Ontario 14

Listen to Ontario 14, a 47-year-old man from Carlisle, St. Thomas, and London, 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: Carlisle, Ontario

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: art teacher and musician

EDUCATION: university degree in art and drama, and a bachelor’s degree in education

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

The subject lived in St. Thomas and London, Ontario, for more than ten years.

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): 29/12/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Well, I’m just going to share with you some of my, uh, good fortune in the last few months, of looking around for used instruments and music gear: yard sales, church sales, second-hand stores, ’cause that always is what I’m looking for when I accompany my wife out on yard-saling ventures.  And, I guess last spring, I found a beautiful PV amplifier, and a beat up Stratocaster at a yard sale out by mom and dad’s house, paid, uh, just a small fraction of what it was worth.  That was a pretty good, uh, a good start to the spring yard sale season.  And then, um, I got out to, got out to Reno, Nevada, and found a, uh, a really nice, 30-year-old Japanese acoustic guitar, um, in fine shape, again for like, um, I think I paid twenty-five bucks for this thing, and, uh, it’s just been, it’s been one of my favorite guitars.  And then recently, on, uh, Kijiji, I found a, uh, amplifier and Stratocaster copy, and I thought the Stratocaster copy might be a nice guitar to give away for a Christmas present, but then I got it home, put some new strings on it, tuned it up, and it plays much better than most Stratocaster copies, and so I decided to keep it for myself.

TRANSCRIBED BY: John Fleming

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 29/12/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

The mouth lexical set undergoes “Canadian raising” before a voiceless consonant, but not before a voiced consonant (e.g., “mouth” but not “around”), heard clearly in “Comma Gets a Cure.” The dress lexical set is quite open (e.g., “pet”). Final plosive consonants  – if spoken  – are rarely released and are sometimes co-articulated with a glottal. In the r-colored diphthongs, the secondary vowel is shortened, resulting in variations. 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 14 is featured as sample number 14 on that page.

COMMENTARY BY: John Fleming

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 29/12/2008

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).

 

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