Inner Mongolia 1

Listen to Inner Mongolia 1, a 21-year-old woman from Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 21

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 11/08/1995

PLACE OF BIRTH: Ordos, Inner Mongolia

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Chinese

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: fourth year of college

AREAS OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The speaker lived in mid-Michigan, in the United States, for three academic years.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The speaker’s first language is Chinese, and her parents are from China. She was raised in Inner Mongolia in a community where many residents are originally from Shanxi, in northern China.

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

RECORDED BY: Karen Vance (under supervision of Deric McNish)

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 30/03/2017

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’m 21. Uh, I’m from China. Like I used to, I really, mmm, isolated from my sister. I don’t like to play with my, uh, siblings or talk with my parents a lot but, uh, like going here, like coming here, to study like make me have s-hus tactics like learning more stuff to, how to, communicate with them, like how to be a [smack] better sister or better daughter. [sniff] Mmm, like it make me become more accept of others, like, umm, I can think in other’s side. Uh, to understand others, and I don’t know if a lot of people know it, but, uh, I wanna be an — I always be a person like be honest person, like, mmm, I don’t like — I don’t want to lie to others; I don’t want to say anything I don’t want to say. Like I try to be a person what I, uh, think is what I will say, but I won’t hurt others, but, uh, I wanna be a honest person. Yeah.

[Subject was asked to tell a joke. She speaks the following in Chinese and then in English]:

丽娜未能怀孕，便去教堂祈求。一年之后，她果然生了一子。一朋友得知后也想试 试看，丽娜说：没问题，只要那个年轻的看门人还在。

Uh, so Lena cannot pregnant, so she pray in a church. After a year, she had a son. She got pregnant and had a son. So, uh, one friend knows that and want to try too, so Lena told her that that’s no problem as long as the young gardener was there.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Karen Vance (under supervision of Deric McNish)

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 05/04/2017

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

While the speaker is fairly fluent in English, some of the vocabulary in Comma Gets a Cure is unfamiliar, which affects her pronunciation. Some nonstandard pronunciation should be taken as an indication of her English language ability. /l/ either becomes /ɹ/ or /u/, or  gets dropped completely. / ɹ/ is molar, or “dark,” and occasionally nasal. /z/ becomes devoiced. /v/ is still voiced, but the lips and teeth don’t come together completely, so it sounds a bit like /w/. /ð/ becomes /z/ or /d/, and /θ/ becomes /s/ or /t/. Nasal consonants seem to blend together, with words ending in /n/ sounding like /ŋ/. The tongue depresses slightly on /ɛ/ to become a sound closer to /æ/, which may be related to her overall oral posture. It seems as though she creates lots of space by depressing her tongue and raising her soft palate.

COMMENTARY BY: Deric McNish

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 28/04/2017

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.