The phonetic and phonological status of the U.S.-Canada border

Avis (1954–56) and Chambers (1994), among others, have shown how the international boundary between Ontario and the U.S. is a sharp linguistic isogloss for a wide range of variables at different levels of grammar, even though Avis (1954: 13) suggests that, from a broader perspective, the differences between Ontario speech and adjacent parts of the United States are minimal. However, these studies have generally dealt with non-phonetic data. The question of the linguistic significance of the U.S.-Canada border at the level of phonetics and phonology – and especially at the level of the vowel sounds that make up our primary impression of the regional character of someone’s speech – has only now begun to be systematically investigated (Labov, Ash, and Boberg, fc.; Boberg 2000).

In general, phonological and phonetic data indicate a border effect that diminishes in importance from east to west. In the east, the completely different phonological systems of Eastern New England and Maritime Canada are directly opposed across the international border. Though both regions share a low-back merger and a conservative treatment of /u:/ and /oʊ/ , eastern Canada was not affected by the Southern British innovations – vocalization of /r/ and the split of Middle English /a – that shaped modern Eastern New England speech. This fact helps in the dating of these changes in New England, since Nova Scotia was settled by New Englanders: it seems likely that the changes became general after the emigration of New Englanders to Canada in the mid-18th century.

In the middle of the continent, the border between Canadian speech in Ontario and Inland Northern speech on the other side of the Great Lakes is remarkably sharp. It separates two different phonological systems, along with the phonetic developments that follow from them. On the Canadian side, a low-back merger has produced a backing of /æ/ in the Canadian Shift; on the American side, a low-back distinction has been preserved by a raising of /æ/ and a centralization of /ɒ/ in the Northern Cities Shift. Boberg (2000) showed that there was no sign of phonetic or phonological interference across the Detroit River between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, despite the prediction of current models of geolinguistic diffusion that Windsor would be linguistically assimilated to its much larger American neighbor, not to speak of the importance of American settlement in the origins of Ontario English.

In western North America, however, the international boundary no longer represents a coherent bundle of isoglosses, with the exception that it marks the southern extent of Canadian raising (especially of /aʊ/ ) and of more extreme versions of the Canadian shift. Western North America, to a large extent, shares a common phonological system and very similar phonetics. The blurring of linguistic boundaries in the West, a well-established fact in American dialectology, is not merely a feature of American English, but of the continent as a whole, reflecting relatively sparse and recent settlement from a mixture of sources. People living in Saskatchewan and North Dakota, Alberta and Montana, or British Columbia and Washington can certainly hear a difference between their own speech and that of their neighbors across the border, but this difference would seem very small indeed to someone from outside the region.

Notwithstanding the varying border effects discussed above, it must be admitted that certain changes in North American English seem to be diffusing rapidly over most of the continent, including Canada. One of these, discussed above, is the fronting of /u:/. Others include the loss of /j/ in /ju:/ after coronals (news, student, tube, etc.), the merger of /hw/ and /w/ (whether vs. weather, etc.), and the spread of be like as a verb of quotation (I was like, what’s up with that?). Moreover, the mass media, which are essentially common to all of North America, spread lexical innovations rapidly across the border, thereby further leveling the differences between Canadian and American English. It remains to be seen which differences will ultimately survive this erosion, and which new differences will arise to take the place of obsolete ones as people on each side of the border strive to sustain linguistic symbols of their sense of community.