Canadian Shift

The Canadian Shift is a chain shift of vowel sounds found in Canadian English, beginning among speakers in the last quarter of the 20th century and most significantly involving the lowering and backing of the front vowels. This lowering and backing is structurally identical to the California Shift reported in California English and some younger varieties of Western New England English, Western American English, Pacific Northwest English, and Midland American English;[1] whether the similarly structured shifts in these regional dialects have a single unified cause or not is still not entirely clear.[1][2][3] Similar, though not identical, changes to the short front vowels are attested in many English dialects as of 21st-century research,[4] including RP,[5] South African English,[6] Australian English,[7] Hiberno-English,[8] and Indian English.[9]

The back and downward movement of all the front vowels was first noted in some California speakers in 1987,[10] then in some Canadian speakers in 1995 (initially reported as two separate phenomena),[11] and later documented among some speakers in Western and Midland U.S. cities born after 1980, based on impressionistic analysis. Assuming the similar chain shifts found in Canada and various parts of the U.S. are a phenomenon with a single common origin, a variety of names have been proposed for this trans-regional chain shift, including the Third Dialect Shift, Elsewhere Shift, Low Back Merger Shift, Short Front Vowel Shift, and North American Shift.

Canadian Shift in Canada

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

It is triggered by the cot–caught merger: /ɑ/ (as in cot) and /ɔ/ (as in caught) merge as [ɒ], a low back rounded vowel.[12] As each space opens up, the next vowel along moves into it. Thus, the short a /æ/ retracts from a near-low front position to a low central position, with a quality similar to the vowel heard in Northern England [a]. The retraction of /æ/ was independently observed in Vancouver[13] and is more advanced for Ontarians and women than for people from the Prairies or Atlantic Canada and men.[14] /æ/ also retracts more before /l/ than other consonants. In Toronto, /æ/-retraction is inhibited by a following nasal, but it isn't in Vancouver.[15]

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

The Canadian Shift according to Clarke (red), Boberg (blue), and both (purple)
  • According to Clarke et al. (1995), who impressionistically studied the speech of a few young Ontarians, /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ tend to lower in the direction of [æ] and [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),[16] through acoustic analysis of 33 subjects from all over the country, noted a backward and downward movement of /ɛ/ in apparent time in all of Canada except the Atlantic Provinces. No movement of /ɪ/ was detected.
  • Boberg (2005)[17] considers the primary movement of /ɛ/ and /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 /ɛ/ and /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 /ɛ/ and /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),[2] through acoustic analysis, noted that /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ do not seem to be lowered in Winnipeg, although the lowering and retraction of /æ/ has caused a redistribution of backness values for the front lax vowels.
  • Sadlier-Brown and Tamminga (2008)[18] studied a few speakers from Vancouver and Halifax and found the shift to be active in Halifax as well, although not as advanced as in Vancouver. For these speakers, the movement of /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ in apparent time was diagonal, and Halifax had /æ/ diagonal movement too; in Vancouver, however, the retraction of /æ/ was not accompanied by lowering.

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. and Western New England,[19] 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 [map] would be recognized as map in Canada but mop in the Inland North.

U.S. Third Dialect Shifts

In the United States, the cot-caught merger is widespread across many regions of the United States, particularly in the Midwest and West, but speakers with the merger tend not to be affected by the shift. The reason why speakers with the cot-caught merger are not typically affected by the Canadian Shift is partly due to the fact that the merged vowel is less rounded, less back and slightly lower than the Canadian vowel. This means that there is less space for the retraction of the vowel /æ/, which is a key feature of the Canadian Shift.

However, there are some regions of the United States where the Canadian Shift can be observed. In the Western United States, one out of every four speakers exhibits the Canadian Shift, as defined quantitatively by Labov et al. based on the formant values for /æ/, /ɑ/, and /ɛ/. Meanwhile, the California Shift in progress in California English contains features similar to the Canadian Shift, although the two phenomena may be different since the retraction of /æ/ has happened in California even though the Californian /ɑ/ is more centralized and not as rounded as the Canadian /ɒ/.[20]

In Pittsburgh, another region where the cot-caught merger is prevalent, the mouth vowel /aʊ/ is usually a monophthong that fills the lower central space, which prevents retracting. However, as /aʊ/ monophthongization declines, some younger speakers are retracting /æ/.

Durian (2008)[21] found evidence of the Canadian Shift in the vowel systems of men born in 1965 and later in Columbus, Ohio. This is located in the U.S. Midland. The Midland dialect is a mix of Northern and Southern dialect features. In Columbus, /ʌ/ is undergoing fronting without lowering, while still remaining distinct from the space occupied by /ɛ/. At the same time, historical /ɒ/ (the vowel in "lot") is merged with the /ɑ/ class, which is raising and backing towards /ɔ/, such that the two are merged or "close." This allows a "free space" for the retraction of /æ/, which is also suggested as a possibility for Western U.S. dialects by Boberg (2005). In Columbus, the Canadian Shift closely resembles the version found by Boberg (2005) in Montreal, where /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ are either merged or "close," and /æ/, /ɛ/, and /ɪ/ show retraction of the nucleus without much lowering (with /æ/ also showing "rising diphthong" behavior). However, the retraction of /ɪ/ was not found among all speakers and is more mild among the speakers that do show it than the retraction of /ɛ/ among those speakers. Additionally, the outcome of low back merger-like behavior is more like the California Shift outcome noted above than the rounded variant found in most of Canada.

