Ontario 17

Listen to Ontario 17, a 48-year-old man from Capreol and other parts of Ontario, Canada. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 48

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1960

PLACE OF BIRTH: Mattawa, Ontario, Canada

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: mechanical engineer, high school teacher

EDUCATION: university degree in engineering

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

Raised in Capreol, Ontario, this subject lived across northern Ontario, and lived for several years in Kitchener/Waterloo and then in London, Ontario. At the time of this recording, he was living in St. Thomas, Ontario.

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): 22/11/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

My mother always used to catch us whenever we got a soaker, which is stepping in a puddle, and soaking our socks, or whatever.  However, the one day, it was early spring, or late spring, I guess, we were out and playing on a raft in the middle of a swamp, and the raft sort of tilted the one direction, and we fell off into the water, and were up to our knees in water, and we were soaked.  So we climbed out of the swamp, and we went down to the local river which ran through the town, and at that time, you could swim there, and there was this little lifeguard stand, so we climbed up on the lifeguard stand, and we sat up there for a couple hours, waiting for our clothes to dry, and, I guess it got dry enough, because when we got home, I did not get into trouble, my mother did not figure out that I had got a soaker at all, even though we were playing on a raft, in the late spring, in water which we probably should not have been doing.  That would be myself and my friend that lived down the street – he was probably about five houses down the street – and he used to have a bathtub in his backyard that was buried, so it was at ground level, and we used to fill it with water, and then we’d put rocks in, and then we’d go down to Candlor’s Pond, which was about two blocks away from our houses, and we would catch turtles, and frogs, and, and tadpoles, and crayfish, and whatever else we could find, and we would put them into his bathtub, and it was quite the little t’rarium out there, with all sorts of different wild critters in there that we used to catch.

TRANSCRIBED BY: John Fleming

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 22/11/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

There is an interesting play between glottal fry and resonance, heard in several other examples of men his age. Final plosive consonants  – particularly [t]  – are co-articulated with glottals, and sometimes even replaced with glottal stops (e.g., “start a” or “kit and”). Also, the PALM lexical set is quite far back in the mouth, becoming almost a [ɔ] (e.g., “palm” in “Comma Gets a Cure”). Plosive medial consonants are often slid over, or not articulated at all (e.g. ,“beautiful” or “different”). He is a good example of “Canadian raising,” with mouth changing before a voiceless consonant, but not before a voiced consonant (e.g., “mouth” but not “around”). The PRICE lexical set also undergoes “Canadian raising” before a voiceless consonant but not before a voiced consonant (e.g., “price” but not “pride”). 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 17 is featured as sample number 17 on that page.

COMMENTARY BY: John Fleming

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 22/11/2008

The archive provides:

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• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
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