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English Linguistics
Regional Phonetic Differentiation in Standard Canadian English
Charles Boberg
Journal of English Linguistics 2008 36: 129
DOI: 10.1177/0075424208316648
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Regional Phonetic
Differentiation in Standard
Canadian English
Journal of English Linguistics
Volume 36 Number 2
June 2008 129-154
© 2008 Sage Publications
10.1177/0075424208316648
http://eng.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Charles Boberg
McGill University
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 Boberg (2005b).
Keywords: accents of English; acoustic phonetics; Canadian English; dialectology;
dialects of English; vowels
Canada in the Atlas of North American English
In the Atlas of North American English, Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006), henceforth
LAB, offer the first national view of Canadian English phonetics. A previous national
Author’s Note: A preliminary version of this article was presented to the American Dialect Society
annual meeting in Anaheim, CA, on January 6, 2007. Thanks are due to several students who assisted with
the research, particularly Anicka Fast, Deena Fogle, Ellen House Kogut, and Erika Lawrance, and to the
editors and reviewers of the manuscript who suggested valuable improvements to it. Financial support
was received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Standard Research
Grant No. 410-02-1391).
129
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130 Journal of English Linguistics
survey of Canadian English (Scargill & Warkentyne 1972) used written questionnaires, thereby excluding the possibility of studying phonetic variation, while previous phonetic studies had been restricted to individual communities (e.g., Clarke
1991; De Wolf 1992; Gregg 1957; Woods 1991) or to single variables (e.g., Chambers
1973; Clarke, Elms, & Youssef 1995; Esling & Warkentyne 1993; Joos 1942). Unlike
these previous studies, LAB examine a wide range of variables in a nationwide sample, using data from acoustic analysis of telephone interviews with thirty-three participants in urbanized areas from coast to coast. This allows them to develop a set of
criteria for distinguishing Canadian from neighboring varieties of American English
at the phonetic level as well as to put forward at least a superficial view of regional
and social variation within Canadian English. Identifying at a broad level the major
sound changes at work in Canadian English and the place of Canadian English
within a taxonomy of North American English dialects was necessarily the main
concern of a work dealing with the study of variation and change on a continental
basis: finer details of the internal geographic or phonetic structure of Canadian English
were left for future studies with a more Canadian focus, like that reported here.
In addition to the low-back merger of /o/ and /oh/ (cot and caught; see Figure 2
for a full explanation of phonemic symbols), which is well established in Canada as
in several regions of the United States, LAB report that Canadian English is characterized by several distinctive phonetic patterns not found to the same degree or with
the same regularity in neighboring American varieties (2006, 217):
(1) the Canadian Shift, a lowering and retraction of the short front vowels /i/, /e/, and
/æ/ (bid, bed, and bad) in response to the low-back merger, which was first identified by Clarke, Elms, and Youssef (1995);
(2) Canadian Raising, the pronunciation of the diphthongs /aw/ and /ay/ (house and
tight) with nonlow nuclei before voiceless obstruents, first noted by Joos (1942)
and further analyzed by Chambers (1973), among others;
(3) the articulation of the long vowels /ey/ and /ow/ (day and go) with tense, peripheral nuclei that approach monophthongal forms; and
(4) the articulation of /aw/ (cow) in relatively back position, a feature shared with some
neighboring parts of northern United States.
In keeping with the general practice of the Atlas, LAB give each of these variables
a quantitative, phonetic definition derived from acoustic measurement of the nuclear
values of the first and second formants in tokens of each vowel produced by each
participant: the Canadian Shift is defined as the F1 of /e/ (bed) being greater than
650 Hz, the F2 of /æ/ (bad) being less than 1825 Hz, and the F2 of /o/ (cot) being
less than 1275 Hz; Canadian Raising is defined as the difference between the raised
and unraised nuclei of /aw/ and /ay/ (house vs. cow; tight vs. tie) being greater than
60 Hz in the F1 dimension; front /ey/ (day) is defined as F2 greater than 2200 Hz
and back /ow/ (go) as F2 less than 1100 Hz; and back /aw/ (cow) is defined as F2
less than 1550 Hz. Within the political boundaries of Canada, a coincidence of these
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 131
five phonetic isoglosses defines an “Inland Canada” region that constitutes the main
type of Canadian English, containing the large majority of Canada’s English-speaking
population. The outer periphery of this region, defined by the Canadian Shift,
extends some 2,800 miles (4,500 km) from Vancouver in the west to the Englishspeaking community of Montreal in the east. Its inner core, defined by the remaining isoglosses, extends from Edmonton in the northwest to Toronto in the southeast
(224). Atlantic Canada, including the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland, is
excluded from Inland Canada, forming a separate subregion of uncertain status.
Regional divisions within Canada arise from several features: the Canadian Shift,
which excludes Atlantic Canada (219); the merger of /e/ and /æ/ before /r/ (marry and
merry), which excludes Montreal and Newfoundland (219); fronted /ahr/ (car, hard),
which distinguishes Atlantic Canada (222); and the allophonic distribution of /æ/,
which is raised before nasals in the Loyalist-settled regions of Ontario and the
Maritimes but not in Montreal or the West (223), and raised before /g/ west of Quebec
(182). A vestige of a Mid-Atlantic-style split short-a (tense /æh/ before fricatives and
voiced stops contrasting with lax /æ/ elsewhere) was found in some older Maritime
speakers in Saint John and Halifax (223). These regional divisions amount to a tripartite view of Canada, with major isogloss bundles separating Inland Canada from
Vancouver in the west and from Atlantic Canada in the east, as seen in LAB’s map
15.7 (224), reproduced here as Figure 1.
Several aspects of LAB’s study of Canada suggest that further research might produce a modified or at least more detailed view of regional Canadian English phonetics. To begin with, thirty-three participants was a reasonable sample for distinguishing
Canadian from neighboring varieties of American English, LAB’s main purpose, but
not for achieving more than a superficial view of regional divisions (much less social
divisions) within Canada. Uncertainties arising from the small sample are compounded by the method of recruitment, which was essentially random, involving interviews with the first two people in each city who answered the telephone, were willing
to be interviewed, and met the criteria established for avoiding nonlocal speakers. This
resulted in a socially diverse sample that, while beneficial in some respects, introduced
an important confound in a regional analysis based on small numbers: there was no
guarantee that what appeared to be a regional difference between two places might not
instead be a social difference aligned with age, sex, social class, or some other factor.
A final uncertainty in LAB’s view of Canadian English arises from the type of data
analyzed: aside from a few minimal pairs for each speaker, the Atlas data come mostly
from spontaneous speech. This has obvious advantages, bringing the analysis closer to
the ultimate object of description, but it introduces a further confound in interspeaker
and regional analyses, as there is only limited control over the kind or frequency of
allophonic environments in the data from individual speakers. Some crucial environments, like those involved in the analysis of Canadian Raising, were sometimes underrepresented in the data from spontaneous speech.
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132 Journal of English Linguistics
Figure 1
Inland Canada
Edmonton
St. John's
Vancouver
Calgary
Saskatoon
Sydney
Regina
Winnipeg
St. John
Thunder Bay
Montreal
SSMarie
Canadian Shift
F2(ow) < 1100 Hz
F2(ey) > 2200 Hz
F2(aw) < 1550 Hz
Canadian raising of /ay/ and /aw/
Halifax
Arnprior
Toronto Ottawa
London
Windsor
Source: Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006, 224, map 15.7). Reprinted with
permission.
These sources of uncertainty give rise to several questions for further research.