Jacewicz (2011a)[22] also found the shift in parts of Wisconsin and in parts of North Carolina, where, despite the Northern Cities and Southern shifts, /ɛ/ and /æ/ are lowered, backed, and monophthongized. /ɑ/ raises, backs, and diphthongizes to approach /ɔ/; however, like in Columbus, the merger isn't actually complete for most of the speakers in the study, and the lowering of /æ/ is more linked with the raising of /ɑ/.

Notes
  1. Conn, Jeff (2002). "An investigation into the western dialect of Portland Oregon." Paper presented at NWAV31. San Diego, CA.
  2. Hagiwara, Robert (2006). "Vowel Production in Winnipeg". Canadian Journal of Linguistics. 51 (2–3): 127–141. doi:10.1017/S0008413100004023. S2CID 231892235.
  3. Ward, Michael (2003), Portland Dialect Study: The Fronting of /ow, u, uw/ in Portalnd, Oregon (PDF), Portland State University, p. 42, archived from the original (PDF) on July 29, 2007, retrieved September 27, 2015
  4. Hickey, Raymond (June 2018). "'Yes, that's the best': Short front vowel lowering in English today: Young people across the anglophone world are changing their pronunciation of vowels according to a change which started in North America". English Today. 34 (2): 9–16. doi:10.1017/S0266078417000487. ISSN 0266-0784. S2CID 149397458.
  5. Fabricius, Anne (2019). "The Anticlockwise Checked Vowel Chain Shift in modern RP in the twentieth century: Incrementations and diagonal shifts" (PDF).
  6. Chevalier, Alida (May 2016). "Globalisation versus internal development: the reverse short front vowel shift in South African English" (PDF).
  7. Travis, Catherine E.; Grama, James; González, Simón (January 1, 2019). "Initiation, progression, and conditioning of the short-front vowel shift in Australia". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  8. Hickey, R. (2016). English in Ireland: Development and Varieties. www.semanticscholar.org. pp. 3–40. doi:10.1057/9781137453471_1. ISBN 978-1-349-68697-1. S2CID 156394104. Retrieved March 16, 2023.
  9. Domange, Raphaël (March 2020). "Variation and change in the short vowels of Delhi English". Language Variation and Change. 32 (1): 49–76. doi:10.1017/S0954394520000010. ISSN 0954-3945. S2CID 216377833.
  10. Luthin, Herbert. 1987. The story of California (ow): The coming of age of English in California. In Keith Denning, Sharon Inkelas, Faye McNair-Knox, and John R. Rickford, Eds., Variation and Language: NWAV XV at Stanford: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation. Stanford: Department of Linguistics, Stanford University. pp. 312-324.
  11. Clarke, S.; Elms, F.; Youssef, A. (1995). "The third dialect of English: Some Canadian evidence". Language Variation and Change. 7 (2): 209–228. doi:10.1017/S0954394500000995. S2CID 145284324.
  12. Labov, p. 130.
  13. Esling, John H. and Henry J. Warkentyne (1993). "Retracting of /æ/ in Vancouver English."
  14. Charles Boberg, "Sounding Canadian from Coast to Coast: Regional accents in Canadian English."
  15. Hall, Erin (January 1, 2000). "Regional variation in Canadian English vowel backing". Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics.
  16. Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-016746-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  17. Boberg, C. (2005). "The Canadian shift in Montreal". Language Variation and Change. 17 (2): 133–154. doi:10.1017/s0954394505050064. S2CID 144832847.
  18. Sadlier-Brown, Emily and Meredith Tamminga. 2008. "The Canadian Shift: Coast to Coast." Canadian Linguistic Association (CLA 2008), Vancouver, BC. May 2008.
  19. McCarthy, Natalie (2004). THE NORTHERN CITIES SHIFT AND LOCAL IDENTITY IN A SUBURBAN CLEVELAND GROUP (PDF). p. 7.
  20. Grama, James. "Kennedy & Grama (2012) - Chain shifting and centralization in California vowels". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  21. Durian, David. "A New Perspective on Vowel Variation Across the 20th Century in Columbus, OH (Or, The Canadian Shift in Columbus?). Paper presented at NWAV 37, Houston, TX". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  22. Jacewicz, Ewa; Fox, Robert Allen; Salmons, Joseph (March 2011). "Cross-generational vowel change in American English". Language Variation and Change. 23 (1): 45–86. doi:10.1017/S0954394510000219. ISSN 1469-8021.
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