The Canadian Shift in two Ontario cities

Abstract

The Canadian Shift, a change-in-progress that is affecting the lax vowel subsystem of Canadian English, has been found to be active in a number of cities across Canada. Very little is known about the geolinguistic history and spread of the shift, however. Combining apparent time data from Thunder Bay, Ontario, with a comparison of lax vowel pronunciation in the speech of young people from both Thunder Bay and Toronto, the current study presents evidence against the hypothesis that the Canadian Shift has spread to Thunder Bay by way of a gravity model of diffusion. Although not identical, the vowel configurations are quite similar in the speech of young people from the two cities, and the apparent time findings suggest that the shift in Thunder Bay has not lagged behind the shift in Toronto. Results support the proposal that the English of Thunder Bay and Toronto share a common source and that the low back vowel merger, the pre-cursor for the shift, was brought westward with the settlers to Thunder Bay in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Subsequently, the Canadian Shift occurred simultaneously in both areas. Evidence of more urban features in the pronunciation of several Thunder Bay teenagers also raises questions about the future impact of mobility on the local dialect.

The Canadian Shift: Still shifting?

“…The eight speakers' data reported here provide insight on the Canadian Shift in Ottawa. It seems to take on a similar flavour as earlier studies from Montreal (Boberg 2005), and from Toronto and Thunder Bay (Roeder 2012), though different from very early work from Clarke et al (1995), as well as more recent work (e.g., Sadlier-Brown and Tamminga 2008;Kettig and Winter 2017).…”

“…For the vowels involved in the Canadian Shift that were included in this analysis ([ɪ], [ɛ], [ae], and [ɑ]), we would expect older speakers to produce [ɪ] and [ɛ] more fronted, and possibly higher, [ae] would be produced more fronted, and [ɑ] would be produced higher than younger speakers (Clarke et al 1995;Boberg 2005;Sadlier-Brown and Tamminga 2008;Roeder 2012;Kettig and Winter 2017). The eight speakers' data reported here provide insight on the Canadian Shift in Ottawa.…”

“…Particularly, due to its layout, the city includes urban, suburban, and rural areas. Previous literature has shown confounding results when investigating urban and rural communities, where age-related differences in vowel production are not statistically significant (e.g., Roeder 2012). Because of this, it may be useful to investigate one city with such a variety of communities in effort to tease apart the effect of age and the Canadian Shift.…”

Vowel patterning of Mormons in Southern Alberta, Canada

“…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). On the other hand, /ae/ is reported to be raised before velars and nasals, with ae-raising before nasals most characteristic of Ontario, and ae-raising before velars most characteristic of the Prairie provinces (Boberg, 2008).…”

The Canadian Shift in non-urban southeastern Ontario: Transmission or Diffusion?

“…Due to variation in recording techniques, elicitation materials, and normalization algorithms, direct comparison of data across studies is difficult. Based on data collected using identical methodology in two locations, Roeder (2012) provided evidence of parallel progression over apparent time in the Ontario cities of Thunder Bay and Toronto, a finding that does not conform to the expected gravity model of diffusion (Trudgill 1974). According to the gravity model, when a change is emanating out from an urban metropolis, city size and distance from the urban core both contribute to the rate at which a linguistic change will spread, such that the larger a given town or city is and the closer it is to the urban core, the more quickly the new linguistic form will begin to take root there.…”