Nova Scotia 1

Listen to Nova Scotia 1, a 55-year-old man from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. 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: 55

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1944

PLACE OF BIRTH: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: security/access coordinator

EDUCATION: university degree in education

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

The subject lived for four years in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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

RECORDED BY: Susan Stackhouse

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 14/11/1999

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

After my naïve childhood, as far as, um, the opposite sex goes, we, um, sports took up most of my life and, uh, and, uh, played a number of them, not that successfully but, uh, quite a few, quite a few sports I’ve been involved in.  And then, uh, one day the, the famous four that I’ve already mentioned, uh, we, we played bridge, and of course that again in those days was something that 17 and 18-year-old boys didn’t do very often, so people probably thought we were quite strange.  We’d have all-night bridge games and, uh, at one of those bridge games, my friend, who was quite intelligent, um, who made very high marks in school and, and, uh, finished university at a young age, decided that because I was pretty good in bridge that I should also go to university, ‘cause up until that time I had not done very well in school.  So about 4 o’clock in the morning, one morning after about four hours of discussion he convinced me that I was a prime candidate for university.  So there I was with my grade eleven, um, partial and had to come up with, uh, two-and-a-half subjects in grade eleven to continue on to go to university.  So I worked at part-time jobs and full-time jobs and studied for about a year to get my, what they called in those days, Provincial Examinations.  So I wrote the Provincial Examinations, then did pass them and the marks weren’t too bad, so I went on to university.  And there I spent probably eight years to get five years so I still wasn’t a great student but I did, uh, manage to get that … that, uh, degree and also the … an education degree as well.  And went on to teach for four years.  I went to New Germany, Nova Scotia where I had an opportunity to teach right out of university and, uh, spent four years there on the Bridgewater/New Germany area and, uh, it was a good experience but I, I was afraid I, I’m afraid I was a, a Halifax-born and bred person and couldn’t really live in the country, especially without a family or anything to settle down.  So I eventually left there and came to Halifax, back to Halifax and, uh, worked in the area of recreation in Sackville, which is a community just outside of Halifax, about ten kilometers.  And, uh, that’s where I worked for twenty years.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Lynn Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 08/06/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Subject is the brother of Nova Scotia 2 and the father of Nova Scotia 3. Of interest is the lack of breath support, the pronunciation of the word “miracle” as “mericle,” and the strong “r” coloring obvious in the words “there” and “earth.” There is a strong example of Canadian Raising (mid-central starting point when the following consonant is voiceless) with the words “white light,” “nightly,” “life,” “prime,” and “quite”; and the closed “a” and strong “r” used for words “grade,” “strange,” “marks,” and “part-time.”

COMMENTARY BY: Susan Stackhouse

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 14/11/1999 and 02/05/2000

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.