North Carolina Eighteen - Text
The subject, an attractive, well-dressed 65 year old Caucasian female was born in 1935 in Macon, Georgia, and raised for 12 years in Allentown, Georgia and for 5 in Milledgeville Georgia. Both are in the rural middle part of the state. She left Georgia to go to Duke University in Durham, NC and has returned to Georgia only for visits since that time. She lived in Alaska 13 months, Rapid City South Dakota for 1-l-2 years and has lived in Winston-Salem 41 years, but her Georgia accent has never left her.
She prepared taxes professionally for several years by choice and not economic necessity. Her husband was a very successful corporate executive until his retirement.
The diphthong in words like "time", white" and "light" loses its second element, becoming a single vowel. The subject consistently changes the endings of "-ing" words to "-in'", as in "workin'", "likin'" and "surprisin'".
Note the elimination of the "r" in syllables preceded by a vowel, as in "north, "here" and "born".
The diphthong in "face", "plain", "name", "came" and "day" is preceded by a schwa. The pure vowel in "fleece", "see" and "scene" "is likewise preceded by a schwa. This tends to retract the following vowel.
Vowels may be lengthened either by elongating of the true vowel sound as in "medicine" "college" or "kit", or by inflecting the vowel, as she does in "stressed', "vet", or "lunatic" (the final vowel) and "on".
Note the vowel used in the words "choice", 'born" and boys". Note too that those words have become two syllables. This is distinctive. "Force" and "north" are also two syllables as is "bad", "there" and "rare".
The vowel in "foot" "put" and "woman" is retracted and may be elongated, as is that in "lovely" and "Douglas" and "duke" and "school".
She uses a front vowel as part of the diphthong in "tower" and "thousand".
The vowel sound represented by "-y" as in 'very" "sorry" and "Mary" is very short and in "Mary" almost disappears.
There are several distinctive pronunciations: "thing", "all", "on", "because" and "story".
Recorded by Pat Toole, November 2000; edited by Paul Meier, March 2001. Running time: 00:05:05
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
My father's family moved in ru- uh, settled in m - [pause] middle Georgia, rural middle Georgia soon after the Revolutionary War. Daddy was born there in nine- in eighteen eighty nine; went to school, went to high school later in Macon, Georgia; graduated from Mercer University, went west and worked on the Denver Post, and came back- fought in World War One in France, and then came back and settled where he had started out, in rural middle Georgia. My mother grew up [pause] probably about sixty miles from that in Eatonton, Georgia which was a lovely southern town. She was born in a house that was built in the early eighteen hundreds: Greek revival with white columns. Went to school in Eatonton and then went to college in Milledgeville, Georgia. When Daddy got home from the war, he went over to Milledgeville to see his baby sister and just happened to meet Mother, who was her roommate. He went home and said to his father, uh, "I have met the woman I'm going to marry," but it was not to be that easy. Mother was invited to stay on [pause] after she graduated (she had majored in home economics), and she was invited to stay on as a teacher, and somehow she ended up in Atlanta, Georgia with an office in the capitol building as an executive with the G- Geo- Georgia Department of Education (which was most unusual in the nineteen twenties, for a [pause] lady to have that kind of a job). But, anyway (finally), after eight years Daddy s- won and moved her to rural middle Georgia, into his grandparents' home. Um, eight years later I was born. At that time Mother was thirty-seven and Daddy was forty-seven. I, um, [pause] lived there surrounded by maiden aunts and great aunts, and then, when I was five years old, Mother taught me the first grade. I had a February birthday so, then- and when I was six years old I entered public school [pause] at the [Twigs-Wilkinson?] Consolidated School. This brought all the children from a two-county area on five school buses to school every day. Most of these children came off farms (their parents were either tenant farmers or sharecroppers) and the first and second grades were huge. They had one section with about probably thirty or thirty-five children.
Transcribed by Evan C. Grosshans