Canadian Phonology

In this page

• General facts
• Canadian Raising: the Central Diphthong
  • front and back diphthongs
  • Phonological conditioning
  • The history of Canadian Raising
• Rhoticity
  • pre-rhotic [o] in sorrow and borrow
  • pre-rhotic in merry and marry
• Borrowings with low vowels
  • The pasta variable and its exceptions
  • A possible explanation

General Facts

Canadian English shares a number of phonological properties with Standard American English. Among these are syllable-final rhoticity and alveolar flapping. Canadian English can be called rhotic because, like in Standard American and Irish English, syllable-final r is pronounced in words like car and farm. Interestingly, the English spoken in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, stands out as a rare r-dropping Canadian dialect.

Flapping is the process of replacing an intervocalic t or d with a quick voiced tap of the tongue against the alveolar ridge. In both Canadian and American English, it can only occur if the t or d is between two vowels, and as long as the second vowel is not stressed. As a result, the alveolar stops in waiting, wading, seated, seeded, and capital are all flapped. Flapping can also occur if there is an r between the first vowel and the alveolar stop, as in words like barter and party. In Canadian English, this feature is age-graded. Woods (1993) shows that older Canadians are less likely than younger ones to replace alveolar stops with flaps.

Canadian Raising

One of the most salient characteristics of Canadian English is the pattern that linguists call "Canadian Raising". In the general discussion of diphthongs, we saw that English has three phonemic diphthongs. Two of these have low vowels as their nucleus: as in ride and as in loud. In Canadian English, both these diphthongs have variants whose occurrence is obligatory under certain phonological conditions. Before a voiceless consonant, the diphthong replaces , and replaces . These variants are called raised or centralized diphthongs, because their nucleus is no longer a low vowel.

The table below provides lists of words which do and do not have raised diphthongs in Canadian English. Click on any highlighted word to hear the contrast between raised and unraised diphthongs. (In the window that pops up from these links, some PC users may have to right-click the audio links to play the samples).

unraised	raised	unraised	raised
five lies rider	fife lice writer	loud gouge powder	stout couch pouter
ride lied tried vibe bide live arrive knives rise spies rye lie try buy vine pine mime lime	right light fight reich pike tyke trike type pipe viper spite bite pike might mighty life rife knife rice lice nice spice	mouthe houses espouse rouse cows bows thou bow how now town down frown	rout lout bout about pout tout doubt gout mouth house louse spouse

Canadian Raising was first brought to the attention of linguists by Joos (1942). Parts of it are evident in other dialects: in the northern US Great Lakes cities raises is raised, but not . Conversely, Virginia English raises only . The English of Martha's Vineyard raises both diphthongs, but not in flapped words like writer and pouter. In each of the American raising dialects, the pattern is variable, but subject to the same phonological conditioning of the following consonant. In Canadian English, the pattern is essentially categorical: it can only occur before voiceless consonants, where it is obligatory.

The origins of Canadian Raising are debatable. Chambers and others use it as evidence of the Loyalist roots of Canadian English, assuming it was a feature of the English spoken by Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, as suggested by its perseverance in some American dialects. Yet the feature is also found in certain "linguistic enclaves" in Canada, notably in Nova Scotia and the Ottawa Valley, where the influence of Loyalist English is thought to have been much weaker. Furthermore, a similar pattern is also seen in Scottish and Irish English, both of which may have had a substantial influence on the Nova Scotia and Ottawa varieties of Canadian English.

So while the question of who brought the pattern to southern Ontario (and ultimately to western Canada) is hard to answer, historical linguists do agree on one thing: that the pattern is a fossil of the Great Vowel Shift that occurred in England in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Great Vowel Shift refers to the rearrangement of the entire English vowel system from Middle to Modern English. Prior to the shift, words like five and house were pronounced [fi:v] and [hu:s], with high vowels. The Great Vowel Shift lowered their vowels to their current low-vowel pronunciation, [fayv] and [haws]. It is believed that the diphthong-raising pattern is inherited from certain middle-English dialects in which the lowering of [i:] and [u:] stopped at the mid-vowel height in some words.