The most important of these is whether an in-depth follow-up study using different
methods and a different sample would confirm the Atlas view of Canadian regional
phonetics or suggest a different view. Might it reveal additional phonetic divisions,
perhaps challenging the tripartite model of Canadian English dialect geography proposed by LAB? These questions were investigated by a new study conducted by the
author at McGill University, titled Phonetics of Canadian English (PCE), which is
the basis for this article.
Method: The PCE Study
The PCE project is a study of regional, sex, and attitudinal effects on vowel
production in Standard Canadian English. It involved tape-recorded sociolinguistic
interviews with fifty-one female and thirty-five male McGill University undergraduate students from across Canada, conducted by fellow students. A breakdown of the
sample by region and sex is shown in Table 1. The regional breakdown was motivated by the dialect divisions identified by the Atlas, which were to be tested in the
new study, as well as by traditional and well-established regional divisions of
Canada along geographic, political, demographic, cultural, and historical lines. The
division between British Columbia and the Prairies, coinciding with the sparsely
populated Rocky Mountains, will examine the status of the western edge of LAB’s
Inland Canada region. That between the Prairies and southern Ontario, coinciding
with a 1,300-mile (2,100-km) sparsely populated expanse of the Canadian Shield,
will examine the major nonlinguistic regional division within LAB’s Inland Canada
region. Those between southern Ontario, greater Toronto, and eastern Ontario will
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 133
Table 1
Sample of Phonetics of Canadian English Participants, by Region and Sex
Region
British Columbia
Prairies (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba,
northwest Ontario)
Southern Ontario
Greater Toronto
Eastern Ontario
Quebec (mostly greater Montreal)
Maritimes (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia)
Newfoundland
Total
Female
Male
Total
8
8
4
7
12
15
4
4
5
8
9
5
51
3
4
4
5
7
1
35
7
8
9
13
16
6
86
examine the linguistic status of the three major regions of Ontario, Canada’s most
populous province; those between eastern Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes will
examine the eastern edge of LAB’s Inland Canada region; and that between the
Maritimes and Newfoundland will reflect the special status of Newfoundland as the
best-known linguistic enclave in Canada. The participants of the present study all
grew up entirely in the regions they represent, as did their parents; their first extensive and long-term exposure to nonlocal peer groups came with their moving to
Montreal to attend McGill, usually at the age of eighteen. They can therefore be
taken to be good representatives of the local speech of each region, at least for their
generation and at the middle-class social level typical of McGill’s undergraduate
population.
The interviews elicited demographic information on each participant, a word list,
conversation, and a written opinion survey. They were recorded on Type II (CrO2)
analog cassette tapes using Marantz PMD 221 cassette recorders and Audiotechnica
AT 803b omnidirectional lavalier microphones. In order to eliminate phonetic,
prosodic, lexical, and other linguistic variables from consideration, the regional
analysis presented here will focus exclusively on data from the word lists, which
provide a uniform set of data from each participant: 145 productions, covering all of
the vowels of English in fully stressed position in a range of allophonic environments. In the word list, each vowel appears at least once before /t/, /d/, /n/, /l/, and
/r/, while long vowels also appear in final position. Allophonic environments of particular interest are represented by more than one token, such as those involved in
Canadian Raising and the Canadian Shift. The complete word list, which also
includes variables of phonemic incidence and consonantal variables not of interest
here, bringing the total to 180 words, appears as the appendix.
The 145 tokens from each participant’s word list representing the allophonic
range of each vowel were subjected to acoustic analysis, using the same equipment
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134 Journal of English Linguistics
and method of analysis as in the Atlas (LAB 2006, 36-40): single-point nuclear
measurement of F1 and F2 using linear predictive coding analysis in CSL 4400 (Kay
Elemetrics). Within each vowel nucleus, measurements were made at a diagnostic
point in the trajectory of one or both formants: at the maximal value of F1 in the case
of a vowel whose central tendency is the lowering and raising of the tongue; at a
point of inflection in F2 in the case of a vowel whose central tendency is movement
of the tongue toward, then away from the front or rear periphery of the vowel space.
In the absence of clear points of inflection, a measurement point was selected within
the steady state extending through the middle of the nucleus. As in the Atlas, the data
from each participant were then normalized, using the additive point system of
Nearey (1978), in which the raw formant values of each speaker in a group are
adjusted (up for men and down for women) by a scale factor derived from the difference between the natural log means of the speaker’s and the group’s formant values. In the PCE database, the group mean of F1 and F2 values taken together was
1119 Hz, of which the natural log is 7.02; scaling factors ranged from 0.84 for the
woman with the highest voice to 1.2 for the man with the lowest voice.
Following normalization, mean formant values for each vowel and allophone
were calculated for each participant (a mean of the individual values for several
tokens), whereupon regional means for each vowel and allophone were calculated
from the mean values of the participants in each regional group. Finally, multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) tests were run in SPSS to determine the significance of the effect of region on the phonetic measures, independent of sex. As the
balance of male and female participants in each region was similar, with the exception of Newfoundland, the effects of sex on vowel production will be set aside for
future treatment; we will be concerned here only with regional differences. The lack
of male participants from Newfoundland will also be of little concern, as the speech
of Newfoundland—a subject deserving a much fuller treatment of its own—lies outside the focus of this report. A methodological comparison of the Atlas and the present study is presented in Table 2. Essentially, the present study involves substantially
more data from a more tightly controlled sample, allowing the analysis to focus with
greater confidence on regional differences to the exclusion of other factors. The cost
of this greater control is that fewer social types of speech are represented and an
apparent-time analysis of age differences is not possible, but social and diachronic
variation will not concern us here.
Results
The basic results of the acoustic analysis of the 145 word list tokens for each
Canadian participant are given in Figure 2, which shows the mean values of F1
(height) and F2 (advancement) for each vowel and its important allophones for the
eighty-six participants. The symbols used for broad phonemic transcription closely follow the Atlas (LAB 2006, 11-15) and the work of Labov more generally; they are
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 135
Table 2
Methodological Comparison of the Atlas and PCE Studies
Criterion
Sample size
Social characteristics
Technology
Source of data
Atlas
PCE
33
Diverse
Telephone to tape, CSL
Spontaneous speech,
minimal pairs
86
Young, middle class
In person to tape, CSL
Word list (for present analysis;
other data available)
Note: Atlas = Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006); PCE = Phonetics of
Canadian English
explained in the key below the figure. The numerical data on which the figure is based
are given in Table 3. Both sets of data reflect a regionally balanced mean—a mean of
the eight regional means—thereby avoiding any bias in favor of regions represented by
a greater number of participants. This is the vowel system of Standard Canadian
English as spoken by young, university-educated Canadians from across the country.
It provides a framework in which the developments discussed below can be understood
to be taking place. As such, it is of course an abstraction developed for purposes of
comparative analysis. While many aspects of this system are common to most or all
Canadian English speakers, it should be emphasized that this is not the vowel system
of any one region of Canada, much less of any individual, but serves rather as a
national average against which the systems of particular regions or individuals can be
compared, and which can itself be compared to vowel systems that occur in other parts
of the English-speaking world. Of particular importance are the three-way merger of
/ah/, /o/, and /oh/ (father, cot, and caught) in low-back position; the separation of the
main distribution of /æ/ in low-front position from its allophones before /g/ and nasals
in lower-midfront position; the separation of the main distributions of /aw/ and /ay/
in low-central position from their allophones before voiceless obstruents in lowermidcentral position; the clearly northern orientation of the front vowels, with /i/ and /e/
much lower and more retracted than the corresponding long vowels, /iy/ and /ey/,
which are strongly peripheral; and the large difference between /uw/, which shows
advanced fronting compared to its allophone before /l/ in high-back position, and /ow/,
which shows much more moderate advancement compared to its allophone before /l/
on the rear periphery. While the large majority of Canadian English speakers share this
system, several of the means shown in Figure 2 nevertheless conceal significant
regional variation, which will be the main concern of the following sections.
