Regional Phonetic Differentiation in Standard Canadian English

Abstract

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).

The Nature of Phonetic Gradience across a Dialect Continuum: Evidence from Modern Greek Vowels

“…The alternative hypothesis is that there are differences in the vowel space area. If the alternative hypothesis is corrected as studies from English and other languages suggest (e.g., Labov, 1994;Labov et al, 2006;Boberg, 2008;Gross et al, 2016), we expect significant effects of the variety on the F1 and F2.…”

Vowel patterning of Mormons in Southern Alberta, Canada

“…Labov et al (2006), based on a telephone survey of 1-4 speakers per city, proposes that Canada is made up of three dialect areas, of which the Canadian West and Ontario make up one area. Boberg (2008) however argues that this large dialect region should be broken down further, proposing a more fine-grained view, with five dialect areas within Canada, differentiating Ontario from the Prairies from British Columbia. His work is based on a comparison of a number of phonetic phenomena among university students from across Canada attending McGill University in Montreal.…”

“…Raising of /ae/ before g The variation in the phonetic realization of /ae/, sometimes called 'short a' (Boberg, 2008) in Canada is somewhat complicated. On the one hand, /ae/ is widely reported as lowering and retracting towards /a/, as part of the widelystudied Canadian shift (Clarke et al, 1995;Esling and Warkentyne, 1993;Hagiwara, 2006;Hoffman, 2010;Roeder, 2012;Roeder and Jarmasz, 2010;Sadlier-Brown and Tamminga, 2008), which is argued to be in reaction to the merger of the lower back vowels /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, a characteristic of most varieties of Canadian English (Clarke et al, 1995;Labov et al, 2006).…”

Vowel Inherent Spectral Change in the Vowels of North American English

“…Production data is analyzed for three distinct dialect regions of North America: Western Canadian English collected in Edmonton, Alberta; Inland Northern English, collected in Kalamazoo, Michigan; and Southern English collected in Dallas, Texas. (Dialect labels adopted from Boberg 2008and Labov et al 2006. Results from modified natural and synthetic speech supporting the relevance of VISC in perception are also summarized.…”

“…1 This specification was based on measurements of formant frequencies from relatively 1 Following Nearey and Assmann (1986), I will use the term Western Canadian English to refer to a combination of what Boberg (2008) refers to as the Prairie and the British Columbia dialects. For all of the Canadian samples discussed in this chapter, the majority were likely Prairie dialect speakers, primarily from Alberta.…”