Guest host Helen Mann talked to Sandra Clarke. The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and Short Front Vowel Shifts across North America. Notes from the Series Editor. There are already fewer regional pronunciation distinctions, and for bilingual speakers, the language is becoming easier to learn and use. Producing and Perceiving the Canadian Shift 2 Producing and Perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift: Evidence from a Montreal Community Abstract This paper investigates inter-speaker variation in the non-high monophthongal vowels of Jewish Montreal English, analyzing the Canadian Shift in … The Canadian Shift is a chain shift of vowel sounds found primarily in Canadian English, but also possibly in some other dialects (for example, younger Pacific Northwest English). It was first described by Clarke, Elms and Youssef in 1995, based on impressionistic analysis. But the Canadian Shift is minor compared to Canadian Raising, a phenomenon describing the altered sounds of two notable vowel sounds, that has … If you want to know what happens to a particular long vowel, click on one of the phoneme buttons to see and hear it go through the shift. The result is that the American pronunciation of stock is almost identical to the Canadian pronunciation of stack. 1. New research says the Canadian accent is going through a subtle shift, making “laugh” sound like “loff,” “red dress” sound like “rad drass” and “milk” sound like “melk.” The North American Low-Back Merger Shift: A continental sound change . PDF. TRISYLLABIC I.AXING, VOWEL SHIFT, AND CANADIAN RAISING Rosemary Rempel In our English language we have a number of words that we know are somehow the same and yet we pronounce them very differently. Statistical analysis of Canadian Vowel Shift Analysis. the three vowels exemplified in black, pen or tin. Canadian speech is changing in what linguists call the Canadian Vowel Shift, and the same thing seems to be happening south of the border too, around the U.S. Great Lakes and the American South. How to Use the Great Vowel Shift Applet: You will need a Java plug-in to run this applet. The vowel sounds start to shift backwards in the mouth, so bet and bit start to sound more like bat and bet. In Becker, Kara (ed. While the vowel shift is slowly changing and jeopardizing Canada’s pronunciation reputation, the change is unifying for the country, since it’s happening almost everywhere. Acknowledgments. That means that a number of vowels have shifted from their “normal” positions in General American. reconfigured vowel space resulting from the low back vowel merger, and are engaged in a parallel shift that is motivated by the tension between forces of articulation, perception, and contrast. Following on this is what is called the “Canadian vowel shift”, whereby bit sounds a bit like bet, bet sounds a bit like bat, and bat is said a bit farther back in the mouth. The Canadian Vowel Shift (CS), generally described as a systematic lowering and backing of the front lax vowels (/ɪ, ɛ, æ/; as in KIT, DRESS, and TRAP), has been investigated by several researchers over the last two decades (see Boberg 2005, 2008, 2010; Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995; Hoffman 2010; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006; Roeder & Jarmasz 2010; Sadlier- Brown & Tamminga 2008, among others). Hardly anybody noticed. The Canadian Vowel Shift (CVS) is defined as the backing of /ɒ/, the simultaneous retraction and lowering of /æ/, and the lowering of /ɛ/. The Great Canadian Vowel Shift (macleans.ca) 68 points by slvv on Aug 4 ... (rounder) than [a], certainly, but it's nowhere close enough to render as "a boat" - the initial vowel is too low and the [ʊ] portion of the diphthong is too high for that approximation to work. Publication of the American Dialect Society (PADS). I agree with everyone else that Canadians use different vowel sounds than Americans or the British. Unlike the common American views which see Canadians sounding weird as they speak English, Canadian Raising is a different vowel shift than the common Canadian Vowel Shift that allows most Americans to hear the dialectal difference between the majority of American English and the dialects of Canadian English. You can study the GVS by Middle English phoneme or by step. ), The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and short front vowel shifts across North America. Canadian vowel shift. Extract . In this short micro-lecture, Lena Wendels, one of Prof. Handke's students, discusses the Canadian Shift, a central feature of Canadian English but also of some northern US varieties. Not only are Buffalo accents and Canadian accents different, but they are actually shifting…in opposite directions. Google Scholar Canadian Shift is well studied in several urban Canadian communities: Toronto (Roeder The shift involves the front lax vowels /æ/ (the short-a of trap), /ɛ/ (the short-e of dress), and /ɪ/ (the short-i of kit).. The blue arrows are shifts described by Boberg. Buffalo, along with other Northern US cities, features something called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS). 1. Canadian raising is a phonological process characteristic of one variety of Canadian English, in which the onsets of the diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/ raise to mid vowels when they precede voiceless obstruents (the sounds /p/, /t/, /k/, /s/, and /f/). THE CANADIAN SHIFT: COAST TO COAST* The "Canadian Shift" (CS) is a widespread change affecting the lax vowel subsystem of speakers of Canadian English (CanE). PDF. View article. In the discussion of the low-back merger, we saw that the Northern Cities Shift and the Canadian Shift have pulled the pronunciation of in opposite directions. That is, the American [a] is almost the same vowel as the Canadian . In the past decade, major impressionistic and acoustic work (Labov et al. For example, the ‘Canadian shift’, first detected in the mid 1990s, affects the ‘short front vowels’, i.e. This effect is probably more noticeable around the Great Lakes area, where the Northern Cities Vowel Shift is happening in the US. Some say there is an enormous difference once … View article. Even neighbouring communities like Detroit/Windsor and the two Niagara Falls have quite noticeable differences. PDF. Study design & data collection: Thomas Kettig Statistical Analysis: Bodo Winter Libraries required for this analysis: The Canadian Vowel Shift (CVS) has been the focus of a number of recent impressionistic and acoustic studies. The Canadian Shift (Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995) is a vowel change in progress that involves the lowering and retraction of front lax vowels in the KIT, DRESS, and TRAP lexical sets (Wells 1982). The Canadian Shift is a linguistic vowel shift found in Canadian English.It was first described by Clarke, Elms and Youssef in 1995, [1] based on impressionistic analysis. English: This image juxtaposes the results of two studies on the Canadian Shift (Boberg and Clarke).The red arrows are shifts described by Clarke. Let's take a look at the phonetic form of some of these words, in particular, certain vowel sounds. English, Canadian Raising is a different vowel shift than the common Canadian Vowel Shift that allows most Americans to hear the dialectal difference between the majority of American English and the dialects of Canadian English. The NCVS just so happens to move in the opposite direction to the Canadian Vowel Shift. Producing and perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift: Evidence from a Montreal community - Volume 29 Issue 1 - Thomas Kettig, Bodo Winter Please note, due to essential maintenance online purchasing will be unavailable between 08:00 and 12:00 (BST) on 24th February 2019. The changed vowel sounds are a as in trap, e as in dress, and i as in kit. 2. The Canadian Vowel shift can be described to have a lot of systematic changes, however one of the main ones can be found in the lowering of /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/. In Canada these vowels move in the opposite direction to the well-established ‘Northern Cities Shift’ in parts of the United States. The purple arrow is a shift described by both. 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