California 1

Listen to California 1, a 21-year-old woman from Canoga Park, Los Angeles, California, United States. 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): N/A

PLACE OF BIRTH: Panorama City, California

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: At the time of the recording, subject was a theatre student.

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

The subject was raised in Canoga Park, California.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

This self-confessed ‘Valley Girl” does indeed have the glottalization, the “questioning” intonation, and the creaky voice associated with that dialect.

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

RECORDED BY: Claudia Anderson

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:

… Valley girl, like, totally for sure. And I, yeah I grew up in, like, Canoga Park, which is, um, kinda like, near, like, Woodland Hills and stuff, [voice unclear] like, near Topanga Canyon. And I have this older brother, and he’s wonderful. I actually, just this past summer we became, like, best friends. But we’ve always like hated each other. He’s, um, 25 and I’m 20. He’d sit on my face and fart and it smelled like rotten corn. And he would, pin me down and hock loogies, you know, and like suck ’em back up right before they hit my face. And, ah, he, ah, he used to tell me about this old lady that would come and take me away if I was bad, or if I wasn’t nice to him or something. And, um, so one day he dressed up in, um, old lady clothes. And he had this gray wig. He was…I was like four, so he was like nine or ten or something. And, um, he dressed up like this old lady and he knocked on the front door. Like he went out the back door and he came around to the front door and he knocked. And my nanny opened the door and, like, I just saw him and, like, freaked out and ran away. But the best story of all is: we had just moved into a new house, um, in, like, West Hills, which is kind of, like, nicer than Canoga Park, so it was like a big deal. And, um, and I came home from school one day and he had this, like, crazy room. Like, he was, like, kind of a fucked-up kid. He was, like, doing a lot of drugs at a really young age. And, like, his walls were painted with, like, demons. He’s an incredible artist. So, like the walls had, like, just these amazing murals of these, like, really evil demons all over them. And, like, the inside of cassette tapes were stapled all over the ceiling. So there was just, like, black stringy stuff, like, hanging down from the ceiling all over. And, like, um, just everything was, like, black and dark and evil looking. And he had, like, a board with, like, black widows painted all over it that he’d caught and pinned while they were still alive. So he’d taken my grandpa had made me this beautiful wooden cradle and given me a baby doll to put inside the cradle, and my grandpa was dead now. And my brother took that baby doll and he set it on…wait, he nailed it to a wooden cross he built, like, he nailed it upside down to a wooden cross and set it on fire, and hung it on the wall in his room. And I came home from school and he was like…and I was probably like five so he was like ten. Oh my God! [laughs] Oh my God, this is so horrible. I got home from school and he’s, like, “Trisha! Guess what I did to your doll. It’s so cool. You’re gonna love it!” And he was serious. And I was like, “OK, what did you do?” And I, like, follow him into, like, the bedroom and, um, maybe I, maybe he was twelve and I was seven…that sounds, like, more right. Um, so I follow him into his bedroom, which I was always really scared to go in his bedroom anyway. So, like, I would stick close by his side. And, ah, and I see this doll, like, hanging on upside down crucifix, like, burnt to a crisp hanging above his bed and I flipped out. Like, I was screaming and crying and, like [makes sobbing sound]. And I took it to my mom and my mom, like, took it off the crucifix and she was like, “There, you have your doll back.” And I was like, “What?!?” Like, its hair was, like, burnt and, like, melted ’cause it had, like, that, you know, like, plastic hair. It was awful. I was so upset.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Mitchell Kelly

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/01/2008

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.