Ontario 19

Listen to Ontario 19, a 53-year-old man from Dundas, Ontario, Canada. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 53

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1955

PLACE OF BIRTH: Dundas, Ontario (near Hamilton)

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: public-health inspector

EDUCATION: high school graduate

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

The subject has never lived outside the area in which he was born and raised.

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): 24/11/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

It was a small cat, which lasted thirteen years, and I thought that was a, a generous time, considering the, uh, health of the cat.  It was a small cat that we got, uh, from a, a resident in a town.  And unfortunately, this cat had fleas. We did not know this. We went, uh, wanting to get a boy cat, in the case, uh, we saw the two boy cats, and they were like springs; we didn’t get them. We saw the girl cat, which resembled the mother, which was a beautiful, uh, tortoise-shell type of cat.  And, uh, it was just an alley cat, and, uh, she came up, curled on our lap, and we took her home.  We got her home, my wife turned the cat over, and found all her little host of friends.  So I stayed in the bathtub all night, with the cat, with the water running, and picked the fleas off her, which she was very happy about.  Then, the next morning, when we could finally get to a veterinary clinic, we got her there; they kept her for three days, did all the treatments.  They called her “Baby X.”  They didn’t want to give her up.  We finally got her back.

TRANSCRIBED BY: John Fleming

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 24/11/2008

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”). The “Canadian raising” heard in other Ontario recordings in the PRICE lexical set is not as pronounced here. However, in “time,” where the “Canadian raising” is generally not heard in other Ontario recordings, the vowel is raised. There is a downward inflection at the ends of all his phrases. The main and secondary stresses in polysyllabic words are minimized, giving a more equal weight to some otherwise unstressed syllables. The DRESS lexical set is quite open, heard clearly in “vet.” His r-coloring is particularly strong. 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 19 is featured as sample number 19 on that page.

COMMENTARY BY: John Fleming

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 24/11/2008

The archive provides:

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• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
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