Canadian Shift

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The Canadian Shift is a linguistic vowel shift found in Canadian English. It was first described by Clarke, Elms and Youssef in 1995,[1] based on impressionistic analysis. It is mainly found in Ontario, Anglophone Montreal and further west.[2][3]

The shift involves the front lax vowels /æ/ (the short-a of trap), /ɛ/ (the short-e of dress), and /ɪ/ (the short-i of kit).

It is triggered by the cot-caught merger: /ɒ/ (as in cot) and /ɔ/ (as in caught) merge as [ɒ], a low back vowel.[4] As each space opens up, the next vowel along moves into it. Thus, the short a /æ/ retracts from a near-low front position to a low central position, with a quality similar to the vowel heard in Northern England [a]. The retraction of /æ/ was independently observed in Vancouver[5] and is more advanced for Ontarians and women than for people from the Prairies or Atlantic Canada and men.[6]

However, scholars disagree on the behaviour of /ɛ/ and /ɪ/:

The Canadian Shifts. Arrows in red illustrate the shift as described by Clarke;[1] those in blue illustrate the shift as described by Boberg.[3] Those in black are shared.
/ɪ/ → /ʊ/
↓
/ɛ/ →
↓ /ʌ/
/æ/ /ɒ/, /ɔ/
↘
[a]
  • According to Clarke et al. (1995), /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ tend to lower in the direction of [æ] and [ɛ], respectively: hence, bet and bit tend to sound, respectively, like bat and bet as pronounced by a speaker without the shift.
  • Labov et al. (The Atlas of North American English, 2006) found that most of the 33 subjects interviewed tended to lower /ɛ/, but no movement of /ɪ/ was detected.
  • Boberg (2005)[3] considers the primary movement of /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ to be retraction, at least in Montreal. He studied a diverse range of English-speaking Montrealers, and found that younger speakers had a significantly retracted /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ compared with older speakers, but did not find that the vowels were significantly lower. A small group of young people from Ontario were also studied, and there too retraction was most evident. Under this scenario, a similar group of vowels (short front) are retracting in a parallel manner, with /ɛ/ and /ʌ/ approaching each other. Therefore, with Boberg’s results, bet approaches but remains different from but, and bit sounds different, but remains distinct.
  • Hagiwara (2006),[7] through acoustic analysis, noted that /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ do not seem to be lowered in Winnipeg, although the lowering and retraction of /æ/ has caused a redistribution of backness values for the front lax vowels.

U.S. dialects of English with the cot-caught merger do not exhibit the Canadian shift because typically in the U.S. the merged vowel is less rounded and/or less back and slightly lower than the Canadian vowel, and therefore less room would be left for the retraction of /æ/.

Due to the Canadian Shift, the short-a and the short-o are shifted in opposite directions to that of the Northern Cities vowel shift, found across the border in the Inland Northern U.S., which is causing these two dialects to diverge: the Canadian short-a is very similar in quality to the Inland Northern short-o; for example, the production [maːp] would be recognized as map in Canada, but mop in the Inland North.


[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Clarke, S.; Elms, F. & Youssef, A. (1995). "The third dialect of English: Some Canadian evidence". Language Variation and Change 7: 209–228. 
  2. ^ Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-016746-8. 
  3. ^ a b c Boberg, C. (2005). "The Canadian shift in Montreal". Language Variation and Change 17: 133–154. 
  4. ^ Labov, p. 128.
  5. ^ Esling, John H. and Henry J. Warkentyne (1993). "Retracting of /æ/ in Vancouver English."
  6. ^ Charles Boberg, "Sounding Canadian from Coast to Coast: Regional accents in Canadian English."
  7. ^ Robert Hagiwara. "Vowel production in Winnipeg."