Oregon 2

Listen to Oregon 2, a 47-year-old man from Ashland, Oregon, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 47

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 10/01/1967

PLACE OF BIRTH: Medford, Oregon

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: teacher

EDUCATION: three master’s degrees: folklore, music/anthropology/English, and education

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

After being raised in Ashland, Oregon, the subject lived in Bursa, Turkey, for nine months; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States, for six years; and Puerto Rico for 20 months. At the time of this recording, he had been living back in Oregon for more than 14 years.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject speaks French and Turkish, and had some acting training as a child at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Naomi Joy Todd

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 07/10/2014

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I was born in southern Oregon, in Medford, Oregon, where my parents were living at the time, and after less than a year of living there, I moved to Ashland, which is a small community right next to Medford. Medford was a pretty large mill town — Ashland never had a decent-sized lumber mill; we had flourmills and some other small wood finishing things going on, and the very first Shakespearean theater in the United States. We also had a normal school, which became a college and then became a university. Um, it’s a small town, and, uh, when I was first growing up there it was pretty rural. A lot of my neighbors had dead deer carcasses in their garages every winter, but, uh, you know as I got older it became a lot more gentrified. And, uh, the composition of the town changed quite a bit. Uh, the people who were living there when I was younger had a much more pronounced — I think — rural accent. They had, um, their “r”’s were darker, and they had expressions that were more from probably regions of North Carolina, Oklahoma, that kind of thing — when people migrated out of those impoverished areas during the Depression. Um, I can say for a fact that my grandparents on my mother’s side, they were from, uh — my grandmother was from — from, um, North Dakota. She had an accent that was sometimes borderline, uh, Midwesternish, and they had — they had vocabulary words that I don’t use, like “dabano” for a couch. And, uh, they’d say things like “see meant,” [laughs] or “cement” for the concrete. Um, in terms of my growing up in my hometown, it’s hard to see your own accent. I don’t think I noticed that — I think the first time I noticed that I had an accent that was maybe more, more rural than, than I would have liked at the time was when I, uh, visit my friends in San Francisco. What I noticed was that, uh, uh, people in the city that I saw there — the ones that were from around the Pacific Northwest had kind of a drawly, you know, tendency when they talked, um, so I suppose I have some of that.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Naomi Joy Todd

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 07/10/2014

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

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

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

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

The archive provides:

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• 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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