The Great Canadian Vowel Shift
macleans.caThe accents in north america are split east-west, not north-south. I'm from Vancouver but whenever I am in the eastern US they think I'm from california because I don't sound have the ontario/maritime accent they recognize as "canadian". "aboot" doesn’t exist in the west. Never has.
For some reason, there is a popular misconception (even among some linguists!) that "Canada" is some kind of unified linguistic zone, or that somehow it is "close enough" (maybe people are just lazy). Whereas English diversity in the US has been studied to very fine level of detail, Canada remains mostly a blob on most maps[0].
Of course, anyone who lives, say, in urban Ontario will immediately notice the differences in accent of someone from B.C. or Alberta, though that seems to just "sound Canadian" to other listeners.
[0] See e.g. http://aschmann.net/AmEng/
I'm not sure that a linguist would paint all of canada with one brush. Any linguist worth being called such should at least recognize a couple english-french divides.
I'm in LA and every time someone finds out I'm Canadian, they say, "But you don't have an accent" or "You don't sound Canadian", and on the rare occasion, people refer to my Vancouver accent as "fake Canadian accent".
I just half-smile or say "I don't know", instead of explaining how provincial their "typical Canadian accent" sounds to Vancouverites.
I've been told that my accent isn't so much a sound, but a mode of speech. You can spot the Canadians in LA because they are the ones using complete sentences.
There is a certain neutrality to the western-canadian accent, much like that of Minnesota. Take the word Going or anything else ending with ing. In much of the US it is pronounced "goin", dropping the g. In the UK it has become "going-g" ... they add an extra g sound. Right in the middle are the canadians and minnesotans who pronounce the word as written.
Canadians, watch this vid to see the similarity with minnesota: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-BCxjYoOl0 (I know this guy)
> There is a certain neutrality to the western-canadian accent, much like that of Minnesota.
??!? I don't think any American who isn't from the middle Northern tier can watch Fargo without at least noticing the accent, or cracking a mild smile. The accent was practically a character in the movie.
However, TBH, I don't know if I know any Minnesotans, and I've never been there.
I've worked with Canadians and just thought they were Americans. This one guy told a joke, an the joke ended with, "It will cost you two loonies!" We looked up and asked, "What are Loonies?" (Their dollar bills)
I asked how come you don't have an accent? (I did apologize about our educational system--we weren't taught anything about Canadians?)
Well, he started to get mad about the accents. He said most of us don't have accents. I won't say what he said next, but from the few words I can repeat; he was burned in his formative years by a French woman, and didn't like Quebec accents? I asked, "I just thought the French accent would sound beautiful?" He said there's nothing beautiful about a Quebec accent! (We were both tired, working construction, and hated our jobs.) I was suprised how Conservative he was though--always complaining about Canadian taxes. That changed one Monday morning when he got the bill from the hospital he took his wife to for a suspected Panic Attack? He couldn't believe we pay the amount we do for medical care. (That entire summer's wage, and then some went to that bill.) His last words to me were, "I'm never coming back. It's not just because I was "jacked" by the hospital, but the amount of stress you have here is just not worth it. If those blood suckers are going to charge this much, why don't they hand out price lists in the lobby?" I agreed, and gave him half my anxiety pill.
Not bills. Loonies are dollar coins with a loon on the back. "Twonies" are the two-dollar coins with a polar bear. Canada traditionally uses animal imagery on money, a sort of reconciliation gesture given the french-english-native splits in the country. Animals were common ground.
Fyi, the band Nickelback was Canadian. The non-wikipedia joke behind that name is the animal on the back of the canadian nickel.
The beaver is considered to be the "front" of the coin.
I'm also a Canadian in LA.. It tends to be other Canadians who can pick out my accent (from Toronto originally).
Toronto? Not Trono?
> I just half-smile or say "I don't know"
Can confirm, kafkaesque must be Canadian. My most Canadian moment was apologizing while jumping out of someone's way while they were barreling down the sidewalk on a skateboard.
