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monophthongs, especially [i] and [u]. Because unstressed vowels are reduced less than in standard varieties, words like together, delivery and university are likely to be pronounced [thu εð ], [dil vəɹi] and [jun vəɹSIɾi] rather than [thəgεð ], [dəl vəɹi] and [junəvəɹsəɾi]. In many AmE varieties, as we have seen, /æ/ is raised and pronounced [ε] or even [iə ] in words like ham and hand, but in ChE this class of words is pronounced with [æ].
The stereotype suggesting a merger or confusion of [i] and [ ] is inaccurate for native speakers of ChE, though it may characterise learner English among Spanish speakers. The stereotype may receive support from the frequent pronunciation of verbal -ing as ‘een’ [in] rather than [ən] or [ ŋ]. There is evidence that / / is sometimes realised as a sound somewhere between [ ] and [i], but ChE does not interchange [ ] and [i]. As with speakers of AAE, speakers of Latino English do not participate in the Northern Cities Shift, at least to the same extent as their non-Latino peers.
Other pronunciations earlier associated with ChE appear to have died out (or are characteristic of learner English), among them substitution of ch [tʃ] for sh [ʃ] (as in she, shoes) and the reverse substitution of sh [ʃ] for ch [tʃ] (as in preach, check).
In its grammatical features, ChE exhibits negative concord, as in You don’t owe me nothing and Us little people don’t get nothin’. It also regularises some verb forms, using past-tense forms as past participles, and shows frequent use of ain’t. Some speakers also use features of AAE, such as habitual be (The news be showing it too much), existential it (It’s four of us, there’s two of them), and preterit had (The cops had went to my house).
Among characteristic lexical items are the verbs clown ‘tease’, talk to ‘date’, kick it ‘hang around’, and tell ‘ask’, as in If I tell her to jump up, she’ll tell me ‘how high’; the phrase from somewhere ‘in a gang’, as in I told him I wasn’t from anywhere and I’m not from nowhere; the adjective American ‘European-American or white’, as in It wasn’t the American lady, it was the other one; and the adverb barely ‘just recently’, as in He just barely got a job you know back with his father and These were expensive when they barely came out. One feature that shows Spanish influence is the use of brothers for ‘brothers and sisters’ or ‘siblings’ (cf. Spanish hermanos), as when a sixteen-year-old girl in a family with one boy and five girls said, To my brothers I usually talk English. Another borrowing from Spanish occurs with the discourse marker ey, glossed as ‘yeah’ and exemplified in If a girl’s pretty you know and she feels the same for me, ey, I got it right there
(examples from Fought, 2003: 103–6).
8.3.7 |
English in Canada |
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A further form of English in North America which we must consider separately is Canadian English, and Newfoundland and Quebec must be distinguished from other provinces. Claimed by England as early as 1497, Newfoundland remained independent of Canada until joining the Confederation in
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1949. For centuries, then, it had a history independent of most of Canada’s. Likewise, Quebec province is largely francophone, with strong French cultural ties that separate it from the provinces to its east and west. Canada is strikingly uniform in its class structure, being highly urban and ‘overwhelmingly middle-class’ (Chambers 1991: 90). Newfoundland and Quebec aside, Canada is also relatively uniform in its use of the English language.
Canadian English has roots in several sources (Brinton & Fee, 2001), whose work we follow, together with Chambers (1993, 1998): American English spoken by some Loyalists who immigrated to Canada during and after the War of Independence; subsequent immigration from the British Isles and Ireland; interaction with French in Quebec; and government policies, including bilingualism and multiculturalism. Four major immigrant groups can be identified (Chambers, 1991). The Loyalists arrived chiefly between 1776 and 1793 and included as many as 40,000 to Nova Scotia (and then, for some, on to England or Sierra Leone) and perhaps 12,000 to Upper Canada (Ontario). The second wave of British settlers, particularly Irish and Scots, peaked in 1851–61 and went mostly to Upper Canada. A third wave comprising British (mostly Scots) settlers and Germans, Dutch and Belgians immigrated between 1901 and 1911. Then, between 1951 and 1961, arrived a group of Germans, Italians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Chinese and Portuguese.
Partly because both BrE and AmE exert strong influence on it, CanE is defined by a set of features peculiar to it and by the particular mix drawn from its wellsprings. One notable feature is its exceptional homogeneity. Newfoundland aside, ‘the accents of second-generation middle-class Anglophones from Halifax or Ottawa or Winnipeg or Edmonton are indistinguishable’, even though those cities are farther apart than New York City and Richmond, Virginia, which are noticeably different in their dialects; put strongly, standard CanE is ‘almost indistinguishable from one end of the country to the other’ (Chambers, 1998: 253–4).
