[Ads-l] Joseph C. Mele dialect audio collection

[Zuzanna Witt]

“I hope this brief summary
that I have placed on this tape
will give some interest to those
who have the pleasure
of hearing it at some date in the future.” Audio transcript from 1976, informant born in 1908, Dallas County, AL

I wanted to share a short excerpt from a recording in the Joseph C. Mele audio collection that really struck me when I first heard it. While this particular recording clearly illustrates the observer’s paradox, the wider collection includes materials featuring free, relaxed, and uncontrolled speech, as well as phonetic passages read aloud for those interested in phonetic analysis. The respondents are from many US states, and there are some from other countries as well. Some of them were born as early as the 1880s.

https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/eadafc.af019009

I came across the collection at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and thought it might be of interest to the members of this list. I’ve accessed some recordings from the southern US for my research, but the collection as a whole seems to be virtually unexplored.


Zuzanna Witt


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Zuzanna Witt
zuzanna.witt at amu.edu.pl<mailto:zuzanna.witt at amu.edu.pl>
Faculty of English [PhD candidate]
The School of Language and Literature Studies
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland





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