PAGINA1
OVERVIEW

Except for the provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island (generally closer to Scottish, in a few places to Irish English), Canadian English shares most lexical and phonological traits with the United States.

  • The origin of Canadian spelling

    Spelling, however, is more faithful to British English and the cause seems to be the closer ties Canada kept with Britain after the American Revolution. After the War of 1812 with England many loyalists were encouraged to expatriate to Canada by the U.S. Government, the official cause being that the U.S. would be no longer able to guarantee for their safety.

    This has fostered the formation of a separate Canadian community of speakers and boosted the growth of an independent standard: words like En. labour, harbour, colour, centre, theatre are spelled in exactly the same way as in Britain (however, U.S. English keeps 'theatre' when referring to the literary genre). And the British 'manoeuvre', 'encyclopaedia', 'paediatrics' (U.S. ‘maneuvre, encyclopedia, pediatrics) is still preferred. The –ise words are also preferred to –ize ones (Can./U.K. realise, jeopardise, finalise vs. U.S. realize, jeopardize, finalize).

  • Phonetics

    Most phonetic traits are shared with its neighbor: although a Canadian Shift has been identified at the turn of the century, it is limited to Western Canada (Ontario and farther west), and even there, it seems to be at its early stages. This is a ‘chain shift’ which seems to translate in a general lowering of front vowels (‘bet’ sounding like ‘bat’, ‘bat’ almost like ‘but’), and a raising of the back ones (‘caught’ merging with ‘cot’).

    Throughout Canada and part of the U.S., diphthongs are also undergoing an upward shift, called Canadian Raising (not to be confused with the Canadian Shift mentioned above), whereby the first vowel in a diphthong is slightly closed (or raised) before a voiceless consonant: ‘writer’, ‘scout’ changing the initial vowel of /ai/ to a schwa.

    In other, the first element of this diphthong sounds much like -ER or driver or A of constant in RP. As for many parts of England, some Canadians also tend to reduce diphthongs to a long vowel, as in fair /fe:/ or time /ta:m/.

    Also, prefixes ending in -I such as semi-, multi- sound like in RP, i.e. are not diphthongized (se-mee, mul-tee etc.), whereas the U.S. has “mult-I-“, “sem-I”.

    Conversely, words like miss-ile, mob-ile, frag-ile, diphthongised in Canada and Britain, are not in the U.S., where the I in the suffix actually becomes a schwa: they thus sound like “missul”, “mobul”, “frajul” etc.

    Apart for some features unique to Canada, Canadian English shares many more traits with U.S. English, as rhotic R in all positions, including –r words as ‘fur’, ‘driver’, ‘car’. Words with flat A as ‘bad’ or ‘cat’ are much closer to /e/ than their British counterparts and R.P. broad A changes into flat A in words like can’t, calm, path, half.

    /t/ and /d/ are flapped into an alveolar tap in a vocalic environment (‘writer’ sounds like ‘rider’, or, better, they are merged by the same flapping sound).

    But some speakers keep the T if it is preceded by /ei/ or /i/. For them 'greater' and 'grader', 'bitten' and 'bidden' are not homophones. Because of the Canadian Raising (which also affects much of the Northern U.S.), potential confusion caused by flapping is avoided by changing the value of the 'I' > 'uh-ey' before T: aprox. 'ruhey-tur' / rIthur for writer/rider. When the first vowel before /t/ or /d/ is nasalised by an the dental is flapped: ‘winter’ sounds like ‘winner’.

    However, this does not occur if the vowel following the dental is stressed: the T of ‘accidental’ is flapped but not that of documenTation or enTice.

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