The Canadian Shift
A MANCOVA of the effect of region and sex on the F1 and F2 of the six short
vowels /i, e, æ, o, ∧, u/ found no statistically significant influence of region on the
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136 Journal of English Linguistics
Figure 2
Mean F1 and F2 Measurements for Vowel Phonemes and Major Allophones of
Standard Canadian English (Balanced Mean of Eight Regions)
F2 (Hz)
2600
2400
2200
2000
1800
1600
1400
1200
1000
800
300
iy
uwl
uw
400
uwr
ohr
u
er
eyr
ær
500
owl,
oy,
owr
600
ow
awT
æN
or
700
e
ahr
ayT
æg
F1 (Hz)
r
i
ey
ah, o,
oh
800
ay
awn
æ
900
aw
1000
Key to Symbols
Short vowels
i
e
er
æ
æg
æN
ær
o
or
r
u
Front upgliding
sit
set
berry
sat
bag
band, ham
carry
cot, bother
borrow
cut
curry
cook
iy
ey
eyr
ay
ayT
oy
see
say
pair
tie, side
tight, spice
toy
Back upgliding
aw
awn
awT
ow
owl
owr
uw
uwl
uwr
cow, loud
down
doubt, house
go, code
cold
pour
do, food
pool
poor
Monophthongs
ah
ahr
oh
ohr
father, spa
bar, dark
caught, saw
short
bird
Canadian Shift as a whole (F = 1.162; p = .193). In general, then, this appears to be
a pan-Canadian development, at least among middle-class youth, contrary to the report
of LAB that Atlantic Canada does not participate in it. However, region did have
(marginally) significant effects on the F2 of /e/ (p = .061) and the F1 of /u/ (p =
.024). The former measure reflects the retraction of /e/, found by Boberg (2005a, 141)
to be the most active phase of the Shift in current Montreal English. The regional means
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 137
Table 3
Mean F1 and F2 Measurements (in Hz) for Vowel Phonemes
and Major Allophones of Standard Canadian English, with
Standard Deviations (Balanced Mean of Eight Regions)
Vowel Class
/iy/
/ey/
/eyr/
/ay/
/ayT/
/oy/
/aw/
/awn/
/awT/
/ow/
/owl/
/owr/
/uw/
/uwl/
/uwr/
/i/
/e/
/er/
/æ/
/æg/
/æN/
/ær/
/o/
/or/
/∧/
/∧r/
/u/
/ah/
/ahr/
/oh/
/ohr/
/3±/
M F1
SD
M F2
SD
401
573
603
844
734
520
870
814
731
612
521
514
422
404
444
563
732
591
884
774
717
630
774
575
760
536
582
777
736
768
526
561
9
10
15
20
12
16
25
26
33
21
23
15
9
14
23
13
10
11
12
48
42
64
21
34
18
13
19
20
17
19
16
10
2494
2189
2113
1429
1652
928
1603
1841
1704
1294
936
940
1734
965
964
2043
1883
2019
1724
1951
2089
1956
1224
1049
1501
1433
1332
1211
1404
1211
1003
1543
43
44
35
30
23
17
15
46
54
44
30
19
76
49
86
33
35
36
32
84
66
55
26
52
40
40
36
18
81
18
27
33
for these measures are shown in Table 4. The F2 of /e/ was found to be significantly
higher in the Prairie region than in all Ontario regions, and higher in Quebec than in
southern Ontario, suggesting that Quebec and the Prairies are somewhat behind
Ontario in at least this phase of the Shift. Nevertheless, the regional profile of the
Canadian Shift is far from clear: while participants from Toronto and Vancouver did
number among the group of a dozen speakers with the lowest F2 values for /e/ (lower
than 1800 Hz), that group also included two young women from Newfoundland and
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138 Journal of English Linguistics
Table 4
Regional Differences in the Advancement of /e/ and the Height of /u/ (in Hz)
Region
British Columbia
Prairies
Southern Ontario
Toronto
Eastern Ontario
Quebec
Maritimes
Newfoundland
National mean
M F2 (e)
SD
M F1 (u)
SD
1890
1943
1844
1861
1854
1916
1893
1888
1891
23
20
29
27
26
22
19
42
89
619
564
586
607
576
567
571
541
581
14
12
17
16
15
13
11
25
47
at least one participant from every other region, suggesting that this change is proceeding on a nationwide basis. The regional identity of those with higher, more conservative F2 values for /e/ (higher than 2000 Hz) is somewhat clearer: this group
contains six participants from the Prairie region, two from Quebec, and one from a
small city in southern Ontario. While leadership of the Canadian Shift is regionally
diffuse, resistance to it—or failure to adopt advanced forms of it—is found mostly
in areas that are somewhat isolated from the main centers of English Canadian urban
culture in Toronto and Vancouver.
While the phonetic position of /u/ has not generally been regarded as related to
the Canadian Shift, the F1 of /u/ was found to be higher in British Columbia than on
the Prairies or anywhere east of Toronto; it was significantly higher in Toronto than
on the Prairies or in Newfoundland. This suggests a lowering of /u/ in words like
cook, foot, and stood that is centered particularly in Toronto. This development may
indeed be completely independent of the Canadian Shift, since lowering of /u/ is not
related to the lowering or retraction of the front short vowels in any obvious way. Of
the nine participants with the highest F1 values for /u/ (greater than 640 Hz), three
are from Toronto, three from Vancouver, two from Nova Scotia, and one from
Ottawa, indicating a strong Ontario/British Columbia urban bias for this feature. By
contrast, participants with low F1 values for /u/ tend to come from Atlantic Canada,
Quebec, and the Prairies.
Canadian Raising
Although Canadian Raising is probably the best-known feature of Canadian
English, LAB found that it was “not uniform enough to serve as a defining feature
of the dialect of Canada” (2006, 221), both because it is variable within Canada and
because it also occurs, especially with /ay/, in some neighboring varieties of American
English. Nevertheless, LAB include an isogloss delimiting reasonably consistent
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 139
Canadian Raising of /ay/ and /aw/ among the five that identify Inland Canada (224).
As mentioned above, the analysis of Canadian Raising is particularly subject to fluctuations in the incidence of allophonic environments in natural speech data, making
word list data particularly useful. The PCE word list allowed for a comparison of five
tokens of /aw/ (cow, foul, loud, proud, sour) with four of /awT/ (doubt, house, shout,
south) and of seven tokens of /ay/ (file, rider, side, sign, tide, tie, tire) with five of
/ayt/ (fight, sight, spice, tight, writer); tokens of /aw/ before /n/ (down, gown, town)
were treated as a separate allophone from the main distribution of /aw/ and not
included in the analysis of Canadian Raising, since they tend to be fronted relative
to the main distribution.
