Canada within the dialect taxonomy of North American English

Some dialectologists, on the basis of lexical evidence, or selected phonological evidence, have classified Canada as an extension of the Inland North region of the United States, which is intuitively satisfying in a geographic sense. However, at a deeper, structural level, Canada differs from the Inland North in a crucial respect – the low-back merger – and this difference has produced an enormous phonetic divergence between Inland Northern and Canadian speech. Phonologically, Canada has more in common with the North Midland and Western regions of the United States than with the Inland North, probably because the genesis of Canadian English involved the same dialect-leveling among heterogeneous migrants and pioneers that made the low-back merger a general feature of the Western United States. This particularly applies to Ontario and western Canada, which together represent by far the largest portion of the Canadian English-speaking population. The speech of these regions can certainly be included with that of the American North Midland and West under one general type of English, at least at a broad level of analysis. As for eastern Canada, while the Ottawa Valley, Montreal, the Eastern Townships, the Maritimes, and Cape Breton may all once have exhibited rich linguistic diversity, all of these regions (and even, to an extent, Newfoundland, especially since its confederation with Canada in 1949) now exhibit a rapidly advancing convergence with Standard Canadian English, at least among younger, middle-class speakers. They, too, can probably now be included under the same category as Ontario and the West.

It may be foolish to speculate on the future of Canadian English, given the uncertain outcome of the interplay of forces of global and local prestige that is always present in the evolution of languages, but the obvious importance of the increasing integration of the two English-speaking nations of North America cannot be overlooked. In an age of instant transmission of language across political borders, of frequent international travel and migration, and of ever-closer economic and cultural integration, Canadian English cannot help but come under greater assimilatory pressure than it has ever experienced in its history. Whether this pressure will overcome the obstacles to assimilation in the more resistant levels of grammar, particularly phonetics and phonology, remains to be seen. At present, there is no indication that Canadian English is about to disappear at these levels; on the contrary, it seems likely that, at a time when so many other differences have fallen prey to continental cultural convergence, the sound of Canadian English will be closely bound up with Canadians’ sense of their national identity for many generations to come.