it used to be called Lockheed n’ Martin, before then it was called Union Carbide, so they’ve had a couple mergers and now they’re called USIG. Uh, my father is um, he’s a newscaster. He has his own television segment back in Paducah called “Burge’s Bag”. Uh, before it was called “Burge’s Bag” it was called “The People Beat.” So growing up as a child I got to go on these nice, adventurous excursions with my father to Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois, and those that are, that were in uh, Kentucky. We would travel around, finding just like little oddities in life, people who have like a three-legged dog that did tricks or caught Frisbees. Or a woman that made uh, human sculptures out of pecan shells. Um, so as you can see I had a pretty exciting childhood growing up. I guess my, my favorite People’s Beat or Burge’s Bag story that my father did was when a woman did a sculpture of me singing on the back of a crushed can, it was a recycled can, and, uh, it wuh- it didn’t really look like me, but it was nice to think that she thought it looked like me. Um, I got to do a lot of television, uh, plugs and networking and, uh, radio plugs as I was growing up. My father and I, uh, we’d go do benefits for KET and PBS a lot, which are like local news stations for Kentucky in the, Paducah uh viewing area. So I had lots of fun growing up. I would do commercials with my father all the time. I still get teased to this day with my aunt. Uh, there was a commercial that my father and I did for the Paducah Library, and I was like, maybe five years old. They used me because I was young and tender—I didn’t know any better. I had two little uh afro puffs in my hair, and I walked over to my father with this big huge like, Encyclopedia Britannica book, and I said “Daddy, read to me!” So to this day, I’m eighteen years old and people still rag on me about “Daddy still read to me!” So . . . um, right now I’m at the University of Louisville, my anticipated major is mass communications. Um, I’m enjoying it a lot. I came to U of L in the summer of nineteen ninety-nine. I’m a graduate of the class of nineteen ninety-nine. Um . . . I’m doing theatre right now, which I absolutely love. I did a little bit of theatre back home, but not much. Um, there’s not a strong theatre program back home, I did a couple of community plays but nothing other than that. Um, but here at the University of Louisville I’ve done, I think maybe four productions, and this is just, this’s been, it was in my first semester so I’m pretty, pretty excited about that. I did uh, one play under my director who’s now filming me and she’s now grinning with uh, with delight. So we had fun doing that. That was my first—that was my debut here at the University of Louisville as far as my theatre performances . . . I’m looking forward to do—doing much more.
UNSCRIPTED SPEECH TRANSCRIBED BY TOM DUNCAN, 6 April, 2008, UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROFESSOR SANDRA LINDBERG