As displayed in Figure 2 and Table 3, the PCE data reveal a difference of 142 Hz
between the mean F1 values of raised and unraised /aw/, considerably more than the
threshold of 60 Hz established for Canadian Raising by LAB. For /ay/, which is articulated further back than /aw/, as in midland and southern dialects of American English
and in contrast to the relative positions of these diphthongs in the Inland North,
Canadian Raising has a bigger effect on F2 (raised tokens are on average 229 Hz further forward) than on F1 (raised tokens are 110 Hz higher), though this degree of F1
difference is also well above LAB’s critical level. Contrary to LAB and other previous
reports [Chambers and Hardwick (1986); De Wolf (1992: 91, 99); Hung, Davidson and
Chambers (1993); Woods 1993: 159-167], which found both regional differences
among major cities and a recession of raising among younger speakers, the PCE data
indicate that Canadian Raising is a largely uniform feature of Canadian English, perhaps all the more remarkable given the young age of the PCE informants: 88 percent
of them showed a difference between the mean F1 values of raised and unraised /aw/
of 50 Hz or greater, 84 percent showed the equivalent difference for /ay/, and 92 percent showed a difference of greater than 50 Hz between the mean F2 values of raised
and unraised /ay/. This relative uniformity makes it surprising that raising of the two
vowels is only weakly correlated: a correlation test of F1 difference measures produces
a value of only r = .51, while there is virtually no correlation between F1 differences for
/aw/ and F2 differences for /ay/ (r = .20), suggesting that those speakers who raise
/aw/ the most do not necessarily also raise /ay/ the most and that these vowels should
be analyzed separately.
A MANCOVA of the effect of region and sex was run on four measures of Canadian
Raising: the F1 distance between /aw/ and /awT/; the F1 and F2 distance between /ay/
and /ayT/; and the F2 position of /awT/, which appeared to vary regionally in its relative advancement. Region was found to have a significant overall effect on this group
of dependent measures (F = 1.815; p = .009). Within the group, significant regional
effects were found for two of the /aw/ measures: F1 distance (F = 2.143; p = .050) and
F2 position (F = 3.217; p = .005). Regional means and standard deviations for these
measures are shown in Table 5. The significant effect of region on F1 distance principally reflects the variable character of raising in Newfoundland: of the six PCE participants from Newfoundland, three produced F1 (/aw/-/awT/) distance measures greater
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140 Journal of English Linguistics
Table 5
Regional Differences in the Canadian Raising of /aw/ and in the
Advancement of Raised /awT/ (in Hz)
Region
M F1 distance (aw–awT)
SD
M F2 (awT)
SD
123
168
176
128
156
117
153
37
142
21
18
26
24
23
20
17
38
72
1623
1617
1747
1760
1754
1684
1702
1750
1692
32
27
39
36
35
29
26
56
109
British Columbia
Prairies
Southern Ontario
Toronto
Eastern Ontario
Quebec
Maritimes
Newfoundland
National mean
than 50 Hz while three did not. The Quebec–Prairies comparison of F1 distance was
also found to be marginally significant (p = .056), reflecting the difference between
uniformly strong raising on the Prairies and variable raising in Montreal, where two participants had distance measures of less than 50 Hz. Though comparisons of British
Columbia with other regions were not found to be significant, three of the eight participants from the Vancouver-Victoria region in particular were also found to have F1 distance
measures of less than 50 Hz, possibly indicating a weakening of the Canadian pattern in
the urban area of southwestern British Columbia, previously reported by Chambers and
Hardwick (1986: 35–37), that would be substantiated by a larger sample. By contrast, only
one of eight Toronto-area speakers showed raising of less than 50 Hz. Nevertheless, the
isogloss drawn by LAB excluding Vancouver and Montreal from the domain of Canadian
Raising in the core area of Inland Canada does not find support in the PCE data.
Regional variation in Canadian Raising of /aw/ extends beyond the question of
whether raising takes place to the phonetic quality of the raised allophone. While
Chambers and Hardwick (1986) and Hung, Davison, and Chambers (1993) report
impressionistic data indicating a fronting of unraised allophones of /aw/ in apparent
time in cities across the country, the PCE data show a significant regional difference
in the advancement of raised /awT/. In particular, British Columbia and the Prairies
have /awT/ significantly further back than all other regions except Quebec. The data
in Table 5 suggest that raised /awT/ is produced about 150 Hz further forward in
southern and eastern Ontario than in western Canada, corresponding to phonetic values approximating [ε> ] and [∧< ], respectively. This regional difference was also
noted among young Vancouverites by Chambers and Hardwick (1986: 37-41), who
label it rounding, but was not directly addressed by LAB (a reflection of it can be
found in Map 10.30, 107). Among the PCE participants, the six with the highest F2
values for /awT/ (greater than 1860 Hz) are almost all from Toronto or southern
Ontario; only one comes from elsewhere, specifically from Gander, Newfoundland.
Of the fifteen participants with F2 values under 1600 Hz, by contrast, ten come from
ó
ó
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 141
western Canada and the other five from east of Ontario: there is not a single southern or eastern Ontarian participant in this group, emphasizing the strong association
between fronted /awT/ and Ontario.
At the other end of the range, the most extreme backing of /awT/ (F2 less than
1450 Hz) is found in two participants from Edmonton: here, the stock phrase out and
about sounds not like oot and aboot, the American stereotype of Canadian speech,
but like oat and a boat. Emeneau (1936) noted a similar pronunciation in Lunenburg,
Nova Scotia, which apparently led to a merger of /awT/ and /owT/, such that couch
and coach were homonyms. Of the fifteen PCE participants with F2 values for /awT/
under 1600 Hz, two were indeed from Halifax, the capital and largest city of Nova
Scotia, confirming that back /awT/ is a general feature of mainland Nova Scotia
English, but another was from Saint John, New Brunswick, suggesting that this feature may have a broader distribution in the Maritimes. However, none of the participants with back /awT/ shows evidence of the couch–coach merger.
Position of Long, Up-gliding Vowels
MANCOVAs of the effect of region and sex on the F2 of the long, up-gliding vowels /iy, ey, ay, oy/ and /uw, ow, aw/ found no significant overall effect on either set: in
general, the positions of these vowels shown in Figure 2 are relatively uniform across
the country. However, a significant individual effect was found for one measure in the
front up-gliding set, the F2 of /ey/ (F = 2.641; p = .018), whereby /ey/ was most
peripheral on the Prairies (mean F2 = 2263 Hz), with a phonetic quality approaching
monophthongal [e:j]: Prairie values were significantly higher than those to the west
and east in British Columbia, southern Ontario, Toronto, or the Maritimes, where /ey/
has a more diphthongal quality closer to [εj]. This supports the exclusion of
Vancouver by LAB’s isogloss for F2 (ey) but introduces a division within Inland
Canada not present in LAB, distinguishing the Prairie region, with extremely peripheral /ey/, from Ontario, with less peripheral values.
