Phonetic features of Canadian English

A general view of the phonetic quality of Canadian English vowels can be obtained from Table 1, which gives an approximate phonetic transcription of each of the keywords used to represent Wells’ lexical sets. These transcriptions are necessarily approximate, because small degrees of regional, social, and inter-speaker variation do of course exist, even in the largely homogeneous context described above. With this limitation, they can be taken to represent the general character of the vowels of Standard Canadian English. A more detailed view of the most distinctive aspects of Canadian pronunciation is given below.