Connecticut 8

Listen to Connecticut 8, a 33-year-old man from Stamford, Connecticut, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

Both as a courtesy and to comply with copyright law, please remember to credit IDEA for direct or indirect use of samples. IDEA is a free resource; please consider supporting us.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 33

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 31/01/1988

PLACE OF BIRTH: Stamford, Connecticut

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: White/Jewish, with ancestry from Russia and Ukraine

OCCUPATION: engineer

EDUCATION: MBA

AREAS OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject lived in Durham, North Carolina, while attending college, and has lived in New York City since his college graduation.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

He says he has an open bite, meaning there might be open S sounds.

He is third-generation American, with all his grandparents born in the United States. (His mother was born in Philadelphia but raised in Connecticut, and his father was born in Brooklyn but raised in Connecticut.)

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

RECORDED BY: subject

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 25/03/2021

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 grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, which is in Fairfield County, very close to New York. I, uh, attended private school until I was in eighth grade and then switched over to public school. For college, I attended Duke University in North Carolina before then moving back to New York City, where I worked as an engineer for a defense contractor for five years. Um, I am now currently married and living in Astoria, Queens, uh, where I’ve been for the past eight years. I work in energy, helping, uh, state agencies reduce their energy consumption.

I’ve been interested in accents for a long time ever since watching Austin Powers, uh, the movie, and seeing a terrible, or, overacted British accent done by Mike Myers, and so I’ve been really interested in dialects since then. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at doing them. Uh, I do like to watch some YouTube videos like Erik Singer, who does tours of different accents and actors and helping them do their accents. Uh, but I’ve never really done any classes or anything like that myself.

I also learned how to speak Spanish in school and have found that my ability to kind of mimic some of the Spanish accents has helped my pronunciation. And so even if you’re not acting or trying to do, um, accents, I feel like learning some of the, the key elements of an accent might help with things like pronunciation of foreign languages.

TRANSCRIBED BY: subject

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 25/03/2021

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: 

The subject has lived in places (Connecticut and New York City) that are often known for their strong regional dialects and, occasionally, their lack of rhoticity. However, he exhibits very little regional dialect, instead coming close to a General American sound.

COMMENTARY BY: Cameron Meier

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 31/03/2021

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.