Taking as a point of departure the preliminary view of regional phonetic differentiation in Canadian English developed by the Atlas of North American English, this article presents data from a new acoustic-phonetic study of regional variation in Canadian English carried out by the author at McGill University. While the Atlas analyzes mostly spontaneous speech data from thirty-three speakers covering a broad social range, the present study analyzes word list data from a larger number of speakers (eighty-six) drawn from a narrower social range, comprising young, university-educated speakers of Standard Canadian English from all across the country. The new data set permits a more detailed view of regional variation within Canada than was possible in the Atlas, which focuses on differentiating Canadian from neighboring varieties of American English. This view adds detail to the established account in some respects, while suggesting a revised regional taxonomy of Canadian English in others. In particular, this article reports on several phonetic isoglosses that divide Canada's Prairie region from Ontario, thereby splitting the "Inland Canada" region of the Atlas into western and eastern halves. In fact, the data presented here suggest a division of Standard Canadian English into six regions at the phonetic level, rather than the three proposed by the Atlas: British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec (Montreal), the Maritimes, and Newfoundland. This taxonomy corresponds to the six major regions identified in the study of lexical data reported in .

Based on an impressionistic study of 16 young Canadians, mostly from Ontario, reported that the short front vowels of Canadian English are involved in a chain shift, the "Canadian Shift," triggered by the merger of 0Á0 and 0O:0 in low-back position, whereby 0ae0 is retracted to low-central position, and 0E0 and 0I0 are lowered toward the low-front space vacated by 0ae0. This article extends the study of the Canadian Shift to the English-speaking community of Montreal, Quebec, using acoustic rather than impressionistic analysis and a larger and more diverse sample. The new data motivate a revised view of the Shift, at least as it operates in Montreal, in which the three front vowels are retracted in a set of parallel shifts, rather than rotating in a chain shift.

Most North American cities no longer display strong ethnic di¡erentiation of speech within the European-origin population. This is not true in the Englishspeaking community of Montreal, Canada, where English is a minority language. Di¡erences in the phonetic realization of vowels by Montrealers of Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnic origin are investigated by means of acoustic analysis. A statistical analysis of ethnic di¡erences in formant frequencies shows that ethnicity has a signi¢cant e¡ect on several variables, particularly the phonetic position of /u:/ and /ou/ and the allophonic conditioning of /×/ and /au/ before nasal consonants. The unusual tenacity of ethnophonetic variation in Montreal English is explained in light of the minority status of English, and the social and residential segregation of ethnic groups in distinct neighborhoods, which limits their exposure to speakers of Standard Canadian English who might otherwise serve as models for assimilation.

The study of Canadian English has, for the most part, relied on synchronic data and description. Via the apparent-time method and earlier linguistic studies, evidence is available for the most part of the twentieth century. This paper provides possible pathways towards examining pre-twentieth century evidence for Canadian English. Using principles of sociohistorical research, the paper offers an outline of how to make the best use of existing data by combining evidence from both literary and authentic written sources. As a test case, central focus is given to the reconstruction of a pivotal Canadian feature, the low-back vowel merger. Texts are used, in conjunction with secondary materials, such as Canadian informants in linguistic atlas data, accounts of settlement history and anecdotal evidence, to show the possibilities and limitations of written evidence in historical phonetics and phonology. As a test case, the approach, which is complemented by a rudimentary sketch of sources across the country, is intended to be easily transferrable to other linguistic levels.

2010

English in the Canadian context -- The establishment and growth of Canada's English-speaking population -- The principal features of Canadian English : a comparative view -- Variation and change in the vocabulary of Canadian English -- Variation and change in the phonetics of Canadian English -- Summary and future directions.

Language Variation and Change, 2017

This paper investigates interspeaker variation in the mid and low short vowels of Jewish Montreal English, analyzing the Canadian Shift in both production and perception. In production, we find that young women are leading in the retraction of /æ/ and the lowering and retraction of /ε/. We furthermore find that across speakers, the retraction of /æ/ is correlated with the lowering and retraction of /ε/, providing quantitative evidence that the movements of these two vowels are linked. The trajectory implied by our production data differs from what was reported in Montreal approximately one generation earlier. In contrast to reliable age differences in production, a vowel categorization task shows widespread intergenerational agreement in perception, highlighting a mismatch: in this speech community, there is evidently more systematic variation in production than in perception. We suggest that this is because all individuals are exposed to both innovative and conservative variants an...

