Ontario 15

Listen to Ontario 15, a 17-year-old girl from Hanover, Ontario, Canada. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 17

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1990

PLACE OF BIRTH: London, Ontario, Canada

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: visual artist and customer-service representative

EDUCATION: high school graduate

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

The subject was raised in Hanover, Ontario. She had lived in Barrie, Ontario, for seven years at the time of this recording.

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): 27/12/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

All right, so, when I was little, we, I used to go up to a cottage with my whole family, and my cousins, and my, uh, aunts and uncles, and grandma and grandpa, and it used to be owned by my grandma, but then they sold it, and now we’ve rented it again.  And my uncle would always make fish that we caught, from the lake, and using the exact same recipe, and it was a huge mystery.  So one day we decided we would figure it out, the, how it was made, so we did some sleuthing, of sorts, and, um, scurried our way around the kitchen, and found various spices, and tried to see which ones were being taken off the rack, as we, as the fish were being made and fried up.  I think, looking back now, it was probably just Mrs. Dash, or like, something like that.  Maybe a little flour and oil; it’s really no mystery at all, but I think the secret ingredient may have been salt, if I remember correctly.  It wasn’t anything even that exciting, it was just stuff.  But still, we managed to waste a good two days with that, and that’s what that’s about, you know, just, waste some time looking for, um, secret spices, like the Colonel, or something.

TRANSCRIBED BY: John Fleming

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 27/12/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Cure and poor are typically unrounded.  The TRAP lexical set sometimes has nasalization, particularly before or after a nasal consonant.  Generally, her mouth is quite closed, and the palate lowered, causing back vowels to come forward (e.g., “palm” [ɑ̘]).  Final consonants are often omitted entirely, or if spoken, are rarely released. [u] vowels rarely have an onglide, and on words where there is, the initial vowel is extremely short.  The PRICE and MOUTH lexical sets exhibit “Canadian raising” before voiceless consonants, as in “spice” and “exciting” or “out” and “about.” Medial and final [ɫ] consonants are often quite dark, and any [s] consonants are quite close to the teeth and quite high in pitch. (The features of the dialect of mainstream English speakers in Ontario can be heard at Professor Eric Armstrong’s website. Ontario 15 is featured as sample number 15 on that page.)

COMMENTARY BY: John Fleming

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 27/12/2008

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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