… everyone knows what Canadians are supposed to sound like: they are a people who pronounce “about” as “aboot” and add “eh” to the ends of sentences.
Unfortunately, that’s wrong. Like, linguistically incorrect. Canadians do not say “aboot.” What they do say is actually much weirder.
Canadian English, despite the gigantic size of the country, is nowhere near as diverse as American English; think of the vast differences between the accents of a Los Angeleno, a Bostonian, a Chicagoan, a Houstonian, and a New Yorker. In Canada, there are some weird pockets: Newfoundland and Labrador speak a sort of Irish-cockney-sounding dialect, and there are some unique characteristics in English-speaking Quebec. But otherwise, linguistically, the country is fairly consistent.
There are a few isolated quirks in Canadian English, like keeping the Britishism “zed” for the last letter of the alphabet, and keeping a hard “agh” sound where Americans would usually say “ah.” (In Canada, “pasta” rhymes with “Mt. Shasta”.) But aside from those quirks, there are two major defining trends in Canadian English: Canadian Raising and the Canadian Shift. The latter is known stateside as the California Shift, and it’s what makes Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge sound so insane: a systematic migration of vowel sounds resulting in “kit” sounding like “ket,” “dress” sounding like “drass,” and “trap” sounding like “trop.” The SoCal accent, basically, is being replicated almost entirely in Canada.
But the Canadian Shift is minor compared to Canadian Raising, a phenomenon describing the altered sounds of two notable vowel sounds, that has much bigger consequences for the country’s identity, at least in the U.S. That’s where we get all that “aboot” stuff.
Dan Nosowitz, “What’s Going On with the Way Canadians Say ‘About’? It’s not pronounced how you think it is”, Atlas Obscura, 2016-06-01.
March 23, 2018
QotD: Canadian English
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