A new survey of variation and change in Canadian English, called Dialect Topography, has been extended from Southern Ontario, where it was conceived and originally implemented, to Montreal. In the tradition of earlier questionnaires investigating Canadian English, the new data contribute to our knowledge of Canadian English at several levels of structure, including phonology, morpho-syntax, and lexicon. In this paper, the Montreal data are compared to those from the Toronto region and to earlier studies of Quebec English, in order to examine differences between the varieties of English spoken in Canada's two largest cities from a diachronic perspective. Contrary to the conclusion of an earlier study, variables involving a contrast between British and American forms show similar frequencies in both cities. The data on these variables also show the frequency of American forms in Montreal speech to be increasing over time. Another set of variables displays wide discrepancies between the two regions. Some of the differences are explained in terms of settlement history and language contact; others are not so easily explained and are presented as a challenge for future research.

American Speech, 1987

HE PRONUNCIATION OF ONTARIO according to Joos (1942, ENGLISH, 141) is nearly identical to that of GENERAL He notes AMERICAN. only two differences of any consequence, and his discussion focuses on one of these, namely the existence of two variants for the diphthongs lay/ and /awl in Ontario. As Joos describes it, the basic Canadian pattern is that these diphthongs have higher starting points before voiceless consonants than in other environments. The examples in (1) illustrate.'

AI

The Atlas of North American English (henceforth ANAE) calls attention to the difficult task of differentiating the dialect regions entitled " the West " and " Canada " and surmises that the dialects can be differentiated on the basis of their degree of participation in the same sound changes (Labov et al. 2006). In other words, the difference is a quantitative one, not a qualitative one. This paper argues that this assessment may be due, in part, to the methodological approach taken. Despite the geographic proximity and cultural similarities of Vancouver, BC and Seattle, WA, few studies have directly compared their speech (see Sadlier-Brown 2012 for one exception). With 29,372 tokens collected via a word list reading task from 20 Seattle and 19 Vancouver speakers and a sociocultural identity survey, the full study analyzes and compares speakers' participation in five key dialectal features of Pacific Northwest English and Canadian English: pre-velar /ae/ raising, pre-nasal /ae/ raising, /ae/ retraction, and the " Canadian " raising of diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/. Formant measurements for these phonemes were extracted at five duration-proportional points and comparisons of formant trajectories were included in the mixed-effects linear regression models for each dialect feature. Including this dynamic information makes evident that there are qualitative differences between Seattle and Vancouver with respect to pre-nasal /ae/, in particular. Findings from this work also affirm the overlapping, coexisting identities of the region's inhabitants and highlight the simultaneous ideologies of solidarity and differentiation exhibited by speakers on either side of the national border.

2020

The Minnesota dialect of American English is often confused with some vague "Canadian English" (Bartholdi 2015). 2 The current study aims to identify precisely which Canadian dialect of English. In so doing, we extract F1 and F2 measurements of 11 monophthong vowels of English ([i, ɪ, e, ɛ, ae, ɑ, ɔ, o, ʊ, u, ʌ]) produced by 20 Northern Minnesota speakers (10 males and 10 females) and compare and contrast the same set of vowels produced by 10 speakers (5 males and 5 females) of Winnipeg Canadian English whose vowels were measured by Hagiwara (2006). Our findings confirm the impressionistic claims that Northern Minnesotans sound like Canadians. The sociophonetic investigation shows that the phonological processes that raise the "face" vowel [e] over the "kiss" vowel [ɪ], those that front and lower the "foot" [ʊ], and those that have caused the "lot" vowel [ɑ] and the "cloth" vowel [ɔ] to merge are the same in both dialects. However, in our considered opinion, the most important contribution of this paper to variationist sociolinguistics is "the discovery" that male Northern Minnesota English (NMNE) sound like males in Winnipeg Canadian English (WCE) speakers because of F1, while female NMNE speakers sound like female WCE speakers because of F2.

The nativization or phonological adaptation of words transferred from other languages can have structural-phonological consequences for the recipient language. In English, nativization of words in which the stressed vowel is spelled with the letter ,a., here called "foreign (a)" words, leads to variable outcomes, because English ,a. represents not one but three phonemes. The most common outcomes historically have been /ey/ (as in potato), /ae/ (tobacco), and /ah/ (spa), but vowel choice shows diachronic, social, and regional variation, including systematic differences between major national dialects. British English uses /ah/ for long vowels and /ae/ elsewhere, American English prefers /ah/ everywhere, whereas Canadian English traditionally prefers /ae/. The Canadian pattern is now changing, with younger speakers adopting American /ah/-variants. This article presents new data on foreign (a) in Canadian English, confirming the use of /ah/ among younger speakers, but finds that some outcomes cannot be classified as either /ae/ or /ah/. A third, phonetically intermediate outcome is often observed. Acoustic analysis confirms the extraphonemic status of these outcomes, which may constitute a new low-central vowel phoneme in Canadian English.

