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Phonology
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Canadian PhoneticsAlthough not the most striking feature of Canadian English, a crucial aspect of the dialect is the complete merger of the vowels 
and 
. Since this is a property of the vowel inventory, it is technically an aspect of phonology, but it has a strong effect on the phonetic realization of other Canadian vowels. Though this merger has also occurred in the mid-western and western United States, in Canada it has triggered what Clarke et al (1995) call the Canadian Shift.
A result of the merger is that the low-back region of the vowel space is less dense; allowing for the low-front vowel 
to retract to a low-central articulation. This retraction moves in the opposite direction of where it has shifted in the Northern (US) Cities Shift. Boberg (2000) sums up the result rather succinctly: the word stack is pronounced in Windsor, Ontario (indeed, in the rest of Canada) with the same vowel of the word stock as pronounced in Detroit, just across the river.
The following links provide examples of the retraction of in Canadian English.
There is evidence that the merger of and had taken place at least as early as the 1850s. Chambers (1993) cites the published memoirs of Susanna Moodie, a British woman who emigrated to southern Ontario. In one passage, she mocks an Ontarian's pronunciation of the word sauce, saying it sounded like "sarce." Given what we know about r-lessness in British English of the time, Chambers reasons that Moodie's spelling of "sarce" indicates that the Ontarian pronounced it as [sas], with a merged rather than .
The vowel space of Canadian English is further distinct in that the entire system is situated slightly farther back in the oral tract. That is, Canadian back vowels are pronounced with the tongue bunched slightly behind where it woud be in British and American dialects.
In acoustic terms, this difference is reflected in the formant structure of each vowel. Recall that F2 varies inversely with backness; a high value for F2 indicates a vowel with the tongue bunched forward, as for front vowels. Each Canadian vowel has an F2 that is a little lower than the equivalent vowel in other dialects. The image below illustrates this; the graph shows the F1/F2 plot for a Canadian speaker. If you roll your mouse over the button below the chart, you will see the formant values for the corresponding American English vowels.
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Second Formant
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Back
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High | ||
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First Formant
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| Low | |||
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Roll over this button to compare with American vowels |
The above graph's plots are F2 on the x-axis and F1 on the y-axis; formant values were extracted using from spectrograms made with Praat software developed by Paul Boersma.
Vowels that are plotted farther to the right have lower F2 values, and are therefore pronounced with the tongue bunched farther back in the mouth. You should notice that the Canadian vowels (in red) tend to be plotted farther to the right than their American counterparts (in blue). The differences between the two speakers here are small, since the word-tokens used to identify their formants were in citation (careful) form, but in fast, natural speech, we would expect a greater distance between the American and Canadian vowel plots.
Generally, even in quick speech, this difference in F2 values is not enough to make a Canadian incomprehensible, but it still is noticeable to the human ear. The following links provide examples of Canadian back vowels. You will also notice that the perception of extra-backness will be heightened by the monophthongal nature of the Canadian vowels. That is, as shown in the discussion of diphthongs, tense vowels tend to be phonetic diphthongs in English. In these examples, however, the tense vowels are steady-state; there is less of a diphthong contour.
For some vowels, the differences in formant structure are enough that a particular vowel in one dialect could sound like a different vowel in another dialect. As discussed above, this appears to be the case for low vowels in Canadian English: the plot for the Canadian front is situated rather close to the American back . An interesting perceptual effect emerges from the proximity of these vowels: an American English speaker might actually perceive the Canadian pronunciation of stack as their stock. The opposite effect is much more salient: Canadians often report the American pronunciation of stock to sound like their own stack. While this effect is strongest for speakers of Northern Cities dialects (like Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo), Canadians associate this with other varieties, including Southern American and Mid-Atlantic English.
There are a few regional differences in the vowels of Canadian English dialects. The feature of -retraction is not found in Newfoundland English or in the Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Some of these regions, notably Newfoundland and rural Nova Scotia, actually have a wide range of distinct varieties that are quite distinct from Canadian English.
One property of central and western Canadian English is in the pronunciation of the high back vowel [u] as fronted and diphthongized instead of a fully back monophthong. The variation between the two pronunciations is such that a single speaker could use either, especially in Southern Ontario, and while research on this variable is lacking, it seems to be a characteristic of the English spokem in the western provinces of Alberta and British Columbia.
© 2001 The Language Samples Project