Montana 2

Listen to Montana 2, a 20-year-old woman from Missoula, Montana, 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: 20

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 21/12/1996

PLACE OF BIRTH: Missoula, Montana

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: college junior

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

The speaker was a university student in mid-Michigan at the time of this recording. She had spent three academic years in mid-Michigan but returned to Missoula for summers and breaks.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

There are no other identifiable influences on this speaker’s speech.

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

RECORDED BY: Carlisle Shelson (under supervision of Deric McNish)

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 01/04/2017

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Well, the winters were normally pretty cold, and the summers really hot, so, like, the weather changed every five minutes. Like, one time at a track meet I was, um, started out like, hundred degrees-ish, sunny, then it started hailing; then that turned into sleet, and then one of those tents you put in the middle of the infield was, like, doing somersaults down it.

Well, for one thing, there’s, like, multiple chair lifts and, um, a huge tram that goes all the way up the mountain. The mountain I think is, I recall, about 12,000 feet, 13 maybe? Lots of skiing and, uh, you know, you don’t have to keep taking lifts to get up. You can still go all the way down the entire mountain in about probably half-hour.

OK, so it was, like, in fifth grade, I had this dream about me and my friends; we were on this like, sort of like a MTV show, and there were like — we were being interviewed about our number-one hit song, wait for it — drumroll — about banana peels.

Well, there’s AOII initiation; there’s meeting my boyfriend. We’ve been together for like a year and half, which was actually really fun, I mean, it was, like, during, um, Smoke Out Arthritis when we were having it down in the basement, he came down; that’s when we first met. But we met on Tinder, so that’s — well, yeah. Anyways. And then, uh, my shift ended at like 9 p.m., and then we sorta just hung out until 4 in the morning, just walking around campus.

Yes. Working with horses. Um, that happens quite frequently. Uh, there was an instant where, like, I was in eighth grade, and a horse jumped on top of me. I blacked out, and I don’t really know what happened; I just sort of woke up on the ground. And, yeah, I was alone at the time — well, my sister sort of ditched me, but, you know, siblings. And then recently, I almost, um, I got bucked off. I almost hit a metal beam, and I was at a trot going probably close to 15 miles per hour or so.

OK, so my freshman year of high school, I — this is probably my biggest injury. I got in a freestyle-ski accident, um, because of an idiot in the train park. My — I fractured my tibia, and then I tore my meniscus and strained both my ACL and MCL, and, um, I had to have two surgeries. The first one was to put a pin in it and repair the meniscus; the second one was to take out the pin.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Carlisle Shelson (under supervision of Deric McNish)

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 03/04/2017

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

The speaker’s prominent vocal fry is more connected to her age than her representative region. Note the dropped final plosives in words like “almost” and “accident.” She pronounces “futile” with the /aɪ/ diphthong, which is typical of the region. She lacks many of the markers of the north-central accent that one would hear in the eastern part of the state, such as the monophthongal mid-vowel /o/ that’s prominent in Minnesota. There’s no “pin/pen” merger; however, she does exhibit the “cot/caught” and “marry/merry/Mary” mergers.

COMMENTARY BY: Deric McNish

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 06/04/2017

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.