This study provides the first wide-scale, apparent time, instrumental description of the Canadian Shift in mainstream Toronto English. The Toronto data suggest that the general pattern of the shift-which affects the front lax vowels /ɪ, ɛ, ae/-involves simultaneous retraction and lowering. Findings also indicate that retraction, instead of lowering, has been the primary direction of more recent change, although little, if any, change has occurred in the speech of Torontonians since the WWII era. In light of these findings, a unified account of the Canadian Shift across speech communities in Canada is proposed that re-interprets the seemingly disparate results of previous studies.

World Englishes, 2012

Newfoundland English has long been considered autonomous within the North American context. Sociolinguistic studies conducted over the past three decades, however, typically suggest crossgenerational change in phonetic feature use, motivated by greater alignment with mainland Canadian English norms. The present study uses data spanning the past thirty years to investigate some half-dozen apparent-time changes in Newfoundland English. It analyses the social and stylistic stratificational patterns associated with declining regional phonetic feature use in this minority dialect context (particularly the speech of the capital, St. John's), along with those displayed by recent vowel innovations which appear to have been imported from mainland Canadian English. Results indicate many similarities in the general trajectory of change: cross-generational differences are frequently mediated by gender, social status and speech style. While outcomes may suggest increased adoption of standard Canadian English features on the part of socially and geographically mobile groups, particularly in formal styles, this review finds little evidence of a general trend towards mainland Canadian heteronomy. Rather, regional feature decline, as well as feature adoption, must be contextualized within a broader temporal and demographic framework. NEWFOUNDLAND ENGLISH WITHIN THE CANADIAN CONTEXT

The present sociophonetic study examines the English variety in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP) based upon a 130-speaker sample from Marquette County. The linguistic variables of interest include seven monophthongs and four diphthongs: 1) front lax, 2) low back, and 3) high back monophthongs and 4) short and 5) long diphthongs. The sample is stratified by the predictor variables of heritage-location, bilingualism, age, sex and class. The aim of the thesis is two fold: 1) to determine the extent of potential substrate effects on a 71-speaker older-aged bilingual and monolingual subset of these UP English speakers focusing on the predictor variables of heritage-location and bilingualism, and 2) to determine the extent of potential exogenous influences on an 85-speaker subset of UP English monolingual speakers by focusing on the predictor variables of heritage-location, age, sex and class. All data were extracted from a reading passage task collected during a sociolinguistic interview and measured instrumentally. The findings of this apparent-time data reveal the presence of lingering effects from substrate sources and developing effects from exogenous sources based upon American and Canadian models of diffusion. The linguistic changes-in-progress from above, led by middle-class females, are taking shape in the speech of UP residents of whom are propagating linguistic phenomena typically associated with varieties of Canadian English (i.e., low-back merger, Canadian shift, and Canadian raising); however, the findings also report resistance of such norms by working-class females. Finally, the data also reveal substrate effects demonstrating cases of dialect leveling and maintenance. As a result, the speech spoken in Michigan's Upper Peninsula can presently be described as a unique variety of English comprised of lingering substrate effects as well as exogenous effects modeled from both American and Canadian English linguistic norms.

Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula is home to one of the province's smallest and most isolated English-speaking minorities, which has nevertheless been in the region for two-and-a-half centuries. This paper presents the first academic study of this speech community, focusing on its unique status as a transition zone between the types of English found in adjacent regions of Quebec and New Brunswick. The paper also examines changes in progress in both phonology and vocabulary, which reflect contrasting developments, including convergence with and divergence from Quebec, Maritime, Canadian and American linguistic norms.

