Ossi Ihalainen visited Somerset between the years 1971 and 1977 and returned in the early 1980s to re-interview some important
informants. The recordings of the present corpus were made in 1971-1976. Ihalainen's notebooks mainly contain the names, addresses,
ages and occupations of the informants, but he has described some of them (e.g. JM, Fitzhead) in more detail in his publications.
Ihalainen characterises his informants and the interviews as follows:
"By calling my informants speakers of the Somerset dialect I simply mean that they were born and bred in Somerset and that
their speech shows a number of common features frequently heard in Somerset. Furthermore, those features clearly distinguish my
informants' language from Standard English." (Ihalainen 1980: 187.)
"The interviews are free in form. The informants, members all of small agricultural communities, were asked to tell about their everyday
activities, such as haymaking, harvesting, tending horses, selling and buying cattle, slaughtering, fishing, catching rabbits, digging
peat, social activities, etc." (Ihalainen 1976: 608.)
J.M. from Fitzhead. Recorded in 1972. Age, sex: 80, male. Occupation: Farmworker. Description: J.M. tells about poaching and of the time he was wrongfully accused of killing a stag.
Course, I'd just shot a rabbit and pick 'en up an' all to once I heard something rush back in the he-
= in the hedge. It was a great old wide hedge an' there was a big stag looking to me. Oh, I happen = pulled 'en, nothin'
happened...
According to Ihalainen, J.M. speaks "West Somerset", but his variety of English is very representative of the Somerset vernacular
in general (Ihalainen 1987: 72-73).
Download the sound clip by right-clicking here and choosing Save As
from the menu. MP3 2:00 1,83mb.
Sample #2
L.V. from Wedmore. Recorded in 1974. Age, sex: 69, male. Occupation: Farmer. Description: L.V. tells about horse-tending.
Well, when a colt 's born, you don't do anything to him = no more than just put a halter on 'en an' break 'en to what we
call the halter; that is lead it, be able to lead 'im about until he do come about two years old an' then you really break 'im in. First
of all, you put in his mouth the bit, the bridle an' the bit...
L.V.:s speech was investigated in "Stressed vowels in East Somerset: an Acoustic-Phonetic Case Study", a study conducted
by Terttu Nevalainen and Reijo Aulanko (Nevalainen & Aulanko 1996).
Download the sound clip by right-clicking here and choosing Save As
from the menu. MP3 1:43 1,57mb.
