Young people at Cambridge
Image from here
Thanks to Alex and Dharmendra. Alex, do let us know how your students enjoy their walk in the jungle …
And Dharmendra, thanks so much for drawing our attention to this video.
It contains a lovely short selection of different speakers, mostly from the UK, but one from the USA (I think) and a couple for whom (it would seem) English is not their first language.
I assume that many of our students would really want to understand these young people, but might not necessarily want to speak like them. What do people think about this?
There is one speaker who I find very difficult to catch – and (I learned from a related Cambridge video) SHE IS FROM BIRMINGHAM WHERE I LIVE! Jeepers. She is the young lady – at 1:24 – in the white top standing next to a young man (who doesn’t speak). And I have had to listen to three or four times at 1:29 into the video to begin to understand what she is saying. Having been to Oxford myself, the normal thing for me to do would be to BLAME CAMBRIDGE (because they are a rival university). But I think it is the way young people speak these days in their private social speech, and she doesn’t moderate her speech for this interview.
Here are some comments about other moments – I am interested in the soundshapes of ‘I would’, ‘definitely’, and ‘visited’.
[1] ‘I would’: the first speaker who starts at 8 seconds begins with a lovely jungle call: ‘I would definitely’ where his ‘I would’ seems to be without consonants, and I hear as something like a wolf-howl (I know wolves don’t live in jungles, but they do live in the wild) |æ.uː|.
[2] ‘Definitely’: then the same speaker ‘it’s definitely’ – which is something close to ‘sdeff.ny’ (close to the proper name Stephanie); and the penultimate speaker (1:34) in the multi-coloured top begins with ‘and definitely’ where her ‘definitely’ sounds close to ‘deff.nut.lee’
[3] ‘Visited’: Here is my transcription of the penultimate speaker. Notice that ‘visited’ in 05 is in a squeeze zone – and on the video it sounds to me that it is close to ‘viz.tid’ – two syllables rather than three, and it is squeezed into a very short soundshape compared to the prominent syllables before and after it. Notice also the pronunciation of the first syllable of ‘perfect’ which rhymes with ‘car!
01 || and DEFinitely ||
02 || GO and VISit the COLLeges ||
03 || … because… ||
04 || i KNEW that ||
05 || WHEN i visited MY college ||
06 || i KNEW that it was the PERfect place for ME ||
What do other people find of interest in this video? Do you hear it as ‘garden-like’ or ‘jungle-like’?
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