Previous studies of border regions have characterized linguistic divergence as a natural consequence of the social psychological and cognitive processes speakers apply in constructing their conceptualizations of the border and those on the other side (Auer 2005). For the border shared by Canada and the United States, in particular, Boberg (2000) highlights a resistance to the diffusion of sound change across the national border. While providing some valid descriptions, these assessments neglect the multi-faceted social function of language to both unite and distinguish speakers and social groups. They also ignore the potentially important role of cultural affinity and regional solidarity spanning a national border. As Irvine & Gal (2000) explain, ideological processes that serve to project contrasts occur recursively and simultaneously with processes that ideologically erase other contrasts at different levels of the system. These ideological processes have consequences for linguistic structure and for sound change. With its strong regional solidarity spanning the U.S.-Canadian border and lack of previous trans-border comparisons in the region, the Pacific Northwest is an ideal site to examine the effects of these ideological processes. Despite the geographic proximity and cultural similarities of Vancouver, B.C. and Seattle, WA, few studies have directly compared their speech (see Sadlier-Brown 2012 for one exception). The Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006) describes the difficulty of differentiating “the West” as a dialect region from “Canada” and concludes that this must be done on the basis of their degrees of participation in similar sound changes. The ANAE relies on single time-point measurements for vowels, however, and does not examine variation in dynamic formant trajectories across the dialects, though these have been shown to differentiate dialects and ethnolects in previous work (Janson & Schulman 1983, DeDecker & Nycz 2006, Fox & Jacewicz 2009, Jacewicz & Fox 2012, Scanlon & Wassink 2010, Koops 2010, Risdal & Kohn 2014). Prior research in B.C. has focused on the region’s participation in features of the Canadian Shift such as /æ/ retraction and its questionable participation in raising of /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ (Chambers 1973, Esling & Warkentyne 1993, Hall 2000, Sadlier-Brown & Tamminga 2008, Boberg 2008, Pappas & Jeffrey 2014). These studies of Vancouver vowels have relied on single-point measurements. In Seattle, on the other hand, research primarily documents pre-velar raising of /æ/ before /g/ (Wassink 2009, Freeman 2013, Riebold 2012, 2014 and 2015). No large-scale studies have compared these features between Vancouver and Seattle speakers using dynamic methods. With 29,372 audio-recorded vowel tokens collected via a word list reading task from a gender and age-balanced sample of 20 Seattle and 19 Vancouver speakers, the current study provides a variationist sociophonetic analysis of speakers’ participation in five diagnostic dialectal features of Seattle English and Vancouver English: pre-velar /æ/ raising, pre-nasal /æ/ raising, /æ/ retraction, and the “Canadian” raising of diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/. Measurements for the current study were extracted at five duration-proportional points and comparisons of formant trajectories were included in the mixed-effects linear regression models for each diagnostic dialect feature. In addition, sociocultural interviews were conducted with each participant to better understand the speakers’ orientations toward their regional and national identity as well as the cultural and linguistic ideologies they embraced. The study also considers variation between two emically-defined age groups of young adult speakers. The results suggest that Seattle and Vancouver speakers are participating in some of the same allophonic processes, like /æg/ raising, but they are also differentiated by other processes including /æn/ raising, /æ/ retraction, /aʊ/ raising, /aɪ/ raising. In these cases, the distinction between Seattle and Vancouver relates to the degree to which a phonetic process has been phonologized, and this distinction can most accurately be captured in the phonetic form of the feature using dynamic analyses. Seattle and Vancouver speakers are also found to embrace asymmetrical language ideologies, and these act as a predictor of their linguistic behavior for features undergoing sound change. In addition, variation between the two emically-defined age groups highlights the differential use of sociolinguistic resources by speakers within the same broader age group of "adult" speakers. This research sheds light on the relationship between phonetic form, sound change and socio-indexical meaning. It also documents the variation within a less studied dialect region divided by a national border and offers a realistically complex view of the simultaneous solidarity and differentiation of identity embodied by its inhabitants.

ExLing Conferences, 2019

The Canadian Shift (CS), a lowering and backing of the KIT, DRESS, and TRAP vowels, has been extensively investigated in the speech of English Canadians. However, its effect on the perceptual categorization of vowels has received little attention. The role of perception in ongoing vowel shifts remains comparatively under-researched. By testing participants both in production and in perception, this study gives a unique view into an ongoing sound change. Participants from Montreal in two age groups were recorded reading a list of 44 sentences containing words with stressed /ɛ/, /ae/, /ɔ/, and /ʌ/ vowels. Participants also categorized 96 synthesized vowel stimuli. While the production data clearly replicated the CS, in perception, shift-leaders did not categorize vowels very differently.

