Ohio 1

Listen to Ohio 1, a 53-year-old woman from Cleveland, Ohio, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 53

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1947

PLACE OF BIRTH: Cleveland, Ohio

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: N/A

EDUCATION: N/A

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

The subject lived in Miami and Homestead, Florida, but spent the vast majority of her life in the Cleveland area.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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

RECORDED BY: Cat Kenney

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 21/09/2000

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Growing up in LaGrange was kind of an experience.  Um, everybody knew everybody.  It was kinda like a little Peyton Place.  It was a farm community.  Everything centered around cows, and, uh, feed, and farm, uh, equipment, and anything: milk, an’ things like that.  Everybody was a farmer, um, everybody but me.  My family, uh, uh, well, they were teachers and railroad workers, so, um …  but everybody knew everybody, an’ actually it was kinda nice.  Um, I hated school.  I hated my teachers.  Um, I couldn’t wait to get out, because it was so small and I wanted to see the world.  Um, yes, there were a very few good teachers, um, maybe one or two. [Laughs]  Most of them were kind of mediocre, um, but the one or two good ones made up for the medio- mediocre one, or … Oh, my art teacher? He was — he was great.  Um, I’ll always remember him.  He, he wore a lotta hats, and, uh, he was just a lotta fun.  He taught us, uh, a great many things.  OK, well, during the time that I was growing up — it was the sixties, an’ “Dragnet” was big on TV — so we had a lotta [sings] “Duhn-da-duhn” in school, every time someone made a mistake.  An’ in Ohio, in the Cleveland area, there was this television personality named Ghoulardi, who was just a maniac, an’ all the kids loved him, so we all had our special phrases, to the horror of our parents, like “purple kaniff” and, uh, things like that.  We’d go around blowing up little things, with, uh, these little capguns an’ things.  Uh, he just was real derelict.  We all wanted to be …

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 02/07/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Subject was born and raised entirely in the Greater Cleveland area of Ohio, which includes the City of Cleveland and surrounding communities. Although she spent some time in Miami and Homestead Florida, there appear to be no characteristics of that region in her speech. Rather, she provides a classic example of what linguists might term the “north-midland” Ohio dialect, which relates to the broad dialectical pattern spoken from western Upstate New York through northwestern Pennsylvania and then through the northern tier of Ohio all the way to Toledo. Historically, this dialect developed in part because of the migration of early settlers from Connecticut following the Revolutionary War. Many of them were heading to a part of the country known as the “Western Reserve,” where huge tracts of land had been set aside or reserved for veterans of that conflict. Today, the northeastern Ohio area, stretching from the eastern boundary of the state west through the city of Lorain, is still often referred to as the Western Reserve. This subject reflects that heritage in the typical nasality of her speech, prominent in words that use the /æ / sound, such as “That” in the “Comma Gets A Cure passage” and the /a/ in such words as “on” and “office” in the same text. In addition, she has a hard or retroflexed /r/ that is identified with this dialect, in such words as “rare” and “Mary” and “cure.” She drops her /l/ almost completely in words like “palm” has a very slurry, casual type of pronunciation, particularly noticeable in “sentimental.” The conversational passage offers numerous other examples of these characteristics.

COMMENTARY BY: Cat Kenney

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 21/09/2000

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.