13. Phonological and Phonetic distinctions of Canadian English pronunciation

Sociolinguistic situation and distinctive features of Canadian English. Canadian English (CnE) is used is the variety of English spoken in Canada. English is the first language, or "mother tongue", of approximately 24 million Canadians (77%), and more than 28 million (86%) are fluent in the language. 82% of Canadians outside Quebec speak English natively, but within Quebec the figure drops to just 7.7%, as most residents are native speakers of Quebec French.

Phonological and phonetic distinctions of Canadian English.The primary aspect of the Canadian English accent is a feature called "Canadian raising", where diphthongs are raised before voiceless consonants. The diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ are "raised" before voiceless consonants, namely /p/, /t/, /k/, /s/, /ʃ/ and /f/. In these environments, /aɪ/ becomes [ʌɪ~ɜɪ~ɐɪ]. One of the few phonetic variables that divides Canadians regionally is the articulation of the raised allophone of /aʊ/: in Ontario, it tends to have a mid-central or even mid-front articulation, sometimes approaching [ɛʊ], while in the West and Maritimes a more retracted sound is heard, closer to [ʌʊ]. Canadian raising is found throughout western and central Canada, as well as in parts of the Atlantic Provinces. Many Canadians, especially in parts of the Atlantic provinces, do not possess Canadian raising. In the U.S., this feature can be found in areas near the border such as the Upper Midwest and parts of New England, although it is much less common than in Canada; raising of /aɪ/ alone, however, is increasing in the U.S., and unlike raising of /aʊ/, is generally not noticed by people who do not have the raising.

Diphthong raising. Because of Canadian raising, many speakers are able to distinguish between words such as writer and rider – a feat otherwise impossible, because North American dialects turn intervocalic /t/ into an alveolar flap. Thus writer and rider are distinguished solely by their vowels, even though the distinction between their consonants has since been lost. Canadian raising preserves the voicelessness of /t/ and the voicedness of /d/ where it is etymologically appropriate, even where the contrast is lost in the consonant itself.

Also heard is the variation in the pronunciation of the word can't, in Ontario, it is said almost as canned, whereas in the west, it becomes more like kahnt. The Northern cities vowel shift that is happening in Michigan also is heard to an extent in Southwestern Ontario, for example, Andy is pronounced [eəndi] or [ɪəndi].

A recently identified feature (1995) found among many Canadians is a chain shift known as the Canadian Shift. This is not found in the Atlantic Provinces, east of Quebec; it is only found in Ontario and further west. For people with this shift, cot and caught merge in rounded [ɒ] position. The /æ/ of bat then moves down to [a], while the /ɛ/ of bet becomes [æ], which is short-a in other accents. This shift is still a relatively new phenomenon, so not all Canadians have it. Of the ones that do, not all have the last stage. Canadians without the Shift typically pronounce cot and caught as an un-rounded [ɑ], as in the western United States.

There is a tendency to monophthongize the long a and o sounds, resulting in [beːt] for bait and [boːt] for boat (though this occurs usually in rapid speech). Finally, the broad /ɑ/ of foreign loan words in words like drama or Iraq are usually pronounced like the short a of bat: /dɹæmə/, /ɪɹæk/.

Like American English, Canadian English is largely rhotic. This means it maintains the pronunciation of r before consonants. Rhoticity has been largely influenced by Hiberno-English, Scottish English, and West Country English.

Therefore, in Canadian English, 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 US, 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 [maːp] would be recognized as map in Canada, but mop in the Inland North.

Canada shares similarities with English English in pronouncing words like fragile, fertile, and mobile. While American English pronounce them as [fɹædʒl̩], [fɝɾl̩], and [moʊbl̩], Canadians pronounce them as the British do, sounding like /fɹædʒajl̩/, /moʊbajl̩/ An exception is missile, where the American and British versions are almost equal; the American pronunciation of fertile is also becoming very popular in Canada, even though the British pronunciation remains dominant.

