Canadian Shift

The Canadian Shift is a linguistic vowel shift found in Canadian English. It was first described by Clarke, Elms and Youssef in 1995,cite journal
last = Clarke
first = S.
coauthors = Elms, F. & Youssef, A.
title = The third dialect of English: Some Canadian evidence
journal = Language Variation and Change
volume = 7
pages = 209–228
date = 1995 ] based on impressionistic analysis.

The shift involves the front lax vowels IPA|/æ/ (the short-"a" of "trap"), IPA|/ɛ/ (the short-"e" of "dress"), and IPA|/ɪ/ (the short-"i" of "kit").

It is triggered by the cot-caught merger: IPA|/ɒ/ (as in "cot") and IPA|/ɔ/ (as in "caught") merge as IPA| [ɒ] , a low back vowel. [Labov, p. 128.] As each space opens up, the next vowel along moves into it. Thus, the short "a" IPA|/æ/ retracts from a near-low front position to a low central position, with a quality similar to the vowel heard in Northern England IPA| [a] . The retraction of IPA|/æ/ was independently observed in Vancouver [Esling, John H. and Henry J. Warkentyne (1993). "Retracting of IPA|/æ/ in Vancouver English."] and is more advanced for Ontarians and women than for people from the Prairies or Atlantic Canada and men. [Charles Boberg, "Sounding Canadian from Coast to Coast: Regional accents in Canadian English."]

However, scholars disagree on the behaviour of IPA|/ɛ/ and IPA|/ɪ/:

* According to Clarke et al. (1995), who impressionistically studied the speech of a few young Ontarians, IPA|/ɛ/ and IPA|/ɪ/ tend to lower in the direction of IPA| [æ] and IPA| [ɛ] , respectively: hence, "bet" and "bit" tend to sound, respectively, like "bat" and "bet" as pronounced by a speaker without the shift.
* Labov et al. (2006),cite book | author=Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg | title=The Atlas of North American English | location=Berlin | publisher=Mouton de Gruyter | year=2006 | id=ISBN 3-11-016746-8] through acoustic analysis of 33 subjects from all over the country, noted a backward and downward movement of IPA|/ɛ/ in apparent time in all of Canada except the Atlantic Provinces. No movement of IPA|/ɪ/ was detected.

* Boberg (2005)cite journal
last = Boberg
first = C.
title = The Canadian shift in Montreal
journal = Language Variation and Change
volume = 17
pages = 133–154
date = 2005] considers the primary movement of IPA|/ɛ/ and IPA|/ɪ/ to be retraction, at least in Montreal. He studied a diverse range of English-speaking Montrealers, and found that younger speakers had a significantly retracted IPA|/ɛ/ and IPA|/ɪ/ compared with older speakers, but did not find that the vowels were significantly lower. A small group of young people from Ontario were also studied, and there too retraction was most evident. Under this scenario, a similar group of vowels (short front) are retracting in a parallel manner, with IPA|/ɛ/ and IPA|/ʌ/ approaching each other. Therefore, with Boberg’s results, "bet" approaches but remains different from "but", and "bit" sounds different, but remains distinct.

* Hagiwara (2006), [Robert Hagiwara. "Vowel production in Winnipeg."] through acoustic analysis, noted that IPA|/ɛ/ and IPA|/ɪ/ do not seem to be lowered in Winnipeg, although the lowering and retraction of IPA|/æ/ has caused a redistribution of backness values for the front lax vowels.

U.S. dialects of English with the "cot"-"caught" merger do not exhibit the Canadian shift in part because typically in the U.S. the merged vowel is less rounded and/or less back and slightly lower than the Canadian vowel, and therefore less room would be left for the retraction of IPA|/æ/. Pittsburgh, which has the cot-caught merger to a quite rounded vowel, has a different shift, known as the Pittsburgh Shift instead, which also serves to fill the low mid space, this time with IPA|/ʌ/. The "California Shift" in progress in California English resembles closely the Canadian Shift.

Due to the Canadian Shift, the short-"a" and the short-"o" are shifted in opposite directions to that of the Northern Cities Shift, found across the border in the Inland Northern U.S., which is causing these two dialects to diverge: the Canadian short-"a" is very similar in quality to the Inland Northern short-"o"; for example, the production IPA| [maːp] would be recognized as "map" in Canada, but "mop" in the Inland North.

ee also

*Canadian raising
*West/Central Canadian English

Notes