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The Great Canadian Vowel Shift

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Re: The Great Canadian Vowel Shift

#31

Post by mabbo »

dghughes wrote: post #30
sandworm101 wrote: post #5

The 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.

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.

Re: The Great Canadian Vowel Shift

#32

Post by sandworm101 »

marincounty wrote: post #28
kafkaesque wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 h…

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.

Re: The Great Canadian Vowel Shift

#33

Post by chc »

mabbo wrote: post #31
dghughes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, A…

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.

Re: The Great Canadian Vowel Shift

#34

Post by cfallin »

bentcorner wrote: post #4

> 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.

Re: The Great Canadian Vowel Shift

#35

Post by stan_rogers »

chc wrote: post #33
mabbo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, A…

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.)

Re: The Great Canadian Vowel Shift

#36

Post by stan_rogers »

douche wrote: post #23
sandworm101 wrote: post #5

The 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.

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.

Re: The Great Canadian Vowel Shift

#38

Post by talideon »

dghughes wrote: post #30
sandworm101 wrote: post #5

The 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.

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.

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.

Re: The Great Canadian Vowel Shift

#39

Post by supercanuck »

sandworm101 wrote: post #5

The 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.

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

Re: The Great Canadian Vowel Shift

#40

Post by refurb »

mijustin wrote: post #19

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.
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