Pre-rhotic vowels

Another characteristic of Canadian vowels is in the distribution of pre-rhotic (before-r) vowels. A notable aspect of Canadian pre-rhotic vowels is their resistance to the emergent pattern in American English of substituting [a] for [o] before inter-vocalic [r]. In a number of highly frequent words, such as sorry, tomorrow, borrow, sorrow, and Laura, this pattern has become obligatory in American English. The pattern is also variably evident in a few more words, such as Florida, orange, oracle, Norwich, adorable, and thesaurus.

The current variability in the pattern suggests that American English is losing [o] before intervocalic [r], but Canadian English maintains [o] in all of these forms. The result is a contrast between the American pronunciations, like [sari] and [baro], and the Canadian pronunciations, [sori] and [boro]. To our knowledge, this feature is not discussed in any published discussion of Canadian dialectology, but we propose that it is a definitive marker of Canadian English.

Click here to hear them: sorry, borrow.

While Canadian English maintains [o] before intervocalic [r], it has nearly or completely lost the distinction between and in the same position. A result of this is homophony for the word pairs marry-merry and Barry-berry. In a survey of Ottawa residents, Woods (1993) finds the pattern to be age-related: older speakers tend to pronounce marry as [mæri], while younger speakers are likely to pronounce it so that it rhymes with merry. It is Woods' claim that the retention of [æri] is a Canadianism, since it is also a Britishism. We contend that the loss of [æri] is a property of Canadian English that distinguishes it from other varieties in close proximity, like the English of New York and New England, where [æri] is preserved.

Borrowings with low vowels

A final, curious property of Canadian English is in its foreign /a/ nativization. This is the way the dialect pronounces borrowed words with low vowels, such as pasta, Mazda, drama, and taco. There is a strong tendency for Canadians to pronounce these words with a front , while Americans tend to use [a].

Though the pattern is somewhat variable, Boberg (2000) finds that for 15 such borrowings, the Canadian pronunciation is always more likely than the American pronunciation to have . For example, 82% of his American informants pronounce panorama with in the third syllable, compared to 94% of Canadians. In a parallel manner, 5% of the Americans in his study pronounce pasta with in the first syllable, compared to 81% of Canadians.

The following table provides a list of items Boberg used. You should note that for nearly each word, at least 70% of his Canadian informants had a pronunciation with , with the exception of macho, taco, and Vietnam. In these cases, however, the Canadian pronunciation was still more likely to use than the American pronunciation was.

The Language Samples project has compiled a list of many more borrowed items that tend to have in Canadian English. These are provided and highlighted in the table below:

Some other words that seem to pattern with macho in Canadian English, by tending to use [a] instead of , include Bach, Guatamala, kamikaze, karate and garbanzo. Why the Canadian pronunciation of these items tends to use [a] is a mystery, but as the two lists above show, the overwhelming pattern is for Canadian English to use in borrowings with low vowels. Furthermore, the use of instead of [a] is productive: Canadians, when confronted with novel foreign words, continue to assign to them.

The reason for this property of Canadian English is a matter of conjecture; Boberg does not speculate as to its source. One account might simply be that Canadian English uses the spelling of these words as a basis for their pronunciation. However, another possible answer lies in the distinct configurations of the Canadian and American vowel systems. In the discussion of the low-back merger, we saw that the Northern Cities Shift and the Canadian Shift have pulled the pronunciation of in opposite directions. The result is that the American pronunciation of stock is almost identical to the Canadian pronunciation of stack. That is, the American [a] is almost the same vowel as the Canadian .

Oddly, then, the American and Canadian pronunciations of borrowed words like lava and pasta are phonetically very similar, even though they are identifiably different phonemes; only a Canadian could rhyme pasta with Mt. Shasta. Because of the phonetic similarity, we can say that both dialects try to assign a low-central vowel to these borrowings; in the American case, the central vowel happens to be the more back of its two low vowels, while in the Canadian case, the central vowel is the more front of the two. Another way of making this distinction is as follows: the Northern Cities shift has pushed too far forward and too high for it to be an appropriate vowel for these borrowings. Similarly, the Canadian Shift has pulled [a] too far back for it to be an appropriate vowel in the same items.

Homepage

© 2001 The Language Samples Project