As for the back up-gliding vowels, the identification of peripheral /ow/ and back
/aw/ with Inland Canada in LAB was not supported by the PCE data: these variables
appear to have no clear regional profile. However, a marginally significant effect was
found for the F2 of /uw/ (F = 2.043; p = .061). This was assessed with six word list
tokens covering the wide allophonic range across the top of the vowel space that is
occupied by /uw/ when not followed by /l/. In ascending order of mean F2, these
tokens are boots (F2 = 1343 Hz), food (1397 Hz), tooth (1648 Hz), too (1702 Hz),
soon (1749 Hz), and do (1973 Hz). The most conservative tokens, boots and food,
are only moderately advanced beyond the mean F2 of /uwl/ (967 Hz), still clearly in
the high-back quadrant of the vowel space; tooth, too, and soon show advancement
well into the center of the vowel space; do, the most advanced token, while retaining its identity as a back up-gliding vowel, has practically reached the F2 position of
/i/ (2051 Hz), clearly in the high-front quadrant of the vowel space. Again, such
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142 Journal of English Linguistics
extreme effects of phonetic environment emphasize the value of word list data for
purposes of strict comparison. The regional analysis of this set of tokens as a whole
found that /uw/ is significantly further back in Atlantic Canada (mean F2s less than
1650 Hz) than in Toronto, southern Ontario, or British Columbia (mean F2s greater
than 1800 Hz), suggesting that Atlantic Canada lags behind the rest of the country in
the fronting of /uw/. Unlike in LAB (2006, 101, 156), New Brunswick was not found
to be a general exception to the Atlantic Canadian resistance to fronting: of five New
Brunswick speakers, only two had advanced values for the F2 of /uw/; the other three
had values consistent with the lower means for Atlantic Canada. The lowest values
for the F2 of /uw/ were found in both speakers from Cape Breton (northern Nova
Scotia) and two speakers from Montreal (where Boberg [2004, 554–56] showed
back /uw/ to be especially characteristic of Italian-origin Montrealers) as well as in
single speakers from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Edmonton, Alberta. Speakers
most advanced in the fronting of /uw/ do not show a clear regional concentration,
suggesting that the position of this vowel is affected as much by social as by regional
factors, along with phonetic environment.
Merger of /e/ and /æ/ before /r/
Most of Canada displays a conditioned merger of /æ/ and /e/ before /r/ in midfront
position, so that marry sounds like merry, Harold like herald, and so on; in addition,
both of these classes are merged with /ey/ before /r/, so that marry and merry both sound
the same as Mary. A MANCOVA of the effect of region and sex on the F1 of /ær/ (F =
4.271; p = .000) confirmed LAB’s report that the regional exceptions to the merger of
/ær/ and /er/ (though not of /er/ and /eyr/) are Quebec and, less consistently,
Newfoundland, as shown in Table 6. At 764 Hz, the mean F1 of /ær/ is significantly
lower in Quebec than every other region, while that in Newfoundland is significantly
lower than that of the Prairies. Table 6 also shows that the distance between the prerhotic
allophones of /æ/ and /e/ is over 100 Hz in Quebec and Newfoundland, while it is virtually nil in the rest of Canada, indicating a complete merger. The absence of this
merger is a feature that Montreal English shares, rather mysteriously, with the midAtlantic coastal region of the United States; however, resistance to the merger in
Montreal could just as well represent a retained feature of British English (also a likely
explanation in Newfoundland) as indicate a linguistic affinity with New York City or
Philadelphia. In fact, resistance to the merger is a consistent feature only of urban
Montreal English, not of Quebec English in general: of the thirteen Quebec participants,
the nine from greater Montreal have a mean F1 distance between /ær/ and /er/ of 218
Hz, with individual mean distances ranging from 112 Hz to 310 Hz, indicating solid distinctions; the four participants from smaller English-speaking communities outside
greater Montreal have a mean F1 distance of only 35 Hz, similar to that in the rest of
Canada, with only one speaker showing a distinction, and this of only 99 Hz difference
between the F1 means of /ær/ and /er/, below the bottom of the Montreal range.
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 143
Table 6
Regional Differences in the Height of /ær/ and in the
Height Difference between /ær/ and /er/ (in Hz)
Region
Quebec
Newfoundland
Rest of Canada
M F1 (ær)
SD
M F1 distance(ær–er)
SD
764
692
598
110
111
14
161
108
7
105
84
40
Fronting of /ahr/
LAB (2006, 111, 222) report that the relative advancement of /ahr/ varies across
Canada, with backer variants in the West and fronter in the East; in fact, fronted /ahr/
is the only positive feature that LAB found to be associated with their Maritime
Canadian region (141, 222). On the PCE word list, /ahr/ was represented by five
tokens: car, dark, harp, star, and start. A MANCOVA of the effect of region and sex
on the phonetic position of /ahr/ in these data confirmed and refined the Atlas view,
with a significant effect of region (F = 4.973; p = .000) that is entirely due to F2,
or advancement (F = 8.983; p = .000), rather than to height. In fact, the relative
advancement of /ahr/ is one of the strongest regional indicators of Canadian English,
with mean F2 values increasing steadily from west to east across Canada, except for
a sharp decline in Quebec, as shown in Figure 3. Along this spectrum, statistically
significant differences were found between the Prairies and southern Ontario and
between Quebec and its neighbors to the west and east. Ontario and Atlantic Canada,
then, show significantly fronter values for /ahr/, approaching [å®], than the West or
Quebec, which have values closer to [∧®]. Looking at individual participants, the
lowest values for the F2 of /ahr/ (twenty participants with means of less than 1300
Hz) all come from western Canada and Quebec, with only two exceptions from
southern or eastern Ontario; the most extreme values at this end of the scale (less
than 1200 Hz) come from northwestern Ontario (Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury),
indicating that the centralized /ahr/ of Ontario and Atlantic Canadian speech stops
abruptly somewhere north of greater Toronto. The highest values for the F2 of /ahr/
(1500 Hz and greater) all come from southern Ontario and eastward, with a particular concentration in Nova Scotia; the most extreme speaker, with a mean F2 of 1706
Hz, is from Truro, Nova Scotia.
LAB’s map 10.34 (2006, 111) suggests that this regional difference may have
originated in the historical settlement of Canada, with fronted (or, to be more historically accurate, unbacked) variants of /ahr/ spreading from New England northward into Loyalist-settled parts of Canada and westward into Yankee-settled parts of
the American Inland North. These territories now form a continuous belt from Nova
Scotia through Massachusetts to southeastern Minnesota, while less fronted variants
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144 Journal of English Linguistics
Figure 3
Mean F2 of /ahr/ (in Hz) by Region from West to East across Canada
1550
1500
Mean F2 (ahr)
1450
1400
1350
1300
1250
F2 (ahr)
BC
PR
SO
TO
EO
QC
MT
NL
1303
1315
1439
1416
1438
1344
1511
1524
Region
Note: BC = British Columbia; PR = Prairies; SO = southern Ontario; TO = greater Toronto; EO = eastern
Ontario; QC = Quebec; MT = Maritimes; NL = Newfoundland.
predominate elsewhere. Today, the (r) isogloss is superimposed on this pattern, so
that Atlantic Canada and the Inland North have an /r/-ful variant of the fronted
vowel, while eastern New England has an /r/-less variant.
Allophones of /æ/
LAB show the phonemic status and phonetic conditioning of æ in words like
bat, bad, bag, and band to be one of the most intricate and regionally diagnostic variables in North American English (2006, 173-84). For instance, these vowels are split
into lax /æ/ and tense /æh/ phonemes in the Mid-Atlantic region (bat with /æ/ and bad
and band with /æh/; bag with /æh/ in New York City but /æ/ in Philadelphia) but
tensed and raised to midfront position as a single phoneme, /æh/, in the Inland North,
the initiating phase of the Northern Cities Shift. In most of New England and the
Midland, a “nasal system” prevails, in which a single phoneme, /æ/, is raised only but
always before the front nasals /n/ and /m/. In most of the West, the nasal system gives
way to a variety of less clearly organized systems involving a continuous range of
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 145
allophones, though with nasals always showing the most raising on the continuum.