Living in northern New England, my experience of Canada and Canadian accents has always been in relation to Quebec, which is a whole different beast.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a good representation of the Quebecois accent on TV. South Park butchered it awfully
There have been several (mostly in Canadian television, of course), but "the québecois accent" isn't really a single thing. Depending on how you want to split it up, there are somewhere between three and six (or seven) regional Frenches in the area with different sound systems, and that results in a rather broad range of accents in English. I grew up in a part of Northern Ontario that was at least 50% francophone, with English as the "high language" (extending education in French past the 9th grade was a recent innovation), and it wasn't hard to spot the "immigrants" (people who had moved in from another part of Canada) by accent - almost to the street if they were Montrealers.
Bon Cop, Bad Cop[0] isn't TV (maybe a TV Movie, now) but its use of Quebecois was, to me (my formative years spent within 3km of the Quebec border), quite accurate.
"Aboot" never existed in the east either. It's more like "a boat" but that's too subtle for caricature.
Yep. I live in Victoria but grew up in Ontario.
I get people asking me if I'm from Seattle all the time, I guess because I sound 'murrican.
More so than accents I'd argue that the north-south orientation applies to culture and trade as well.
St. John's Newfoundland is geographically closer to London England than Vancouver. Aside from an interest in hockey, there's not a great deal of commonality. Seattle and Portland are more relatable and relevant.
Canadians say "aboot" nearly as often as Americans who plan to go drink at a "baah". After all, the United States = Boston and Canada = St John's.
I'm from the Maritimes and have never heard anyone here i know say aboot I think to certain people in the US it just sounds that way.
I knew a girl from Liverpool England and she thought I was from Ireland, not 100% convinced but more so than Canada. I'm from PEI which at one point was going to be called New Ireland.
The problem with "aboot" is that it's not... quite that. I've lived in a few different English speaking countries, I'm from rural Canada, and I now living in Toronto, the epicentre of accents. Over time, I've started to hear some of the differences, but I won't claim to be an expert.
IMHO: We don't say "Aboot", but something closer to (but not quite) "Abehwt", compared to the American "Abowt". From what I can tell, Americans can hear a difference, and frankly we Canadians can't at all. But Americans seem to hear the difference as more exaggerated into the "Aboot" territory.
In short: We do say "About" very differently, and we're generally totally unaware of it.
Yeah, it's generally less like "a boot" and more like "a boat." In phonetic terms, I think Americans use /aʊ/ (think "ow" like you hit your thumb) there while Canadians use either /ɔʊ/ or /ɔ:/, which is more of an "oh" sound.
The [ɔ] is more o-ish (rounder) than [a], certainly, but it's nowhere close enough to render as "a boat" - the initial vowel is too low and the [ʊ] portion of the diphthong is too high for that approximation to work.
The "aboot" thing did exist at one time in Southern Ontario when, as Stephen Leacock (our Mark Twain) put it: "In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages without trying to invent slang, so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversations." The Scots influence was huge in Upper Canada until about the middle of the 20th (and was refreshed by an influx of authentic accents after WW II), and "aboot" wouldn't have been a gross mischaracterisation south of Parry Sound, with Toronto and Windsor excepted.
(Down east, the Scottish influence was more Gaelic then Scots. 25 years ago, it wasn't hard to find Gaelic speakers on Cape Breton whose English was clearly a second language; the kids were mostly English-first by then, though, and Gaelic's little more than a heritage language now. If anything, the Gaelic-influenced pronunciation of "about" and "house" is flatter than the American version.)
As an Irishman, I can see where she was coming from. I was channel hopping one day and stumbled across a documentary, can't remember what it was about, but the people in it sounded Irish[1], but... off, somehow. There were little accent and vocabulary differences. Then one of them said something utterly Canadian, and that's when I realised that it was actually Newfoundland.
[1] To be precise, like as if they're from the south east, around Wexford and Waterford.
Yeah Newfoundland people have a very thick dialect some so much it can be very hard to understand to anyone not from the island.
I'm not from Ireland but both my paternal grandparents' ancestors are from Monaghan and Ulster.
It's interesting to hear an opinion on which area in Ireland that Newfoundland people sound like.