In American English, words like semi, anti, and multi are often pronounced as /sɛmaj/, /æntaj/, and /mʌltaj/, whereas the British pronounce them like /sɛmi/, /ænti/, and so on. Canadians tend to prefer the British pronunciation of these words, though American pronunciation has made headway.

14. Variations in pronunciation can be accounted for with reference to social factors. It has also to be remembered that the language of its users varies according to their individualities, range of intelligibility, cultural habits, gender and age differences.

It has long been believed that received pronunciation is a social marker, a prestige accent of an Englishman. In the nineteenth century "received" was understood in the sense of "accepted in the best society". The speech of the aristocracy and the court phonetically was that of the London area. Then it lost its local characteristics and was finally associated with ruling class accent, often referred to as "King's English". It was also the accent taught and spoken at public schools. Wіth the spread of education cultured people not belonging to the upper classes were eager to modify their accent in the direction of social standards. According to British phoneticians (Ch. Barber, 1964;A. Gimson, 1981; A. Hughes and P. Trudgill, 1980) received pronunciation is not homogeneous. A. Gimson suggests that it is convenient to distinguish three main types within it: "the conservative received pronunciation forms, used by the older generation, and, traditionally, by certain professions or social groups; the general received pronunciation forms, most commonly in use and typified by the pronunciation adopted by the BBC, and the advanced received pronunciation forms, mainly used by young people of exclusive social groups - mostly of the upper classes, but also for prestige value in certain professional circles".

Of all the many kinds of difference that exist among the myriad varieties of English, few give rise to fiercer discussion and greater speculation than those which differentiate British and American English.

Native speakers of English learn early in life that their mother tongue is written and spoken in very different ways on opposite sides of the Atlantic. It is natural that they should seek to explain, describe, and understand the origin and nature of this phenomenon. But since language is highly complex, and since the information on which to form an opinion presents itself only piecemeal, they rarely reach a sat­isfactory understanding. The similarities and differences between British and American English can be seen in perspective if one notices, first, that both have a common origin in English of the Elizabethan period, although their subsequent history and development have been separate and they now express and embody two cognate but distinct cultures; second, that both 'British English' and 'American English' are labels attached to a great many different varieties of English rather than to single, homogeneous entities, and that some of these varieties exhibit greater similarity than others; and third, that for purposes of education, whether English is the mother tongue or a foreign language, equivalent varieties of American or British English are used in which the similari­ties are maximal whereas the differences are minimal and largely con­fined to pronunciation.

It is customary to think of English before about 1700 as being one language, with no specifically American characteristics yet visible, since the British settlements were so young and so small. It is after this date that the history and development of English in America began to diverge from that of English in Great Britain, because of the geographical isolation of the settlers, their growing feelings of social and political independence, their intimate contact with American Indian, Spanish, and French cultures, and their assimilation of a large popula­tion of former slaves and of great numbers of immigrants of diverse linguistic and cultural origins. Undoubtedly this separate development and the distinctive American culture which it produced were sufficient to ensure separate modes of speech and writing. But the rate of change of the language was greater than one would expect on the ba­sis of contemporary experience, for two reasons: (1) there was no such thing as a single Elizabethan English, so that among the early settlers there existed a wide range of dialects and accents, reflecting the diver­sity of forms of Elizabethan English but offering no single form from which deviations could be charted; and (2) in the early 18^th century there existed few of the pressures for standardization and con­formity in speech and writing – such as universal literacy, a large liter­ature, the media of press, radio, and television – which in Britain and North America today slow down the innate tendency for English, like all languages, to change.

During the first 200 years of separate development, one of the most striking features specific to English in America was the large number of borrowings from other cultures. For example from the American Indian came hickory,hooch, tateeu, from French came prairie, depat, rotisserie, from Spanish came brancho, rodeo, patio and vigilante.

The contemporary situation, then, is one of two distinct yet cognate cultures in Britain and America, each possessing a form of English as the mother tongue. The differences of vocabulary, grammar, pronuncia­tion, orthography, semantics, and usage between the two reflect both the similarities and the differences between the cultures.

