Ontario 22

Listen to Ontario 22, a 52-year-old woman from Cobourg, Ontario, Canada. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 52

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1956

PLACE OF BIRTH: Cobourg, Ontario, Canada

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: clerk

EDUCATION: high school graduate

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

The subject was residing in the Halton region 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): 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:

When I was growing up, across the street from where I lived was a farm.  There were cows and horses in that farm, that were always out in the field.  Some boys on the street decided that they would throw my tricycle over the fence, to see if they could scare the cows.  So they took my “tryk,” and they threw it over the fence.  The cows just stood there and looked at it.  Then I went to the boys’ parents, and the parents made the boys and go and get my tryk from the other side of the fence.  That’s when the cows left.  I was about 4 or 5, I think, around, round in there.  [Slight sound by the interviewer] Oh, the boys were awful.  I was the only girl on the south end of the street, and there was … and there weren’t any girls until you got up to the north end, which was about eighteen houses up, and I couldn’t go up that far; I had to stay down at, at my end.  But there were all boys around, and they were all just a couple of years older, so they were always picking on me.  So the parents made the boys hop the fence, and they kind of, went over and tried to shoo all the cows away while they go and get my bike.

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:

In general, her mouth is quite closed, shortening and closing the back vowels (e.g., “story, goose, farm.” This also moves her [k] sounds farther back on her palate (e.g., “tryk”). The DRESS lexical set is quite open (e.g., “vet”), and the TRAP lexical set has some nasalization. Both the PRICE and MOUTH lexical sets undergo “Canadian raising” before a voiceless consonant but not before a voiced consonant (e.g., “price” but not “pride,” “mouth” but not “around”). Note the lack of musicality in her voice; the similarity in sentences rarely breaks until she begins to talk about how old she was at the time of the unscripted speech. 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 22 is featured as sample number 22 on that page.

COMMENTARY BY: John Fleming

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

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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