Nevada One - Text
[submitted by the subject himself]
Age 19; born late 1989; male; White (not-hispanic); security guard and student; Sophomore in college.
I was born in a small town in Nevada called Gardnerville. It’s a little ways south of Carson City. I lived there until about age fourteen, then moved to California where I still live. That region of Nevada has a lot of transplants from the region of California in which I currently live, so the most common speech pattern is pretty much the same there as here.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:
My own accent is uh… It’s actually pretty variable. I spent, uh… most of my time from the ages of eight through fifteen learning every accent that I could get a hold of via media—you know, movies and… what not. My sister and I both were… uh, we-we entertained ourselves for hours imitating the movies. Uh, Austin Powers was actually the first movie that inspired our “linguistic habits” and then, uh, Monty Python and the Holy Grail was the uh… kinda the catalyst for us learning the English accent, at least, and since then we’ve pretty been going one after the another, learning all the uh… Well, pretty much as many as we could. So, today, you know, I’m nineteen years old—I’ve been doing it for so long that all I have to do is watch Pirates of the Caribbean and I will fall into and get stuck in an English accent for like an hour or so. It’s uh (laughs) it’s like people that lived in Oklahoma, like my mother for instance—she used to live in Oklahoma—whenever she uh has a couple a drinks or if she’s around somebody from that area, she starts talking like she’s from Oklahoma… And… it’s actually really annoying because we can’t get her to stop. But, you know, I kinda feel HER pain when I do that, though, ‘cause, you know, her having done it to me I… (laugh) I’m sure—I can sympathize with her whenever I drop to into an accent, but… The funny thing about me, though ugh, is that uh, Sometimes I’ll drop into an accent and I won’t stay in THAT accent, I’ll JUMP from that accent to another one, back to that one and into another one again. So, on a bad day, I’ll go from English to Scottish to Irish to French to Canadian to English again and then to Mexican to Australian to Japanese to you know, whatever accents I have in my inventory—I have so many of them I don’t even know what I have anymore! But, when I do that it even drives my sister nuts, and she knows at least as many accents as I do. So (laughs)… I don’t know, it’s fun, though. I like to, uh, to play with people, you know. Sometimes the… the first day of class at a new semester people will ask me for my name and… I’ll say my name, you know, and then, but I won’t say it in an American accent. I’ll say it, you know, in an English accent or something, and they’ll ask me, “Are you from England?” and I’ll say, “well, yeah, maybe,” and they’ll kinda look at me all funny and I’ll just kinda smile innocently and pretend that my answer was TOTALLY NORMAL. And leave them confused for the rest of the class period. And then I’ll usually wait a couple of days (laugh) before I uh, jump back into my own native accent that you’re hearing now. And… I actually did this in high school. People were SHOCKED when they learned that I wasn’t from London (laugh). I was very pleased with myself, needless to say.
SAMPLE RECORDED, SPEECH TRANSCRIBED, AND NOTES WRITTEN BY DALLAS MILLER ON NOVEMBER 20, 2008. RUNNING TIME, 05:13