Connecticut 1

Listen to Connecticut 1, a 44-year-old man from Norwalk, Connecticut, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 44

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 28/02/1967

PLACE OF BIRTH: Norwalk, Connecticut

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Irish/German Caucasian

OCCUPATION: software designer

EDUCATION: Ph.D.

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

Subject lived in Ithaca, New York, from 1985 to1989. He has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Santa Clara and San Jose) since 1989, so this is not a good example of a pure Connecticut dialect.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

Subject’s father had a strong Brooklyn accent, and this may have had an influence.

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

RECORDED BY: Mark Keavney

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 17/04/2011

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 Norwalk, Connecticut, which is in the southwestern part of Connecticut, in Fairfield County; that’s the part that’s closest to New York City. Uh, I lived, um, I was born in 1967. I lived 18 years my life there, uh, and then I went to college in upstate New York, in Ithaca, and then after that in 1989, I went to, uh, the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’ve been there ever since, in the South Bay. I live in, uh, San Jose right now. I don’t feel like the way I’ve talked has really changed much. I feel like people speak pretty much the same in the San Francisco Bay Area as when I grew up, but I suppose it’s possible it’s changed. I, uh, my, uh, my dad was, uh, grew up in Brooklyn, New York; my mom, uh, grew up in Rochester, in upstate New York. Um, so Norwalk is pretty close to New York City; it’s maybe an hour’s train ride or so, um, but I, we always felt that we spoke differently from people in New York. And, I had some cousins, for example who, uh, lived in New Jersey, and they, whenever they came to visit they definitely spoke with a big accent. Um, and my dad, uh, the kids, I was the youngest of six kids, and we used to kind of tease my dad sometimes, because he would speak in ways that we, to me, to us was very, uh, was like a Brooklyn accent, or there was, it was different than the way we spoke. So, for example, he would say orange instead of orange; we would all say orange. Um, and he would, he would say, um, for like Mary, the girl’s name, or marry like marrying someone, or, or eat, drink and be merry, we would pronounce those all the same; it’s all marry to us, but he would pronounce them differently, something like marry, or merry. Um, so we would sometimes talk about that. Uh, so local names, so Norwalk, um, some of the r-, uh, towns around it are Wilton, New Canaan, Darien, Westport; um, if you go towards New York, along the coast there, there’s also Stamford and Greenwich, um, and then the opposite way, um, after Westport, it’s Fairfield, Bridgeport, New Haven, um, and up north is Danbury, after Wilton and New Canaan.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Mark Keavney

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 17/04/2011

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:

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• 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).

 

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