English in Canada: phonology

As recently as 1948, Morton Bloomfield (1948: 59) was justified in remarking that very little research had been devoted to Canadian English, especially in comparison to American or British English. The projected Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, which produced groundbreaking studies of dialect variation along the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, was never extended to Canada, beyond a few scattered informants in New Brunswick, Ontario, and Manitoba, interviewed in connection with studies of American English across the border. Since the 1950s, however, research on Canadian English has proliferated. It now comprises a substantial body of material focused on four major themes:

1) the historical origins of Canadian English;

2) alternation among American and British words, pronunciations, and usage in Canada;

3) the documentation of relic areas and traditional regional enclaves; and

4) Canadian Raising, the articulation of the diphthongs /aʊ/ and /aɪ/ with non-low nuclei when they occur before voiceless consonants, which became a standard example of the need for ordered rules in generative phonology.

Overviews of the research in these areas can be found in Avis (1973), Bailey (1982) and Chambers (1979, 1991). We will focus on the sound of Canadian English, and in particular on those phonological and phonetic variables that are most useful for distinguishing Canadian English from other varieties, and for identifying regional varieties within Canada.

The origins of Canadian English have been studied in light of the history of the settlement of Canada and will be briefly addressed in 2.1, below. The contributions of traditional dialectological research to determining the status of Canadian English in relation to American and British English will discuss three phonological features of Canadian English.