Journal of English Linguistics, 2012

Self-reports in linguistic study, which were central to the dialect surveys of the twentieth century, have, by and large, been relegated to the sidelines by more advanced sociolinguistic techniques in recent years. This article probes into the validity of written self-report surveys in relation to the fieldwork method for Vancouver, British Columbia. Confirming Chambers's general findings of equivalence, it produces insights into the preferred length of written questionnaires and offers recommendations as to question type. The present article also compares the written questionnaire results to acoustically analyzed recorded data for yod-dropping and the low-back vowels before /r/, identifying linguistic items that correlate well with results from self-reports and those that fail to produce reliable results because of ongoing linguistic change or reindexicalization in the case of yod-dropping. Overall, written self-report surveys are found to be highly reliable data gathering tools if certain factors are kept in mind.

Publication of the American Dialect Society, 2016

The present analysis builds on previous evidence for the California Vowel Shift in San Francisco English (Hall-Lew 2009, 2013) with data on the lowering and retraction of BET (Kennedy & Grama 2012) and the BAT nasal split (Eckert 2008). Based on interview speech from a socially stratified sample of 22 San Franciscans, women lead men in the retraction changes, and European Americans lead Chinese Americans in both BAT retraction and BAN raising. We also find the first evidence for gender-differentiated change in BAN raising when the nasal is velar. Furthermore, preliminary data suggest a pre-velar effect for BET and BAT, which is best described as inhibition of retraction and lowering, not the raising movement of Pacific Northwest varieties (Becker et al. current volume, Wassink current volume). Overall, San Francisco English exhibits precisely the Northern Californian vowel system expected, rather than being an exceptional dialect island (cf. Labov et al. 2006). 1 The automatic align ment and extraction of vowel data is only possible due to long hours of initial orthographic transcription. Our thanks go to research funds from the 2009-2010 Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship which funded transcription by RAs Cla ire Drohan, Annabel Schwenk, and Amanda Wall, as well as to the 2010-2011 PPLS Pilot Scheme wh ich funded transcription by RAs Keelin Murray and the first author. A special note of thanks goes to RAs Julie Saigusa and Kieran Wilson, who, along with the authors of this paper, volunteered their time to pro ject transcription during 2014-2015. We also thank Josef Fruehwald and the editors and other contributors to this collection for the conversations that made this paper possible. Lastly, the biggest debt goes to those speakers whose voices are represented here. All shortcomings are our own.

World Englishes, 2012

Newfoundland English has long been considered autonomous within the North American context. Sociolinguistic studies conducted over the past three decades, however, typically suggest crossgenerational change in phonetic feature use, motivated by greater alignment with mainland Canadian English norms. The present study uses data spanning the past thirty years to investigate some half-dozen apparent-time changes in Newfoundland English. It analyses the social and stylistic stratificational patterns associated with declining regional phonetic feature use in this minority dialect context (particularly the speech of the capital, St. John's), along with those displayed by recent vowel innovations which appear to have been imported from mainland Canadian English. Results indicate many similarities in the general trajectory of change: cross-generational differences are frequently mediated by gender, social status and speech style. While outcomes may suggest increased adoption of standard Canadian English features on the part of socially and geographically mobile groups, particularly in formal styles, this review finds little evidence of a general trend towards mainland Canadian heteronomy. Rather, regional feature decline, as well as feature adoption, must be contextualized within a broader temporal and demographic framework. NEWFOUNDLAND ENGLISH WITHIN THE CANADIAN CONTEXT

World Englishes, 2012

"Canadian Raising" is the process in which the low nucleus of the diphthongs /aw/ and /ay/ is raised to "mid" position before voiceless consonants. Although the process is often featured in simple stereotypes of Canadian speech (e.g. "oot" and "aboot" for out and about), it is in reality a far more complex phenomenon in that it is not restricted to Canada, does not occur uniformly across the country, and has been variously claimed to be receding in favour of American standards, particularly in Vancouver. This paper presents the results of two studies addressing these issues. The first is an apparent-time study of teens and adults in Vancouver. Results suggest that CR is generally a stable feature of Vancouver English, while both the raised and unraised variants show a strong apparent-time fronting trend. These results demonstrate Vancouver to align with other Canadian cities with regards to CR. The second is a comparison between speakers in Washington State and Vancouver, British Columbia. Results indicate that the most widelyremarked aspect of CR, the height of raised /aw/, continues to differentiate Washington from Vancouver speakers, but that in all other respects, speakers from the two regions demonstrate more similarities than differences.

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