Only the northwestern United States and Canada show an exception to this pattern of
conditioning: in a region extending from Wisconsin to Seattle to Anchorage, Alaska,
and across western and central Canada from Vancouver to Ottawa, allophones of /æ/
before /g/ are also raised and fronted, joining the prenasal tokens in midfront position.
Raising before /g/ is phonetically distinct from raising before front nasals, arising
not from tensing and raising of the nucleus per se but from assimilation of nuclear
height and advancement to the high-front transition demanded by a following voiced
velar consonant. The direction of the glides in the two types of raising is opposite:
those before front nasals have in-glides, toward [´], whereas those before voiced
velars, /g/ and /N/, have up-glides, toward [j]. This glide reversal causes a change
across subsystems, so that short /æg/ effectively becomes long, up-gliding /eyg/,
merging with the /eyg/ of plague, vague, and so on, a neutralization similar to the one
that prevents tense–lax distinctions before /N/ in all English dialects (this merger was
first noticed by Zeller [1997]). In some places, /eg/ is also involved in this development: either because the merger of /æg/ and /eyg/ is avoided by a laxing of /eyg/ to
/eg/ (so that bag is [bεjg] or [bε:g] but vague is [vεg] or [vε:g]), or because /eg/ shows
a similar phonetic development to that of /æg/, so that lag and leg, and bag and beg,
are indistinguishable, each having [-εjg] or [-e:g]. The merger of /æg/ and /eyg/ was
shown in the Atlas to occur regularly in Wisconsin and Minnesota and neighboring
communities in Canada (Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario) as well as more
sporadically across the Canadian Prairies (2006, 182, map 13.5).
The PCE word list includes four tokens of /æN/ (band, ham, stamp, and tan) and
three of /æg/ (bag, gag, and tag) as well as six tokens of /æ/ in the “elsewhere” environment (bad, sack, sad, sat, tally, and tap). Analyses of these tokens produced results
that largely support the Atlas view of (æ) in Canada. All regions of Canada show raising of prenasal /æ/, with the mean Cartesian or diagonal distance between /æ/ and /æN/
ranging from between 300 and 400 Hz in Western Canada, Quebec, and Newfoundland
to over 400 Hz throughout Ontario and in the Maritimes; the most extreme separation
of the allophones occurs in southern and eastern Ontario, where the Cartesian distance
between them exceeds 500 Hz. The lowest and backest variants of /æN/ occur in
Quebec, where Boberg (2004, 556) shows that raising of /æN/ is ethnically conditioned,
with British-origin speakers raising like Ontarians but Italian and Jewish-origin speakers producing very little raising at all. Turning to /æg/, the PCE data reveal a similar pattern: all regions show raising of /æg/, with substantially less raising in Quebec and
Newfoundland: the Cartesian distance between /æ/ and /æg/ is generally between 100
and 200 Hz in Quebec and Newfoundland but over 200 Hz in the rest of Canada.
However, unlike prenasal raising, raising before /g/ is greatest not in Ontario and the
Maritimes, but in western Canada, including the northwestern region of Ontario identified in the Atlas as displaying the merger of /æg/ and /eyg/: on the Prairies, the mean
Cartesian distance between /æ/ and /æg/ is over 350 Hz.
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146 Journal of English Linguistics
Table 7
Regionally Significant Measures of Allophonic Conditioning
of /æ/, in Hz (Standard Deviations in Parentheses)
Region
British Columbia
Prairies
Southern Ontario
Toronto
Eastern Ontario
Quebec
Maritimes
Newfoundland
National mean
Mean Cartesian
Distance (æ–æN)
Mean Cartesian
Distance (æ–æg)
Mean Difference Between
(æ–æN) and (æ–æg)
392 (147)
354 (143)
517 (143)
458 (73)
526 (148)
312 (175)
412 (128)
286 (81)
404 (151)
323 (129)
352 (161)
323 (115)
244 (92)
311 (95)
149 (78)
243 (75)
147 (88)
270 (130)
70 (189)
3 (171)
194 (195)
213 (150)
215 (132)
164 (157)
169 (143)
139 (72)
135 (172)
A MANCOVA was carried out to test the effect of region and sex on three measures
of the Cartesian distance between /æ/ and its allophones before front nasals and /g/
along the front periphery of the vowel space: /æ/ to /æN/, /æ/ to /æg/, and the difference between /æ–æN/ and /æ–æg/ (the first two distance measures). Region had a significant overall effect on this group (F = 2.581; p = .000) as well as on each measure
individually. Regional means for these measures are displayed in Table 7, along with
standard deviations. The latter are fairly large, particularly in western Canada, indicating considerable interspeaker variability in the raising of /æ/; nevertheless, the MANCOVA identified many significant regional differences despite this variability.
The MANCOVA confirmed that raising before nasals is strongest in Ontario: the
Prairies and Newfoundland have significantly less raising than southern and eastern
Ontario, while Quebec has significantly less raising than all of Ontario. Raising
before /g/ was found to be strongest on the Prairies, where Cartesian measures of the
distance between /æ/ and /æg/ are significantly higher than those in Toronto, Quebec,
or Atlantic Canada. On the Prairies, a combination of moderate raising before nasals
and extreme raising of /æ/ before /g/ eliminates any difference between the positions
of these allophones, reflected in the low figure of 3 Hz in the third column of Table
7; British Columbia’s figure of 70 Hz is also substantially lower than those of central and eastern Canada, which are all well over 100 Hz. The MANCOVA confirmed
that the Prairie value for this measure is significantly lower than that of every other
Canadian region except British Columbia and Newfoundland. These data indicate an
important isogloss dividing Ontario from western Canada: east of this division, /æ/
is raised more before nasals than before /g/; west of it, raising of /æ/ before /g/
approximates prenasal raising.
Regional differences in the relation between prenasal and prevelar raising of /æ/
are displayed graphically in Figure 4, which plots the Cartesian distance in Hertz
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 147
Figure 4
Raising of /æ/ (in Hz) before Nasals and /g/, by Region
Cart.dist. (Hz) /æ/-/æg/
400
PR
350
BC
SO
300
EO
250
200
QC
MT
TO
150
NL
100
300
350
400
450
500
550
Cart.dist.(Hz)/æ/-/æN/
Note: BC = British Columbia; PR = Prairies; SO = southern Ontario; TO = greater Toronto; EO = eastern
Ontario; QC = Quebec; MT = Maritimes; NL = Newfoundland.
between /æ/ and /æN/ against that between /æ/ and /æg/ for each region. The graph
clearly shows four pairs of regions, well separated by this diagnostic. In the lower left
are Quebec and Newfoundland, which show relatively little raising in either environment. In the upper right are southern and eastern Ontario, which show the strongest
prenasal raising of /æ/ together with considerable prevelar raising. In the upper left
are British Columbia and the Prairies, which show the strongest prevelar raising of
/æ/, approximating their moderate raising of prenasal /æ/. In the middle are greater
Toronto and the Maritimes, which show moderate values for both types of raising,
Toronto with slightly more prenasal raising, the Maritimes with slightly less.