Other characteristic features combine to make CanE a distinct national variety. The most prominent pronunciation feature involves the vowels in the bite bike life and bout shout house word classes. In the nucleus of the diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/, a phenomenon usually called Canadian raising produces [ ] before voiceless consonants, as in wipe, white, strike, lice and life (but not bribe, wide, lies, Clive) and [υ] in about and house (but not proud and houses). Currently, there appears to be a change underway in the pronunciation of this vowel, a change that would threaten this distinctive feature. Especially in inland urban areas, younger Canadians increasingly pronounce the diphthong in the how, houses, house class with a low front onset vowel, just like their American counterparts (Chambers, 1991: 93). As noted earlier, the vowels in caught and cot, pawned and pond are pronounced alike in a merger traced in Canada to the mid1800s (Chambers, 1993: 11). CanE likewise flaps intervocalic /t/ in words with certain stress patterns, producing [ɾ] (or [d]) for /t/ and creating homophones of pairs like latter/ladder and metal/medal. CanE flaps intervocalic /t/ in more contexts than US varieties do, including between /f/ and a vowel (as in after), between
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/s/ and a vowel (sister), between /ʃ/ and a vowel (washed out), and between /k/ and a vowel (picture) (Brinton & Fee, 2001).
CanE is rhotic. Loyalists arriving from New England may have brought an r-less variety and afterwards restored r-pronunciations, perhaps in part to create distance from the Americans and thereby underscore Canadian loyalty to the crown (Bailey, 1982). Alternatively, New England dialects of the 1770s and 1780s may have been non-rhotic to some degree. Pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ (fear, storm) was in flux in England, with /r/ having been ‘sporadically’ lost as early as the fifteenth century; it was ‘on its way out in the 1770s’, such that ‘by the 1790s /r/-less pronunciations must have been very common and increasing’ (Lass, 1999: 115). Consequently, rather than carrying an r-less variety to Canada and later restoring /r/, Loyalists may have spoken a dialect with variable /r/ pronunciation and subsequently increased its frequency, exactly the opposite of what their neighbours to the south did. In distancing their speech from that of New Englanders, if that is what happened, the Loyalists likewise distanced it from the speech of southern England, which went on to become non-rhotic.
A few word classes and a few isolated words differ in their Canadian and American pronunciations, although Canadian usage typically varies. The first syllable of the process progress class is pronounced with /o/ (but in the US with /ɑ/); schedule has initial /ʃ/ or /sk/ (in the US only /sk/); the second syllable of again may rhyme with pain or ten (in the US typically with ten); the first vowel of drama is pronounced /æ/. A sensitive matter is the name of the last letter of the alphabet – Canadian zed. Apparently influenced by kindergarten alphabet songs seeking a rhyme for the letter tee, children living in parts of southern Ontario call the letter zee, but zee is such a shibboleth that, as children mature, the percentage using zed increases dramatically (Chambers, 2003: 207–8).
While most vocabulary items are shared across NAE, some expressions for Canadian customs are unfamiliar in the US. In other matters, too, government structure or political history differs, and terms routinely used in one nation may be unfamiliar in the other. In Canadian courts, the Crown prosecutes; in US jurisdictions, the State or Commonwealth. The head of a province is the premier, of the federal government the prime minister. The hydro is an ‘electric bill’; washroom is usual for ‘toilet’; Grade 13, equivalent to the British sixth form, is unknown in the US. Some vocabulary items that have been distinctively Canadian – e.g. chesterfield ‘sofa’ – are being lost, while for others Canadians use several terms, including the generally used American one. Recent local surveys (see Chambers, 1998) have found that Canadians use washcloth and facecloth, Americans only washcloth; Canadians call post-secondary institutions college or university, Americans almost invariably college. For the prank in which schoolboys pull up another boy by the back of his underpants, Americans use only wedgie, while Canadians also say gotchie, rooney and snuggy.
In grammar, a few characteristic features have been identified, including (1) after plus a past participle (He’s after telling me all about it ‘He has just told me all about it’), found in parts of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and ‘other places
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founded by Celtic settlers’; (2) ever-exclamations (Is he ever stupid!), also known in the US; (3) sentence-initial as well (He told Mary to be careful. As well, he asked all of us to help her) (Chambers, 1986: 9–10).
