New Hampshire 3

Listen to New Hampshire 3, a 25-year-old man from Sandown, New Hampshire, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 25

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1975

PLACE OF BIRTH: near Boston, Massachusetts (but moved almost immediately to Sandown, New Hampshire)

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: acting student, model

EDUCATION: college

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

The subject was born near Boston but raised from the age of three months in Sandown, New Hampshire. At age 18, he moved away to attend college in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he studied engineering. He then moved to Italy to work as a fashion model and, several months before the date of the recording, to New York City to pursue a career in acting.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The participant suspects that the tempo of his speech has slowed as a consequence of his having lived away from home, but his dialect remains representative in important respects.

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

RECORDED BY: Esther K. Chae

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 11/11/2000

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 New Hampshire, a town called Sandown, small population, about 5,000 people.  Very small town.  Born and raised there.  Actually, I was born in a different city, but, uh, I was brought there at three months old, and I was raised there for the rest of my life in the same town.  It’s, uh, it’s definitely the simple life. I’m real excited ’cause I’m going back there for, uh, Thanksgiving, so, that should be interesting, but, uh, I don’t usually get back there too often, you know.  It’s usually a long weekend here and there, but other than that, no.  It’s about, uh, four hours, by car.   Um, plane is only 45 minutes, which is good, but then you gotta get from the city up, up to New Hampshire, you know, which is an hour.  Or if you fly into New Hampshire, but now the plane tickets have just gone crazy.  They’re four hundred dollars.  Yeah, you could fly to Paris, you know, for a weekend for cheaper than that.  Which is insane to me, but, God, I lived there for 20, 20 years.  No, I lived there for 18 years, and then when I went to college, I moved to a town called Lowell, Massachusetts.  That is where there’s a university that’s — it’s a good size, about 12,000 people [unclear]. About my third year, I left and moved to Milan, Italy, to start a career over there in modeling and stuff like that.  Someone approached me, and they had an agent in Boston, and all this big stuff.  Well, a friend of mine was actually working with this agent in Boston.  And I was on the football team with him at school, so he’s like, “Yeah, I want you to come down with me.” And I was like talking to my girlfriend, and like, “What do you think about this? You know, it seems a little weird to me.”  You know, it was just really strange.  And then I went there, and she was like, “Oh yeah,” you know, and she started working with me.  And two months later she brought me to, to New York, for a convention.  So I was — I was like, “Uh, OK.”  And then when I was here for a week, somebody — you know, I got a bunch of offers and stuff like that.  People wanting me to go to Florida, or, you know, LA, or, you know, wherever.  Really strange places, you know, Tokyo and, uh … I decided to go to Milan, ’cause, you know, it’s a really cheap way to start a career, as far as, I mean, that’s what they told me. …

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 20/11/2007

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Regarding prosody, the listener may notice a loud, abrupt punch on stressed syllables and a reduction of syllables (“normally” and “expensive). For consonants, take note of the varied realization of the letter “r” after a vowel and active use of the tongue-tip in “-ing” endings (“morning” and “suffering”). Also notice the dental “th” (“there” and “stuff like that”) and the voicing in “MassachuSets.” Regarding vowels, there is a split of the historical lexical set TRAP so that some words (e.g., “managed”) come to rhyme with DRESS words, while other words (e.g., “trap” itself) maintain a more open vowel as does BATH (but not as open as so-called intermediate “a” for this talker). As in many other Northeastern American accents, the TRAP split is conditioned by the identity of the following consonant. The present passage is too short to allow a full analysis of the split, but it seems that this talker’s pattern may be different from either the pattern typical of Metro New York, where BATH is reported to merge with those TRAP words having the higher, not the lower, vowels, and also different from the pattern typical of the Northern cities, where the TRAP and BATH lexical sets are reported to merge completely. (For a discussion of the Northern cities vowel shift, see much of the work of William Labov. For a definition of the lexical set concept, see Volume One of J. C. Wells, 1982, “Accents of English.” Cambridge University Press.) TRAP words before “r” have an open vowel, but so do some SQUARE words (“Sarah” rhymes with “Harrison,” not “Mary”). Regarding the NORTH/FORCE set, you will notice they are virtually identical here. There is a fairly low, back vowel in the LOT, THOUGHT and CLOTH lexical sets, all alike in vowel length (half-long, perhaps), but, in the present sample, variable in lip-rounding, even from instance to instance of the same word (e.g., “Comma”). You will notice a mid-open front vowel in START, especially front in “car” and in the word “start” itself the last time it occurs toward the end of the unscripted material. This is the famed “Park your car in Harvard Yard” lexical set. GOOSE and CURE: No yod (that is, no liquid “u”) after tongue-tip consonants including “t,” “d” and “n” (“Duke,” “new,” and “tune”). There is a fairly back vowel in GOOSE and a mid-open vowel in DRESS. Lastly, happY is said with a very close vowel.

COMMENTARY BY: Doug Honorof

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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