For 17 of the PCE participants, the distance between /æ/ and /æg/ subtracted from
the distance between /æ/ and /æN/ actually produced a negative figure, indicating
greater separation of /æg/ from /æ/ than of /æN/ from /æ/, a striking reversal of the
usual order of constraints on /æ/ raising. Such speakers occur in every region except
Newfoundland, but the preponderance—ten of the seventeen—are from western
Canada. By contrast, only one such speaker can be found in each of southern Ontario,
Toronto, eastern Ontario, or Quebec, and three in the Maritimes. This indicates that
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148 Journal of English Linguistics
the raising of /æg/ beyond /æN/ is largely a western Canadian phenomenon. The five
most extreme speakers in this regard, with /æg/ more than 150 Hz higher than /æN/,
are all from the West: Vancouver, Edmonton, Vernon (British Columbia), Red Lake
(northwestern Ontario), and Swift Current (Saskatchewan); the last speaker produced
a measure of –383 Hz, a complete reversal of the usual positions of these allophones,
with strong raising of /æg/ but comparatively little raising of /æN/. Crucially, however, the four speakers from communities across northwestern Ontario—Thunder
Bay, Red Lake, Sault Ste. Marie, and Sudbury—do not show a consistent pattern in
the allophonic conditioning of /æ/ that would allow them to be categorized clearly
with either the Prairies or with southern Ontario, as was possible with (ahr). Measured
in terms of the height of /æN/, the speaker from Red Lake shows relatively low,
Prairie-like values (higher F1); the speaker from Sault Ste. Marie shows relatively
high, Ontario-like values (lower F1); while the speakers from Thunder Bay and
Sudbury show medial values. This suggests that northwestern Ontario forms a transition zone between the speech of southern Ontario and that of the Prairies, the nature
of which could be effectively elucidated only by a local study of that region with a
larger sample.
Discussion
The PCE data support a somewhat different view of regional phonetic variation in
Canadian English than that of LAB. The Canadian Shift appears to be a national development, without a sharp isogloss excluding Atlantic Canada, but with Ontario ahead
of Quebec and the Prairies in the retraction of /e/, one of its main components. With
respect to Canadian Raising, the PCE data show above-average raising of /aw/ on the
Prairies, in southern and eastern Ontario, and in the Maritimes. This is only partially
consistent with the LAB isogloss (2006, 222, map 15.5), which shows no raising in
New Brunswick, variable raising on the Prairies, and strong raising in Toronto. LAB
do not report variation in the F2 of raised /aw/, which was found here to be a strong
regional indicator, with fronter vowels in Ontario and backer vowels in the West and
the Maritimes. The PCE data do support the LAB view of all of Canada except the
Atlantic region having advanced fronting of /uw/, but find a minor regional difference
in the peripherality of /ey/ that was not detected by LAB (95, map 10.18), with peripheral /ey/ most characteristic of the Prairies. The PCE data also support the LAB view
of the regional distribution of the merger of /ær/ and /er/, but motivate a different view
of /ahr/, without the variability in Alberta or the fronting in Montreal reported by LAB
(111, map 10.34). Finally, the PCE data on the allophones of /æ/ match the corresponding LAB data closely, with raising before nasals strong in Ontario and the
Maritimes but weak in Quebec and the Prairies (223), and raising before /g/ excluding
Quebec and Newfoundland (182, map 13.5), though the PCE data find raising before
/g/ to be strongest on the Prairies, a regional difference not identified by LAB.
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 149
Table 8
F2 (æ) – F2 (uw) by Region
Region
British Columbia
Prairies
Southern Ontario
Toronto
Eastern Ontario
Quebec
Maritimes
Newfoundland
National mean
F2 (æ) – F2 (uw)
SD
–100
122
–95
–101
–76
35
121
230
7
70
59
87
81
76
65
57
125
251
At this point, a number of individual regional differences have been identified, but a
more general picture of regional differentiation has not been presented. For instance,
where do the most important regional divisions lie within Canadian English, and which
parts of Canada can be seen as more innovative or more conservative? It is possible to
develop a broader view in two ways. First, the variables under study can be categorized
in terms of their status as traditional features or active changes in progress, based on the
evidence gathered by LAB of the dynamic processes affecting North American English
as a whole and Canadian English in particular. This evidence suggests that three of the
variables discussed above—Canadian Raising, the fronting of /ahr/, and the allophonic
conditioning of /æ/—are traditional features of Canadian English, while two others—
the Canadian Shift and the fronting of /uw/—are changes in progress, the first apparently confined mostly to Canada, the latter affecting North America on a continental
level. The combined effect of these changes operating in tandem is to reduce the distance in the F2 dimension between /æ/, traditionally a front vowel, and /uw/, traditionally a back vowel, so that the nuclei of the two vowels come to occupy similar positions,
somewhat behind the front periphery of the vowel space. The conjunction of these
changes—an index of innovation—can therefore be measured as the F2 of /uw/ subtracted from the F2 of /æ/: positive values indicate a relatively back /uw/ and front /æ/,
the historical pattern, while negative values indicate a relatively front /uw/ and retracted
/æ/, the innovative pattern. It turns out that this measure shows a clear regional pattern,
revealed in a MANCOVA of the effect of region and sex on F2 (æ) – F2 (uw) (F =
2.495; p = .024). The regional index scores are displayed in Table 8.
This measure shows the close approximation of /æ/ and /uw/ in F2 space across
the country as a whole, with an index score of close to zero, but with a great deal of
variation on either side (a standard deviation of 251 Hz). In fact, the national mean
is a compromise between strongly positive scores on the Prairies, in the Maritimes,
and in Newfoundland, indicating that these regions are more conservative in this
respect, and strongly negative scores in British Columbia and the three regions of
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150 Journal of English Linguistics
Ontario, suggesting that these are the most phonetically innovative regions of the
country. Quebec falls on the conservative side with the Prairies and Atlantic Canada,
but less emphatically so. Perhaps not surprisingly, the regions showing the most
innovative patterns are those focused on the two largest urban centers of English
Canada, Toronto and Vancouver.
Another more general view of the PCE data can be obtained by examining the
number of phonetic differences that are aligned with each regional division. In this
respect, the tripartite view of Canadian dialect geography developed by LAB receives
some support from the PCE data: important isoglosses do separate British Columbia
from the Prairies, and Atlantic Canada from Ontario, with Quebec an often distinct
interstitial pattern. However, the PCE data indicate that LAB’s Inland Canada region
contains an important internal division—not evident in the Atlas maps—between the
Prairie region and Ontario, while Quebec emerges as a clearly distinct region in the
PCE data. Specifically, British Columbia is divided from the Prairies by the F2 of
/ey/, which is lower in British Columbia and higher on the Prairies, but united with
the Prairies by low values for the F2 of raised /aw/ and the F2 of /ahr/, and by the
proximity of the prenasal and pre-/g/ allophones of /æ/; these three features together
define a western Canadian subregion spanning all four western provinces and parts of
northwestern Ontario, thereby diminishing the primacy of the western border of
LAB’s Inland Canada region.
A greater challenge to LAB’s Inland Canada region comes from the substantial
bundle of isoglosses that split it in half, dividing the Prairies from the southern regions
of Ontario: participants from the Prairies have less retracted values for /e/, less fronted
variants of raised /aw/, more peripheral values for the F2 of /ey/, less fronted variants
of /ahr/, and less raising of prenasal /æ/. These five isoglosses, together with the features that unite the Prairies with British Columbia, suggest that the basic differences
between the settlement histories of Ontario, founded by American Loyalists followed
by large groups of Ulster Irish and Scots, and western Canada, peopled by a mix of
Canadian, British, American, and European settlers from a wider range of origins, continue to have linguistic consequences today. While these differences are not of a similar magnitude to those found among the major regional varieties of American English,
much less of British English, they nevertheless create subtle differences between the
types of English that can be heard in Ottawa or Toronto and in Calgary or Vancouver;
these differences are not necessarily detectable only to the ears of a trained phonetician. This presents a challenge, if only a minor challenge, to the conventional view that
Canadian English is geographically homogeneous over the vast territory extending
from Vancouver to Ottawa.
