England 54

Listen to England 54, a woman in her late 40s from Salford, Lancashire, in northwest England. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: late 40s

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1950s

PLACE OF BIRTH: Salford, Lancashire

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: white

OCCUPATION: librarian

EDUCATION: N/A

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

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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

RECORDED BY: Lynn Watson

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 13/08/2002

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

And for us children, it was fantastic because the block where we lived was one of four that formed a square, and in the middle of this square was a huge playground where we spent all of our time. And we were, we were very fortunate that we had lots of things there that other children didn’t have: um, parallel bars, single bars to swing on, monkey climbers, swings, slides, the umbrella, um, and … an, an umbrella was, um, a kind of a conical shape with … *made out of bars, and at the bottom of the cone there were seats, and this was *kind of suspended on a single pole. It was like an upside-down ice-cream cone on a, on a s…, and it went ’round. Walkden, and he used to say he was getting the bus to Wogden. [Interviewer: Who said that?] Me dad. He was getting the bus to Wogden, and I thought “Where’s this place, Wogden?” And it was Walkden, but me Dad had picked up that in Walkden; they spoke with an accent and they called it Wogden. So he was working in Wogden. W A L K D E N: Walkden. [Interviewer: And he said?] Wogden. That’s the accent. With … within the area of of where I lived, um, there were towns like Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, Bury. And each would have their own accent. Even Swinton, which was only four miles up from us, had its own accent. And *um in later years I found that when, when I was mixing with people from these places when I talked about a barmcake, they would they would be talking about a muffin or an oven bottom. And a barmcake to me was, um, something similar to a burger bun, made out of *dough, quite a light, light kind of dough, um, and a, a similar shape but without any seeds or anything on it. Barmcake: B-A-R-M C-A-K-E.
[* = vocalic pause]

TRANSCRIBED BY: Kevin Flynn

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 31/08/2007

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Please note, in this commentary, phonetic [ ] are often presented as / /.  Additionally, [ɹ] is presented as [r].

Features:

Tendency away from lip rounding. Vowels at ends of phrases tend to be lengthened.
Listen for the rising inflection/pitch patterns that are a distinguishing aspect of the dialect.
Dropping of post-vocalic “r.”
“-y” syllable at ends of words tends to be given extra stress and pronounced /ɛ/.
“greasy” = [grisɛ].
Extra elongation of vowels in some stressed syllables intensifies their stress and lends to a perception of some choppiness in delivery.
/a/ phoneme tends to some nasality, including in diphthong /aɪ/.
“happy, that” = hãpɪ ðãt; much [ʊ].
/k/ is often added to the nasal “-ng” /ŋ/, sometimes as a linking sound.
“growing up” = groʊɪŋ͜ kʊp.
Occasional glottal stop for final stop-plosive.
“street” = striʔ; “back yard” = bæʔ jɑd; “ate” = ɛt.
Pronoun “my” pronounced = mɪ.

COMMENTARY BY: Lynn Watson, Unicode trans. Dylan Paul

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 13/08/2002

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.