Ontario 18

Listen to Ontario 18, a 49-year-old man from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 49

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1959

PLACE OF BIRTH: Hamilton, Ontario

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: engineer

EDUCATION: bachelor’s degree

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

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): 23/11/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Uh, I didn’t like going to church.  I thought it was kind of dumb, especially Sunday School.  Didn’t get Sunday School at all.  And, so, eventually, I would, uh, hide in the closet, because kids really, they don’t know what to do because you have no power, so I would just hide in my closet and hope my mother wouldn’t find me, but eventually she would, and then, eventually she caught on, and I think she might have stopped going to church as well.  But the other confusion, also about church, although I don’t think it was around the same, at exactly the same time as that was: My father died before I was born, so when you went to church, they’re always talking about Our Father, Who art in Heaven.  And, uh, after a while, I started wondering why all these people cared about my father, so much that, that every week talk about it.  I think I must have been pretty young for that one, so, so, we didn’t do them that often, so it was always an experience when we did.  This would’ve been in the fall, and it might have just been a weeknight, too, ’cause it didn’t seem to be anything special.  But we, uh, we went into the forest, a local forest called King’s Forest, and it was nighttime, and, you know, they started to kick in, so you know, you’re starting to enjoy the effect, and then it started to rain.  So we said, “Ah, you know, rain.” So we all ran back to the car.  Now, on the way back to the car, the ground, the grade of the ground rose gradually, but perhaps a change of, you know, over the course of a hundred yards, it might have gone up, maybe, four or five feet.  For some reason, while running that, as fast as I can – at least that’s how I remember running back to the car – my eyes stayed level, even though the grade was changing beneath me, to the point where I ended out falling down because my knees hit my chest.  So I actually ran and maintained my head at a flat point, until I couldn’t do it anymore, and all my friends thought, they thought I was pretty funny.  So yeah, so, there you go, that’s my tortured tale.

TRANSCRIBED BY: John Fleming

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 23/11/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

The DRESS lexical set is quite open, heard clearly in “vet.” The LOT lexical set is also more open than other Ontario samples, heard in “dog” and “cost.” Where possible, he elides articles and other “unimportant” words into the surrounding words, often sacrificing unvoiced or fricative consonants (e.g., “bowl of porridge”). “Canadian raising” can be heard in the PRICE lexical set  – particularly in “nighttime”  – where the vowel changes when before the voiceless consonant, but not the voiced. The mouth lexical set also undergoes “Canadian raising” before a voiceless consonant, but not before a voiced consonant (e.g., “mouth” but not “around”). 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 18 is featured as sample number 18 on that page.

COMMENTARY BY: John Fleming

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 23/11/2008

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