It naturally comes as less of a surprise that there should be differences between
the types of English spoken in Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, and Newfoundland,
given the longer history of settlement and greater diversity of linguistic influences in
these regions. The PCE data find that the English-speaking population of Montreal,
isolated from those of Ontario to the west and New Brunswick to the east by the
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 151
minority status of English in Quebec and by considerable geographic distances (especially to the east), exhibits only variable presence of three Canadian features: Canadian
Raising of /aw/, the merger of /ær/ and /er/, and the raising of prenasal /æ/; Quebec
English also has lower values for the F2 of /ahr/ than its neighbors. This suggests that
these features were inherited from American English by means of the Loyalist settlement of the Maritimes and Ontario during and after the American Revolution, which
had comparatively little influence on the establishment of Montreal’s English-speaking
population. (While Quebec was a temporary refuge for large numbers of Loyalists
immediately after the war, most of these were soon resettled further west in Ontario;
most of Montreal’s English speakers came directly from Britain.)
Atlantic Canada is distinguished by its resistance to the fronting of /uw/, while
Newfoundland patterns with Quebec in showing the absence or variable presence of
Canadian Raising of /aw/ and raising of /æ/ before /g/; their unique histories make these
regions less Canadian, in linguistic terms, than the rest of Canada. The apparently limited extent of Newfoundland’s divergence from the rest of Canada in these data requires
some qualification. As is well known, the phonetic and other distinguishing features of
the varieties of English spoken in Newfoundland are many and varied, going well
beyond the scope of this study. The few phonetic variables studied here, which have a
general importance for Canada as a whole and are embedded in a general theory of the
dynamic processes affecting North American English on a continental level, are not necessarily the most important of the dozens that could be studied in a focused investigation of the unique properties of Newfoundland English (see Clarke [2004] for a recent
review of many of these properties). Moreover, the problems associated with analyzing
the speech of university students living outside the province are particularly acute in the
case of Newfoundland, so that the data presented here, whatever their value in studying
middle-class Newfoundland English, cannot be taken as representative of the wide
range of local varieties spoken by the majority of the population of Newfoundland.
More generally, it must be admitted that the restrictions of the PCE sample—
young, university-educated, mostly middle-class Canadians—tend to constrain the
applicability of the PCE data to Canadian English as a whole, even beyond the obvious case of conservative enclaves like Newfoundland, Cape Breton, Lunenburg, or
the Ottawa Valley. A study of working-class speech in any of the regions or communities discussed above might reveal even greater regional differences than those
reported here, or additional variables that do not appear in middle-class speech. The
PCE data likely represent the minimal extent of regional variation in the phonetics
of Canadian English; the real picture can be assumed to be even more vivid once a
broad range of social levels is taken into account. Nevertheless, it is interesting to
know how much regional variation exists at this minimal, middle-class level; if it can
survive where regional identities are weakest, its survival at more locally oriented
social levels would seem to be assured.
Several considerations, by contrast, moderate the social limitations of the sample.
One is the observation that social variation in the sound of North American English
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152 Journal of English Linguistics
tends to involve consonants—(r), (ng), (-t, -d), (th, dh), and so on—whereas regional
variation tends to involve vocalic variables, such as those studied here or in the Atlas
of North American English. The variables of vocalic nuclear quality analyzed here
have by far the most pervasive and systematic effect on the perception of regional
speech: more than consonantal variables or morpho-syntactic variables, which vary
socially across regions and apply only among a minority of speakers at the lower end
of the social class spectrum, and more than lexical variables, which occur only sporadically in spontaneous speech. Another consideration is that many of the vocalic
variables examined here seem to operate below the level of conscious awareness,
being indicators of regional identity rather than markers of social class that respond
to stylistic variation. The likelihood that any of the PCE subjects might have learned
to control the Canadian Shift of /e/, the Canadian Raising of /aw/, or the allophonic
conditioning of /æ/ is extremely small: for these variables, word list data are closely
representative of vernacular speech.
Finally, the PCE data presented here, though based on word list productions only
and on a highly constrained social sample, show a close correspondence to the data
of LAB, which reflect the spontaneous speech of a broader range of social types. This
convergence of data from different sources suggests not only that word list data are
of considerable value in the study of Standard Canadian English, but that the data
obtained from the socially restricted PCE sample are not broadly different from those
obtained from a wider social sample like that of the Atlas. Unlike in Labov’s famous
study of New York City, in the case of modern, urban, Standard Canadian English, we
are not dealing with a “sink of negative prestige” (1972, 136), introducing an element
of chaotic distortion of the vernacular grammar in formally elicited speech. On the
contrary, with the exception of a minority of nonstandard speakers in older rural
areas, specific enclaves, and urban lower-class neighborhoods, most native Englishspeaking Canadians are comfortable with the way they speak, believing it to be inferior, perhaps, to the “best” British English but certainly superior to most, if not all,
varieties of American English and very close to an imagined global standard. In this
context, the PCE data have considerable value as a controlled comparison of regional
productions of vocalic variables in Standard Canadian English.
As such, the PCE data suggest that the primary dialect divisions of Canada at the
phonetic level are between six rather than three regions: the West, Ontario, Quebec, the
Maritimes, and Newfoundland, with a secondary division within the West between
British Columbia and the Prairies. Northwestern Ontario constitutes a wide and
sparsely populated transition zone between the West and southern Ontario. This picture closely matches the regional taxonomy based on lexical data developed in Boberg
(2005b), suggesting that it applies to Canadian English as a whole, rather than only to
the phonetic level of analysis.
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Boberg / Regional Differentiation in Standard Canadian English 153
Appendix
Word List Used in Phonetics of Canadian English Study
PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING WORDS AS YOU WOULD
NORMALLY SAY THEM
bar
sit
file
student
collar
stare
pajamas
lasagna
strong
tally
sort
too
sell
sat
fork
start
still
sterile
sorry
palm
down
drama
south
bother
doubt
void
fool
caller
caught
bad
steer
dawn
sour
bold
go
monitor
cow
pair
proud
tide
star
sod
Pakistani
lager
charity
rider
stamp
spa
saw
horrible
sale
see
coin
Colorado
steel
tag
whine
stir
soprano
which
tire
stood
band
tin
poor
bird
toe
sack
talk
lava
cut
cot
tooth
seed
stayed
carry
step
mafia
boots
writer
pour
dark
llama
worry
Slavic
dead
side
relative
town
foot
father
soon
due
barrel
sign
foil
sawed
top
Don
sun
gown
loud
sight
foul
borrow
stain
bag
duck
girl
did
bang
new
state
code
dull
cool
food
stone
house
hanger
gag
Iraq
singer
tan
whale
dirt
tour
plaza
say
full
tie
ham
car
care
tube
sure
cold
stole
sick
sanity
fight
tap
macho
stud
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sad
sore
cook
do
spirit
tight
turn
ferry
set
deck
coat
cup
veto
core
seen
tool
curry
pasta
shout
spice
panorama
façade
taco
berry
sock
Picasso
harp
avocado
short
toy
tip
ten
boat
hurry
seat
calm
154 Journal of English Linguistics
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Charles Boberg is Associate Professor of Linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is
co-author, with William Labov and Sharon Ash, of the Atlas of North American English (Mouton de
Gruyter, 2006). His research focuses on variation and change in North American English, particularly
English in Canada.
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