Northern cities, here I come!

12:45 pm September 29th, 2008




			The Growlery - Northern cities, here I come! In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

forthright


	Northern cities, here I come!
	One of the things that will strike anyone with any ear for accents in the Windsor/Detroit area is that the international boundary is also a linguistic boundary. Even though it is only 25 minutes door to door from my house to work (less than 20 km on the road), the accent difference among English speakers is quite striking. This is a result of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, a striking change in several vowels found primarily in certain areas of the US around the Great Lakes, but which is almost absent entirely in Canadian Great Lakes (i.e. southern Ontario) speech, even in a city like Windsor that is basically a suburb of Detroit. I find it striking particularly because I do find myself accommodating to the NCVS, particularly in the pronunciation of words like borrow and got. So, for any of you who are interested in American dialectology, or are just nosy and want to hear what I sound like, I've recorded a couple of short voice samples using the nifty voice recorder I ordered from work: Me, in my ordinary (southern-Ontario-born-and-bred) accent Me, assimilating to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift I don't expect that these vowels will become standard in my pronunciation, but it will be interesting to see how much of the NCVS I use while talking to Michigan natives as opposed to at home. Tags: language

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	From: writingjen	Date: September 29th, 2008 04:52 pm (UTC)		(Link)

What is interesting to me, down in the southland of the U.S. and thus at a remove from both accents, is how much your "native" (i.e., southern Ontario) accent reads to me as just... "a Canadian accent."

I expect this is informed by news, popular culture, etc., similar the way in which many non-U.S.ers (who are non-linguists) think of the midwestern accent as "an American accent."

Edited at 2008-09-29 04:53 pm (UTC)

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	From: forthright	Date: September 29th, 2008 05:00 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Yes and no; Canadian dialects west of Quebec are remarkably similar to one another. There are gradations in things like Canadian rising 'going oot of the hoose', but really the only highly divergent dialects are those of Atlantic Canada.

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	From: ladyiolanthe	Date: September 29th, 2008 11:34 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Northern Canadians have a very different dialect too but that it is probably because most are Aboriginal and may have English as a second language (as in Paulatuk, where I think Inuvialuktun is still most residents' first language). That being said, most of the people who are 40-50 years old in Fort Chipewyan have English as their first language, and they definitely have a different accent from southern Canadians.

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	From: circuit_four	Date: September 29th, 2008 06:07 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	unrelated

Found myself looking for the proper term for a base-30 numbering system, in the middle of an intense roleplay. Guess whose stately Internet home I found it in? ♥

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	From: forthright	Date: September 29th, 2008 06:10 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: unrelated

But where else, of course? :)

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