Egypt 1

Listen to Egypt 1, a 55-year-old man from Cairo, Egypt. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

Both as a courtesy and to comply with copyright law, please remember to credit IDEA for direct or indirect use of samples.  IDEA is a free resource;  please consider supporting us.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 55

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 4/04/1944

PLACE OF BIRTH: Switzerland (but raised in Cairo)

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Egyptian (exact ethnicity unknown)

OCCUPATION: engineer

EDUCATION: Subject doesn’t say, but we may infer an engineering degree.

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject was born in Switzerland and lived there for about one year as a baby. Other than that, he’s lived in Cairo his entire life.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject doesn’t mention his father’s ethnicity, but he does say his father was working in Switzerland when he was born. This might have had some effect on the subject’s accent, although his entire adult life has been spent in Cairo.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Krista Scott

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I was born in Switzerland in 1944. Actually on the fourth of April, 1944. Only happens ten times century or eleven times century. Anyhow, I was back home in Egypt when my father was transferred to Egypt in 1945 and uh since then I lived in Cairo. It’s very difficult to live in Cairo … nowadays, but before that it was beautiful, really beautiful in the old days. Cairo was originally designed for two million persons. Now they have about sixteen million persons. Imagine sixteen million persons living in an area originally designed for two million persons. Anyhow, we are surviving, but is getting worse and worse, worse and worse every day. We Egyptians because we live today here for long time, we don’t feel much to difference … ’cause things are changing very badly but when we think of the old days, then it’s very difficult for us to continue, uh, living in the same city with this huge amount of people around us. Even the weather changed. We used to have beautiful greenery around us. We used to have rain. We used to have beautiful weather now it stopped, it’s very hot every day … ee …. we don’t have winters anymore; it’s very, a long summer with a variation of temperature, but we don’t have winter; we don’t have even, uh, spring. It’s all long summer. Three, three hundred sixty-five days of summer.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Phil Hubbard

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 28/05/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

• Recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select.
• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

 

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.