What? I'm born and raised outside Vancouver and now live in Los Angeles. There is definitely a difference between my lack of accent and Canadians in BC. but yes, they don't sound like my ex-pat colleague from Nova Scotia
Yeah, I've always wondered why people think Canadians pronounce things like "no doot aboot it". That's basically Groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons (ie: a crusty old Scottish accent).
Being from New Brunswick, I've never actually heard anybody say 'aboot'. (Except perhaps after watching South Park and wanting to confuse people.)
I'm from the maritimes. Can confirm.
> The English version of “baguette” stops rhyming with “vague-ette,”
Coming from central Canada, "bag" always rhymes with "vague". I get funny looks sometimes when "lag" comes up in conversation here in the Pacific NW.
Interesting, I thought that was a PNW (OR/WA/BC) thing (I've heard it described as the "Northwest vowel shift")? I say "bag" and "lag" rhyming with "vague" or "bagel" too, and I grew up in Oregon.
By central Canada, do you mean Ontario? I've lived in Manitoba for decades and I don't know anyone who pronounces "bag" that way.
Manitobans are the worst offfenders on the "bag"/"bayg" meter. If anything, it's the trademark of their accent. It isn't until I point it out do they hear it. anything that Americans (californians especially) say with the short A sound that ends with a hard consonant is liable to be mangled by a manitoban. If you aren't hearing it, it's because your accent is getting in the way (the one you probably swear you don't have).
Ontario residents mangle their A sounds a little different. when you have an "ar" combination in a word, they pronounce it like "air", but as if you're simultaneously having a mild stroke. "Marnie had an Enlarged Heart" is always fun to hear one say.
Raised in Winnipeg from a very early age. My wife who is also from Winnipeg speaks the same way.
I have a lot of relatives in the Midwestern U.S. (specifically Minnesota), and you encounter that pronunciation in that region. I have no idea if it spills over into Manitoba or Ontario, but if it does, the location seems right for it.
Interesting juxtaposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cities_Vowel_Shift
There are many more linguistically-oriented articles than usual today. I like it.
Additionally, praat is really interesting software from the University of Amsterdam that allows you to analyze speech recordings and see what the vowels and consonants actually are. http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
Hmm, I left Western Canada 15 years ago to move to Denver. I thought I had grown out of the accent, but now it seems the accent is catching up with me?
I studied linguistics in school and was fascinated by the linguistic shifts in Germanic languages long ago. But it seems a shame for it to be happening now as pronunciation becomes homogenized.
For anyone who's curious about the stereotypical 'oot' and 'aboot' vowels, Wikipedia has a nice overview[1] of the phenomenon (Canadian Raising).
As a Western Canadian (who works with a lot of folks in California, Oregon and Colorado) one thing that gets pointed out all the time is my pronunciation of:
- JavaScript - Americano - Pasta
Yup. Canadians often pronounce "a" as "ah" vs. "awh". A great is example of the Mazda brand. It's mahz-dah in Canada, but moz-duh in the US. Even the commercials pronounce it differently in each country.
Yes! Pasta was one of the first words I learned to say differently when I moved from Edmonton to the US.
"These changes in the mouth are happening under our noses."
:)
Great line!
I spoke all of the examples at the beginning of the article, and I don't sound like any of the "new" examples; furthermore my mother was from the U.S., so I should sound more like them if anything.
I've also lived on both coasts(as well as nearer the center), and honestly I don't remember anyone speaking like this.
I've never actually heard "aboot" either.
I don't actually see any references, so I'm not sure what "linguists" they're talking to.
What a great thread - from one Canuck to all of you - "How's it goin' eh?"
In Nova Scotia the only people you hear saying eh are from Ontario, mostly from the Toronto area it seems.
It's a real life Pontypool ;-)
That movie was great. Yay Canadian arts!
I'm going to miss 'oot' and the rest. RIP
"Soar-y" for sorry has always been my favorite. I've always associated that pronunciation with obnoxious child-actors since so many of the shows I grew up on were peopled almost entirely with Canadian actors/voice actors.