Posted on 08/04/2015 10:51:55 AM PDT by rickmichaels
Out with “oot.” No more “aboot.” Canada is talking with a New Speak. In a linguistic pivot called the Canadian Vowel Shift, we are pronouncing “God” more like “gawd,” “bagel” like “bahgel,” “pillow” like “pellow,” and “sorry” less like “sore-y.” The word “Timbit” is becoming “Tembet,” and “Dan slipped on the staircase” now sounds more like “Don” “slept” on it. First discovered in 1995, the new vowels are contagious, spreading rapidly from Victoria to St. John’s, where linguists are mapping the frequency of people’s voices and using ultrasounds to track their tongue and lip placement.
“We’re in the middle of a transformation,” says Paul De Decker, a sociolinguist at Memorial University of Newfoundland. “Our vowels are getting higher and backer in the mouth, and it’s more widespread, more diverse than we initially thought.”
Some linguists compare the shift to “Valley Girl” speech, which is perhaps most dramatically demonstrated by an American comedian in the hit YouTube video, “Shoes.” The chorus, “Shoes. Oh my God, shoes,” sounds more like, “Shahs, ah my gawd, shahs.” More mildly in Canada, we find the shift in the Air Canada pre-flight safety video when we hear, “Welcome aboard Air Canada.” Compared to a 1986 version, the “Canada” is now pronounced farther back in the mouth, like “Cahnadah.”
These changes in the mouth are happening under our noses. Even though the new pronunciation is used every day, almost nobody has heard of it—not the president of Canada’s association of university and college English teachers, nor the national director of Teachers of English as a Second Language. As it creeps into our speech under the level of social awareness, the vowel shift is known as a “change from below,” with a suspected epicentre in urban Ontario.
Wait, what the hall? De Decker explains the shift as a result of Canadian tolerance. As immigrants and visitors arrive with different accents, we have come to tolerate variation and to play with language ourselves. “If we weren’t tolerant,” he says, “we would crack down and say, ‘No, that’s not how it’s pronounced.’ Instead, we’ve started to push the envelope even further.”
With young women initially leading the shift, some experts suggest they subconsciously adopted it from California as a way to portray a more trendy identity. De Decker says the new Canadian vowels only partly resemble Valley Girl speech, and that the similarities may be coincidental; still, he agrees the new vowels are in vogue. “It’s like a badge saying, ‘These are all the people I’ve met, and I have the vowel system to prove it.’ ”
The Canadian Vowel Shift has now shot far beyond urban youth. One study heard the shift to be equally advanced in Thunder Bay as in Toronto, and others have found it among seniors as old as 90. “People who don’t consider themselves innovative or hip are showing it,” says De Decker. We can even hear it in the Corner Gas theme song: “You think there’s not a lot goin’ on, but look closer, baby, you’re so wrong.” The “think” almost sounds like “thenk,” and “lot” is more like “lawt.”
The first person to discover the shift, Sandra Clarke, a linguist at Memorial University, says Canadians have long held potential for a change in their speech, based on their relaxed pronounciations of many words. For example, we say “cough” without the harsh “quaff” sound that might make us crank our heads in the U.S., and we say “caught” the same as “cot,” without pronouncing the a or u at all. “When you have open space like that, vowels don’t have to stay in their places,” says Clarke. “The opportunity is there for new ones to move in.”
Scholars debate which vowels have changed the most. Clarke thinks the consonants within words affect whether or not we shift our pronunciation of the vowels. The shift is most obvious, she says, in words with fricatives, which are letter combinations such as “th” and “sh.” “Shovel” is more like “shawvel,” and “thank you” resembles “thahnk you.” “I wouldn’t be surprised if fricatives are in the lead,” she says.
Although these sneaky vowels might jeopardize the sound of Canada’s iconic lingo, they are also helping unite us. Since the same change is happening in Red Deer as in Montreal, we may find decreasing distinction between accents. For bilingual people, the new pronunciation could even get carried over into their French, leading to more similarities in the sounds of the two languages. The English version of “baguette” stops rhyming with “vague-ette,” and “decor” stops resembling “de-core.” Meanwhile, the shift is distinguishing Canada even more from the U.S., where an estimated 34 million people around the Great Lakes Region are showing an opposite change called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. There, God is becoming “gad,” “Dan” is becoming “din,” “slipped” is getting closer to “slapped,” and “sorry” more like “sarry.”
Aside from perhaps making spelling bees tougher, the current vowel shifts may well have lasting significance. The Great Vowel Shift of the 14th- to 18th centuries marked the leap from Middle to Modern English, with Norman pronunciations rapidly changing words such as “lake” to no longer rhyme with “latté,” as they do in other Germanic languages. That shift was responsible for most of the irregularities in English—the thousands of words pronounced differently than they are spelled. The changes today could lead to even more oddities in English in Canada and the U.S. Vowel shifts are messy.
What I heard was not “aboot”. I heard, “aboat”. ;-)
Oh joy, Canadians are becoming even more pretentious.
We gots ways of makin you say the letter”O”.
The vowel shift sounds a lot more like a bowel shift to me.
Never git caught in the flow of a violent “vowel movement!” (especially coming from Lefty Liberals and most of all from Media Mavens)
I believe that "aboot" thing is a Western Canada accent. Most Canadians say it like "abewwt" similar-to (but not exactly like) an American girl would say "eww that's disgusting."
My Canadian wife dropped the “aboot” long ago. She still says “sore-y”, and has no intention of dropping it. I was born and raised in south central Connecticut, where mostly those of Italian heritage and sometimes Jews have the NY accent, but no one else. Only those who moved from Massachusetts sport the Boston accent.
She does tease me as I say “cran” and she says “cray-ahn”. I say “droor” and she says “draw-er”. I tease her for saying “ant” instead of “ahnt” for “aunt”.
Lanuguage is fun.
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for NOT moving back to Pittsburgh until after I had learned to speak.
Yinz reddin’ up n’at?
Jo MAIN...are ju sayn das bad ?....
I had a friend from Pittsburgh a few years ago who edumocated me to a litany of Pittsburghese.
Thank you
Overcompensating.
lol - you’d best say sahry for that.
The stereotypical question tag "eh?" is being supplanted by the quasi-High Rising Terminal "right?", because Canadian kids associate saying "eh?" with being unsophisticated.
The truth of the matter is the word "eh" is merely looking for agreement or, mostly (I believe) validation for the speaker by turning a declarative statement into an interrogative one...
Right?
How polite and inclusive of me, isn't it?
I truly love how Canadians, Yoopers and Minnesotans speak. Beats the hell of my New Joisey - Eastern PA hybrid accent... that I can't escape... though my time in Illinois did bring some new inflections to my speech... being in western PA, not so much.
I hate how they speak out here... they leave words out of sentences i.e. "My watch stopped working and needs fixed" as opposed to the NORMAL way to say it, "My watch has stopped working and it needs to be fixed". It's subtle, but grates on my BIG TIME.
Don't even get me started with those Pittsburghers with their "YOONZ".
Fuhgeddaboutit! [eh?]
I once met a girl from New Jersey who said that she never heard her home state referred to as “Joisey” until she moved to California.
My wife grew up in Michigan. Her parents were Yoopers.
When I first met her she dropped an “eh” at the end of every other sentence. People used to ask me “what part of Canada is she from?”
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