North Dakota One - Text
This subject was recorded 12.05.02 by Paul Meier at the University of Kansas. She is an acting student, born Bismarck, ND, 1982. She lived there all her life until moving to Kansas for college. As a drama student she has had voice and speech training, hence is aware that she has a regional dialect, mitigating its strength in the interview. However, she is able to talk about the features of the dialect and demonstrate a stronger version. Still of interest in her speech wil be the strong rhoticity and closed tone. Also notice her pronunciation of go, boat, snow etc.; dog, on, strong, job, etc.; and goose, tune, zoo etc. The recording includes her singing an unofficial 'state song', and a story of the appearance of a moose on the main street of the state capitol. Running time, 00:04:55
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
I was born in Bismarck, North Dakota. Uh, a blustery winter, of course, starting in September. Um, I lived in North Dakota all my life, surrounded by Germans and Norwegians. We were one of the only Irish families there. Um, when we were in school we were taught to salute the flag and we bought our groceries in bags…and when we go outside, we put on our coats and when we go to the lake we ride in boats and uheh, we’re I lived about three hours from the Canadian border so it was just a short trip and then you could hear an even more pronounced, um, accent. People where I’m from would say, “ay” after certain sentences and you can here a slight “aboot” when we say “about”. I lived in nnn..North Dakota, I lived in the same bedroom eighteen years of my life until I moved to Kansas, which is eight hundred miles south . I lived in Bismarck, North Dakota, which is the capitol and there’s probably about sixty thousand people that live there, so it’s not a small tiny town but…um..I lived on one of the busiest streets but even then..um, we’ve had deer in our back yard and rabbits and raccoons and there was once, when I was little, and it was April probably the eh very end of April almost early May when I was thirteen and we had a tremendous snow storm that shut down the town for four days and cars were buried and it was like ten feet of snow or something ridiculous and there was actually a moose that was walking down Main Street. I learned this song when I was in first grade..um they passed out copies of the North Dakota s-state song which I don’t remember that one and they passed out, you know, copies of all the different national songs and things that we needed to learn for some government presentation and then another one they passed out was the North Dakota song and everywhere I go, every national conference or anything I’ve ever been to, this is the thing that people get the biggest kick out of . You ought to go to North Dakota, see the cattle and the wheat and the folks that can’t be beat, you ought to go to North Dakota but you just can’t say goodbye. The skies are bluer than blue, the folks are friendlier too and if you don’t believe me, well there’s only one thing to do, you ought to go to North Dakota but you just can’t say goodbye.
UNSCRIPTED SPEECH TRANSCRIBED BY PHIL HUBBARD 19 MAY, 2008