Differences. There are three main methods of describing the nature of the differences between American and British English. In the past it was customary to concentrate on words, using them to illustrate differ­ences of borrowings, of historical change, and of distinctions in mean­ing. In descriptions of word differences, the treatment of grammar and pronunciation is fairly superficial. More recently there have been written descriptions of each kind of English in terms of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and sometimes orthography which treat the language more systematically than do word-based descriptions. A third method of description is to see each form of English as comprising a constellation of varieties, which differ in particular ways according to the speaker or writer, his purpose, and his immediate situation.

15. SOCIAL AND COMMUNICATIVE DIMENSIONS OF AN ACCENT

Alongside with expressing semantic information by using phonological means, the speakers use signs in speech which are treated as the basis on which to attribute their personal characteristics.

Markers relate primarily to the LANGUAGE USERS, and they are relatively permanent for them, because speakers may live in a certain region and have an affiliation with a certain social group for some period of time (sometimes for their lifetime), though moving to a new region and changing a social affiliation are also possible.

At the same time language users having an identical regional and social group:

(i) can communicate in more than one regional and social variety; and (ii) can switch varieties (consciously or subconsciously) according to the context/situation of communication which relates to the LANGUAGE USE.

The markers that serve to identify a speaker's membership of a given social group are of especial interest to sociolinguistics and have been the subject of a lot of research . While investigating speech variations associated with the exemplified markers, sociologists operate a system of notions: IDIOLECT, LECT, SOCIOLECT, etc.

The accent of a given speaker viewed as an individuating marker uniquely identifying the speaker against the mass of other members of the wider group is termed the speaker's IDIOLECT, whereas an accent without specific implications for its sociological or idiolectal status is termed LECT.

When the accent of a given speaker is viewed as a group marker of the speaker's membership of a certain social group, it is termed SOCIOLECT .

Within a group-identifying sociolect finer details of phonological (systemic and structural) realizations associated with such speakers' social attributes as age, education, socio-economic status, and gender are differentiated and form the following variations:

(i) ANNOLECT is a set of features in pronunciation attributed to the speakers on the basis of their age. Variation according to age is most noticeable across the grandparent - grandchild time span [Yule 1996:241]. Young people are more susceptible than older people to adopting innovations spreading into a local speech community from outside [Pennington 1996:16]. An example when the choice of a phoneme is associated with the habits of different generations within RP/BBC English is given by A.C. Gimson:/o:/ for to! in off, doihfrosi, and III for/ei/ in Monday, holiday are preferred by older speakers as disti/ict from the young generation who reveal preference in using /d/, /ei/ in such cases [Gimson 2001].

(ii) ACROLECT, MESOLECT, BASILECT are sets of pronunciation distinctions differentiated on the basis of the speaker's educational level, e.g. in British English, Acrolect describes the accent which is accorded the highest prestige mostly because of its associations with the speaker's high level of education and socio-economic status. On the contrary, basilect enjoys the lowest social prestige: the 'broadest' form of speech surviving s of now among elderly people with little education in rather isolated areas. Mesolect is represented by the graduations of accent between acrolect and basilect .

SEXOLECT is a set of features in pronunciation ascribed to the speakers on the basis of their gender. Some conclusions from male-female accent surveys show that female speakers tend to use more prestigious forms than male speakers with the same social background, and males generally orient their speech more to localized norms than do females .

According to Susan Ramsaran's opinion, the role of these social markers has become

increasingly complex and controversial over the 20th century, and especially at the end of it. Addressing the problem of RP/BBC English, she claims that it is no

longer possible to talk in such clear-cut terms of social classes; nor is there any longer so Ijie straightforward a correlation between social background and profession or type of education of present-day society. Since it is thus quite unrealistic to try to label the accent as belonging to a

particular section of society, it is impossible actually to identify RP in social terms .