{"id":35437,"date":"2018-03-23T01:00:12","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T05:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35437"},"modified":"2018-03-03T09:11:13","modified_gmt":"2018-03-03T14:11:13","slug":"qotd-canadian-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/03\/23\/qotd-canadian-english\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Canadian English"},"content":{"rendered":"

… everyone knows what Canadians are supposed to sound like: they are a people who pronounce \u201cabout\u201d as \u201caboot\u201d and add \u201ceh\u201d to the ends of sentences.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, that’s wrong. Like, linguistically incorrect. Canadians do not say \u201caboot.\u201d What they do say is actually much weirder.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There are a few isolated quirks in Canadian English, like keeping the Britishism \u201czed\u201d for the last letter of the alphabet, and keeping a hard \u201cagh\u201d sound where Americans would usually say \u201cah.\u201d (In Canada, \u201cpasta\u201d rhymes with \u201cMt. Shasta\u201d.) 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\u2019s what makes Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge sound so insane: a systematic migration of vowel sounds resulting in “kit” sounding like \u201cket,\u201d \u201cdress\u201d sounding like “drass,” and \u201ctrap” sounding like \u201ctrop.\u201d The SoCal accent, basically, is being replicated almost entirely in Canada.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s identity, at least in the U.S. That’s where we get all that \u201caboot\u201d stuff.<\/p>\n

Dan Nosowitz, “What’s Going On with the Way Canadians Say ‘About’? It’s not pronounced how you think it is”, Atlas Obscura<\/em><\/a>, 2016-06-01.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… everyone knows what Canadians are supposed to sound like: they are a people who pronounce \u201cabout\u201d as \u201caboot\u201d and add \u201ceh\u201d to the ends of sentences. Unfortunately, that’s wrong. Like, linguistically incorrect. Canadians do not say \u201caboot.\u201d What they do say is actually much weirder. Canadian English, despite the gigantic size of the country, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,41],"tags":[400],"class_list":["post-35437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-quotations","tag-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9dz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35437"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35441,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35437\/revisions\/35441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}