Status: British vs. American identity; place in a taxonomy of North American dialects

The status of Canadian English with respect to American and British English has been a primary concern of many linguists studying Canadian English, and of commentators and critics outside academic circles. As Scargill asserted, the large number of British immigrants in the 19^th century, together with the use of British English for official purposes during the colonial period and to some extent beyond, had a significant impact on Canadian English, which today shows the effect of a standard Southern British superstratum having been imposed on a North American variety. As a result, modern Canadian usage varies between standard British and American forms on a long list of variables concerning phonemic incidence, morphosyntax, lexicon, and general usage. Spelling has traditionally followed British practice in many respects (e.g., color and centre rather than color and center), though spelling too shows American influence, which has recently increased. Very few if any Canadians would write tyre, gaol, or kerb for tire, jail, or curb, and many now write color and center as well.

Studying the alternation among British and American words, pronunciations, and usage in Canada has been the main preoccupation of the largest body of research on Canadian English. Beginning in the 1950s (Avis 1954–56), this tradition employed written surveys to investigate variables such as whether missile sounds like mile or thistle; whether progress (the noun) has /oʊ/ or /ɒ/ in the first syllable; whether dived or dove is the past tense of dive; and whether people say tap or faucet, trousers or pants, and in hospital or in the hospital. It culminated in a nationwide postal survey representing 14,000 participants (secondary school students and their parents) from every province of Canada, divided by age and sex, and covering a wide range of variables at every level of grammar, except of course phonetics (Scargill and Warkentyne 1972). The tradition has recently been renewed, with a sociolinguistic perspective and some methodological innovations, under the name of Dialect Topography (Chambers 1994). The general finding of these surveys has been to confirm what might be predicted from settlement and cultural history and from the present cultural dominance of the United States: that Canadian English exhibits a mix of American and British forms, varying slightly from one region to another, which is gradually shifting towards increasing use of American forms among younger Canadians. The Americanization of Canadian English at these levels has been a popular topic in both academic and popular circles.

While many early students of English in Canada sought to promote its affinities with either British or American English, a growing sense of Canadian identity in the decades after the Second World War produced a third view of the status of Canadian English, which preferred to emphasize a small but significant set of features that are uniquely Canadian. This position was espoused by Scargill (1957: 612), and was the motivation behind the compilation of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (Avis et al. 1967). However, apart from a few items like the well-worn example of chesterfield for couch (which is strongly recessive and practically extinct among younger Canadians), these unique Canadianisms draw too heavily on the obvious categories of words connected with traditional, obsolescent occupations and with local flora, fauna, and topographic features, to make a very convincing case for a unique Canadian lexicon. In the more important domain of general vocabulary, Canadian usage inclines overwhelmingly toward the American variants of pairs like chemist/drugstore, chips/fries, lift/elevator, lorry/ truck, petrol/gas, spanner/wrench, and torch/flashlight.

The questionnaire tradition has tended to overstate the British element in Canadian English, insofar as it concentrates by necessity on phonemic incidence and the lexicon, where British superstratal influence was strongest, exercised through schools, dictionaries, the media, and other institutions. The smaller amount of work done in descriptive phonetics and phonology, together with the component of the usage surveys that deals with phonological inventory, shows a clear preponderance of non-Southern British variants. The vocalization of /r/ and the split of Middle English /a/ (TRAP vs. BATH) have never had any currency in vernacular Canadian speech, and younger Canadians now flap intervocalic /t/ and delete the glide in words like news and student pretty much to the same extent and in the same environments as most Americans do (De Wolf 1992; Gregg 1957: 25–26). Combined with the merger of /ɒ/ and /ɔ: – the vowels of LOT and THOUGHT, or cot and caught – which is nearly universal in Canada, and of a maximal number of vowels before /r/, these phonological features cause Canadian English to sound very similar to the North Midland and Western varieties of American English that underlie the popular conception of “General American” speech.

One exception to this assessment is Canadian Raising, which will be discussed. Another, much less well-known and studied but equally pervasive and distinctive, is the Canadian Shift, involving most notably a backing of /æ/ to [a]. Phonetic variables of this type are of course beyond a written survey’s powers of observation. It is therefore to the phonology and phonetics of Canadian English that we now turn.