Connecticut 5

Listen to Connecticut 5, a 21-year-old woman from Trumbull, Connecticut, 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): 20/08/1992

PLACE OF BIRTH: Laguna Beach, California (but raised in Connecticut)

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: college student

EDUCATION: At the time of this recording, the subject was planning to graduate from college in May 2014.

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

She lived in Dana Point, California, as an infant from 1992 to 1993. Since then, she has lived in Stratford and Trumbull, Connecticut.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

Her father grew up in Orinda, California, so that might have had an effect on her dialect. She says that when her parents and she took a dialect survey from the New York Times, however, it appeared that her speech was much more heavily influenced by her mother, who grew up in Connecticut.

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

RECORDED BY: Emma Lazaroff (Subject)

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 27/12/2013

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 Laguna Beach, California, in 1992, and my family moved when I was about a year old to Stratford, Connecticut, and I stayed there until I was about 5 years old, and then I moved to Trumbull, which I have stayed in since then. And my mother grew up in Bridgeport, which is right underneath Trumbull … her entire life, and she moved to San Francisco — I think in her late twenties — and met my father, who had grown up in Orinda, California, which is about twenty – twenty, twenty-five minutes east of San Francisco. So they met there, and they got married in ’87, and moved to Connecticut with me in 1993 to be with my mother’s family, and they’re all Portuguese and they’re all from Connecticut. So, um, there’s some regional dialect here that I’ve noticed that’s different from other places, ’cause I have, um, my boyfriend’s from Rockford, Illinois, and I have a bunch of friends that go to my university that come from different states, like in the Midwest or on the West Coast. I’ve noticed that we have, um, certain phrases like, if you’re at a restaurant, and the waiter asks if you need anything else, and you, you say “I’m all set.” I’ve noticed that if I’ve traveled to a so-sort of Southern state or something, or the Midwest, they don’t understand “all set”; they don’t, they don’t really know what it means. And, um, I’ve also noticed different things like “bureau” for, for, like, a dresser, and, um, “pocketbook” for a purse, “cruller” is a doughnut, um … “frappe” is a milkshake. So, uh, oh, also, “Mischief Night.” I’ve noticed that “Mischief Night” seems to be something that’s really a unique term to our area, which is the night before Halloween, when people do things like toilet-papering a house. There’s something I also noticed about the, uh, Connecticut accent, is that it does seem kind of like a slight version of a New York accent. And I’ve noticed that my friends from New York have a more — a stronger difference between the words “cot” and “caught.” Like, there’s a little bit of a dip in the word “caught,” but in New York it’s like “caught,” so it’s very much stronger, but I’ve noticed that Connecticut seems to be kind of a, a lighter version of that.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Emma Lazaroff (Subject)

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION: 27/12/2013

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.