Phonological features of Canadian English

The low-back merger (the LOT and THOUGHT sets)

The most significant defining feature of Canadian English at the phonological level is the general consistency across the country of the merger between /ɒ/ and /ɔ:/ , the vowels of cot and caught (or LOT and THOUGHT), in the low-back corner of the vowel space. While this merger is by no means unique to Canada, being shared with neighboring areas of Eastern New England, Western Pennsylvania, and the Western United States and thereby causing Labov (1991) to include Canada with these regions in his “Third Dialect”, it is nevertheless a unifying feature of English across Canada with important phonetic ramifications, to be discusssed below in relation to the Canadian Shift. For virtually all native speakers of Canadian English today, the pairs cot and caught, sod and sawed, stock and stalk, Don and dawn, and collar and caller are homophones.

The dialectological literature on this merger suggests that it is well entrenched in Canadian English and is at least several generations old. For example, Scargill and Warkentyne (1972: 64) record an average of 85% of Canadians responding ‘yes’ to a survey question that asked whether cot and caught rhyme. Since this was a written survey in which spelling may have influenced responses, it seems safe to speculate that the real rate of merger was very close to 100%. Indeed, a generation earlier, Gregg (1957: 22) reported an exceptionless merger among Vancouver university students. Avis (1973: 64) and the limited data on Canada in Labov (1991: 32) also suggest a consistent merger across Canada, as do more recent data from Labov, Ash, and Boberg (fc.).

In Newfoundland, the same merger can be observed, but the merged vowel is produced further forward in the mouth, in low-central position. At a phonetic level, this means that a Newfoundlander’s production of a word like cod will be very close to that heard in the “Northern Cities” of the Inland Northern or Great Lakes region of the United States: something like [kad]. At the phonological level, of course, the two dialects differ. In Newfoundland, caught would have the same low-central vowel as cod, whereas in the American Inland North, caught represents a distinct phonemic category, with a higher, backer vowel. This is one of many distinctive features of Newfoundland English that reflect its origins in southwestern England and southeastern Ireland. Others include a centralized pronunciation of /ar/, a back pronunciation of /Λ/ , and a spirantized articulation of post-vocalic /t/.