In spelling, Canadians draw sometimes on British precedents (cheque not check), sometimes on American (tire not tyre); Canadian style manuals urge drawing selectively on one tradition or the other and, within a given pattern, not to mix British and American spellings – for example, not to use both neighbour and color or both criticise and initialize (Brinton & Fee, 2001). Spelling differs somewhat from province to province (Brinton & Fee, 2001; Ireland, 1979 as reported in Chambers, 1986). By contrast, publications throughout the US draw on the standardised spellings propagated in a few nationally distributed dictionaries, as Noah Webster had hoped when he published his American Dictionary as a national standard of usage.
8.3.8 |
Social meaning and attitudes |
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Attitudes play an important role in forming and judging people’s language. We describe four instances of social meaning attaching to pronunciation – one each related to local and class values, a third to urban and traditional values, and one to ethnic identity. On Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts that is home to a small group of year-round residents with an influx of summer tourists and vacationers, characteristic pronunciation shows centralisation of the nucleus in the diphthongs of the nice and shout word classes. Year-round residents vary between centralised [n s] and [ʃ υt] and the mainland pronunciations [na s] and [ʃaυt]. In the 1960s, resident young men planning to raise families on the island showed the highest incidence of centralised variants, while those intending to take up careers on the mainland showed the least (Labov, 1972a). Vowel centralisation thus represented island values. Elsewhere, in a suburban Detroit secondary school, students showed varied realisations of the diphthong /ay/. Representing middle-class suburban values, ‘jocks’ showed least raising and backing, while ‘burnouts’, representing working-class urban values, had much higher indexes for this feature (Eckert, 2001: 125). Another kind of social meaning attaches to pronunciations of the final vowel in Missouri, where ‘Missouree’ with final [-i] is associated with urban and refined values, while ‘Missouruh’ with [ə] signals traditional rural values. Reflecting larger cultural trends, the more urban pronunciation closer to the spelling is on the increase (Lance, 2003).
The final example involves pronunciations with a distinctly non-English flavour. In the US one readily hears Latino television and radio correspondents reporting from the field in standard varieties of English, unmarked by features of Latino English. In signing off, however, these same correspondents may use markedly ethnic pronunciations of their own names. Maria Hinojosa identifies herself as [mɑriɑ inohosɑ] with a trill [r] and full vowels rather than the reduced vowels characteristic of unstressed syllables in NAE. Geraldo Rivera calls himself
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[hεrɑldo], and others identify themselves as [dεlɑkrus] ‘de la Cruz’, [fwεntεs] ‘Fuentes’, [ ɑrsɑ] ‘Garza’, or [εrnɑndεs] ‘Hernandez’, using pronunciations that affirm their Latino identity.
8.3.9 |
Official languages in a multilingual North America |
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Benjamin Franklin argued for limiting languages other than English in America, and John Adams suggested that the Continental Congress create an academy to ‘purify, develop, and dictate usage’, both to no avail. More than a century later, President Theodore Roosevelt claimed ‘We have but one flag. We must also learn one language, and that language is English.’ From the outset, some North Americans have been troubled by linguistic diversity, and especially in periods of political or international conflict or heavy immigration, citizens of both Canada and the US have tried legislating restrictions on language use. After the start of World War I, the states of Iowa, Ohio, Nebraska and several others forbade teaching youths any subject in the German language, but in 1923 the US Supreme Court declared such laws unconstitutional. In 1981, a proposed amendment to the Constitution would have made English the official language of the US, but at the federal level nothing came of it. More than twenty states have designated English their official language, although state supreme courts have ruled certain of these statutes unconstitutional. Hawaii is the only state with two official languages – English and Hawaiian – although Louisiana law recognises both English and French.
As in colonial North America English was not the only language, so it remains today. It is not the only language of government, not the only official language, and certainly not the only language of importance in many people’s everyday lives. In Canada, English and French are the official languages; likewise for the province of New Brunswick; in Quebec province, French is the sole official language. In 1996, of 28.5 million Canadian residents, 6.6 million claimed French as a mother tongue (more than 85 per cent of whom lived in Quebec), and an additional 4.6 million claimed a mother tongue other than English or French.
The US has no official language, and the 2000 census found that 47 million residents over the age of five speak a language other than English at home. (That’s 18 per cent of that age group, up from 11 per cent in 1980.) Twenty-eight million of those claim Spanish, but many other languages are represented, including Chinese with 2 million claimants, and French, German, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Italian with a million or more each. Korean is spoken by 900,000, Russian and Polish by 700,000 each, Arabic by 600,000. Each of the fifty states is home to speakers of Arabic, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, Tagalog, Thai, Urdu and Vietnamese. In seven heavily populated states, at least one in four residents claims a home language other than English. In Los Angeles, election ballots are available to citizens in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Tagalog. Native American languages are spoken in every state, but the misleading character of that fact is underscored by acknowledging that the 175,000 speakers of