Virginia 1

Listen to Virginia 1, a 29-year-old woman from Hurt and Gretna, Virginia, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 29

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1970

PLACE OF BIRTH: Lynchburg, Virginia

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: store manager

EDUCATION: bachelor’s degree

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

The subject lived in Annapolis, Maryland, for three years and had been living in Lawrence, Kansas, for almost three years before the recording was made.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject has middle-class, college-educated parents and grandparents, although she was raised in a poor rural area of Virginia.

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

RECORDED BY: Paul Meier

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 1999

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 Lynchburg, Virginia, which is a sm–, uh, large community, um, that, that’s where the hospital was. I was actually — lived in Hurt, Virginia, most o’ my life. Um, I went to Gretna Senior High School, in Gretna, Virginia. It was a county high school, where we were bused, an hour each way each day, to the county high school. An’ then I went to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University at Blacksburg, Virginia, which is a state uni– … one of the state university colleges. Um, it’s mostly a technical school. Their strong points are, um, the sciences and engineering. And then I also got a Bachelor of Science degree in business management. And then from there I moved to … And that was in Blacksburg,Virginia, and I lived there about four and a half years. And then, from there I moved to Annapolis, Maryland, and I was a store manager, in the retail industry in Annapolis, Maryland, and I lived there for about three years. And then I moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and I’ve been here since 1995. My- – have mother, father, two sisters. Um, I lived for a short time in town. If you want to call it — Hurt has a population of fifteen hundred, if you want to call that a town, I lived there, till I was about 7 or 8 years old. ’N’ then we moved to a farm jus’ one block right outside the city limits of the town of Hurt, which is in Pittsylvania County. Um, so I lived on my farm till I was about 17. So I lived on the farm for about 10, 12 years. My fa– both my father and mother were college educated. Both my grandparents — all my grandparents were college educated. My grandfather, like I was telling the class, was the country doctor, and he did have a hospital in town for a while. So he ran, sort of, the city hospital, in Alta Vista, Virginia, which is another small community nearby, that has a population of 8,000. So he ran that sort of city hospital an’ was the city cor– county coroner for a while. So he gave birth to a lot of the people in the community. So he was real well liked in the community. Um, I was real active in high school. We didn’ have — m–my husband went to a real big city school, an’ they had all these sports, an’ all these things. We — that — we had some sports, but not — we didn’t have a real track or anything like that. Our football stadium got condemned. So ’s sort of a small — not one of the mor– … actually it’s one of the lowest — county in Virginia, in terms of wealth, that’s spent on education for its students. But we had really good teachers that really cared about us, and we were really fortunate in our s…

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 24/07/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Subject has careful, cultivated speech, though this is an excellent example of the dialect of the area, somewhat muted by her years in Kansas.

COMMENTARY BY: Paul Meier

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 1999

The archive provides:

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• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
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