Ontario 12

Listen to Ontario 12, a 47-year-old woman from St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 47

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1961

PLACE OF BIRTH: St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian with western European background

OCCUPATION: high school teacher

EDUCATION: university degree in English

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

The subject has lived in both Toronto and Kitchener, Ontario, for more than a year at a time.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

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

RECORDED BY: John Fleming

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 08/11/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

When I was in grade one, I had a particularly memorable Halloween costume.  I was inspired by the reading that the teacher was doing in class, from a book about this particularly pretty little witch, so I had in my mind that I wanted to be a witch, which I told my mother.  Now my mother had a lot of black clothes in her closet, so it worked out very well, because she had plenty of resources to draw on. But the costume didn’t turn out exactly as I had envisioned.  So she put together an assortment of black objects, and I put them on, and I must have showed by my down-turned expression, that these things just really didn’t appeal to me very much.  So my mom went ahead and picked out couple of other items that she thought might make me feel better after I told her I wanted to be a pretty witch.  So, I had a very short haircut at the time – a pixie cut was very much in vogue; I thought it was the ugliest haircut ever – so, I was very happy that my mom picked me up this little blonde wig with pigtails.  So I put on the little blonde wig that was sort of made out of a candy-floss-like material, and I put on this black, sort of gauzy thing that my mother had given me, and it wasn’t until much later that I realized it was actually an old nightgown of hers, which went on overtop of my thick sweater, and of course, I couldn’t go out trick-or-treating without the addition of the highly-attractive brown galoshes, which went over my shoes, and had a buckle that flapped.  Fortunately, there were plenty of sweets to make up for this really humiliating costume.

TRANSCRIBED BY: John Fleming

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 08/11/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Any r-colored vowels are much more closed than their non-r-colored counterparts, resulting in very dark r’s. The price [aɪ] vowel a very good example of “Canadian raising,” before a voiceless consonant but not before a voiced consonant (e.g., “price” but not “pride”).  Mouth [aʊ] before a voiceless consonant, as in “out,” also demonstrates Canadian raising, and is particularly noticeable in the unscripted speech. Goat vowels are very rounded and almost monophthongal. The features of the dialect of mainstream English speakers in Ontario can be heard at Professor Eric Armstrong’s website (http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ontario/words_and_phrases.html). Ontario 12 is featured as sample number 12 on that page.

COMMENTARY BY: John Fleming

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 08/11/2008

The archive provides:

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• 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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