You have exquisite taste.
I’ve lived in Canada all my life, raised in the Maritimes but I’ve travelled coast to coast of this country (including the US “eastern seaboard”),…and I’ve never, not once, heard anyone pronounce the word “about” as “aboot.” If such a thing exists it is beyond my comprehension.
However, since I moved to my current province I have noticed that Southern Ontarians (in general) do have a unique way of talking (maybe I’m crazy).
A one-TV market all alone on the bald prairie with only a squeaky windmill and a Fargo pickup truck, and a chicken for company would have satellite.
[QUOTE=Derleth]
More than that, there’s no cultural exchange. We don’t get their TV, they don’t get ours. Products don’t cross the border.
[/QUOTE]
Maybe this is accurate for Americans, but not for Canadians.
We get your tv, your sports, your books and magazines, your fast-food chains, your big box chains. We get your brands.
Basic cable includes the four major networks, plus CNN. I couldn’t have cable and not have US TV. If I’m curious about any event in the US news or politics, it’s all there. If I’m interested, I can watch the same coverage of your primaries and elections as you get.
When I was growing up, we had three TV channels: CBS and NBC from Minot, North Dakota, and CBC from Yorkton, Saskatchewan.
Doesn’t get more small market than that.
And, I certainly didn’t get the “small market” qualifier from your post.
Montreal (a city of a million and a half, four mil for the metro area) gets several TV channels from Burlington, Vermont, a city of 38,000, 120,000 for the metro area. I’d call that a small market.
(Note: Burlington, in turn, gets several channels from Montreal.)
I grew up watching Global television network, so yeah, electromagnetic radiation does go both ways.
I also grew up with homo milk, which seems uncommon in the USA. Maybe it was just my small town at the border. Specifically, I mean referring to it as “homo milk” is uncommon.
As for the OP, yeah, Ontario has a very distinct accent that’s easy to pick up on with a familiar ear. I have a familiar ear, so maybe it’s not as noticeable to someone from, say, San Diego.
Many people I know raised within three hours of the border, and me too, have been asked if we’re Canadian because of the way we say about. It doesn’t sound like the Canadian aboot to us, but it obviously does to other people.
I lived for my first 31 years in the US (mostly Philadelphia) and the last 47 in Canada. Canadians seem unfailingly to detect my accent as American, but I’ll be damned if I can tell a Canadian unless he does something truly characteristic. Such as:
abouwt where I say aboult (a very dark l, but there’s still an l)
same with doubt
zed for the last letter of the alphabet
shedule where I say skedule
leftenant where I say lootenant
fails to understand “a quarter of five” (insteaf of “quarter to five”). Both are common in Philly.
The soda/pop isogloss crosses the border and is not diagnostic. Everyone in Philly and everyone in Montreal says soda. I say leever or lever interchangeably and I doubt you can make anything of that.
The only explanation I can offer for this is that the variety of American accents is so large that they overwhelm the differences across the border, while the Canadian accent is more uniform. I can certainly tell British (or Strine, or Kiwi) accents instantly so it is not that I am deaf to accents. I had a telling experience last week. I was walking on a busy downtown street and I hard a lady talking rather loud and when I was about 15’ from her I realized she had a strong British accent. When I got to 10’ from her I realized she was speaking French (but still had a strong British accent).
Newfies are different. Their accent is halfway to Irish. But then Newfoundland is halfway to Ireland. (There is a distance sign on Telegraph Hill in St. Johns, NL that shows that London, England is only a few miles further than London, ON).
Thunder Bay ON – Grand Marais MN: small difference.
Thunder Bay ON – Minneapolis: noticeable difference (with the Americans noticing my accent more than I notice theirs).
We were down in Northern Idaho this summer visiting friends and there were many word pronunciations that differed between them and us.
One that stood out was the way they pronounced roof: ruff. But then I’ve noticed that in many western states.
One evening there sitting around with our friends and a few others, one of them shouted in glee: “she just said eh!”. She was referring to my wife saying the word “eh”. Then everyone was waiting for her or I to say “eh”. And sure enough, we were guilty several times that evening.
I’ve also noticed when I say “thank you” to a clerk or waitress, they respond with “uh huh”. Odd.
Most word pronounciation differences seem to be found in the smaller towns, whereas the cities such as Seattle, Portland and Spokane don’t seem to have the differences.
As for other differences noted in northern Idaho, well that’s another topic.
As a child in Calgary, I watched CBC and CTV; and on good days, we got a snowy (I think) CBS signal from Great Falls, Montana. I could watch the Captain Kangaroo show, which was broadcast by the CBS affiliate there.
Then we moved to Toronto, where we got all of six channels, half of them from the US: CBC and CTV (both Toronto), CHCH (channel 11, Hamilton), and ABC, NBC, and CBS, all out of Buffalo NY. Later, when we got a UHF antenna, we’d get PBS (channel 17 from Buffalo) and Channel 29 (Buffalo, which showed hilarious and not-at-all scary monster movies on Sunday afternoons). There were Canadian channels on the UHF dial too (in truth, Toronto’s City-TV on channel 79 showed soft-porn movies which attracted a lot of attention), but for the most part, we watched American TV.
I guess we Canadians picked up our accent and vocabulary (with some exceptions) from all that American exposure. I’ve certainly recorded liners, bumpers, and voiceovers for the American market (radio liners mostly). The producers want me in spite of the fact that I am Canadian–they don’t find any accent that is identifiably Canadian in my speech. So, I get work and a few extra dollars (in addition to my regular line of work).
“Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, it’s MONSTER TRUCK MADNESS…” Yeah, that’s me in some recordings, including some that have been used in the US.
That’s ridiculous. At first I thought you were being sarcastic. Here in southern Ontario, we are inundated with American television over the air even if you don’t have cable, and it goes the other way, too, but in lesser volume. Electromagnetic waves – what a concept! To some degree this happens all along the border.
As for products, virtually every manufactured product you buy in the US is made in China for an American company. And virtually every manufactured product you buy in Canada is made in China for an American company. And typically you buy them all either from Amazon, Best Buy, or Walmart. What a strange and funny country Canada is!
If I may be permitted to indulge in some good-natured jabs, the difference is that Canadians pronounce those words correctly. 
“About” is pronounced as if it was spelled “about”, which, as it turns out, it is. Instead of “abawt”. Ditto for “sorry”. It’s spelled with an “o”. “Sari” is not an expression of sorrow, it’s a kind of South Asian garment. 
Where I lived, we received:
Local Buffalo NBC, ABC, CBS, and eventually WUTV.
Local Toronto CBC, CTV, Hamilton CHCH, and eventually Toronto CITY.
That’s dead even.
Where my mother lived on the NB/ME border, the American and Canadian communities were integrated to a significant degree, including the international streetcar that my grandfather drove.
Derleth’s post was about Montana.
There was a US exchange student in my college class for a while. She was from upstate New York and sounded to our ears Canadian. She told us that a lot of her fellow Americans also mistook her for Canadian.
My friend from Ireland’s midlands lived in Toronto for a year. He said people automatically assumed he was a Newfie by his accent.
I’ve lived in three places in New York State, and never heard anyone speak that way, either.
Conversely, growing up in Minot, North Dakota, when we got cable in 1974 (I think), one of the new stations was CBC from Brandon, Manitoba. It was a sad day a few years later when that was dropped in favor of Christian Broadcasting Network. Still, until NPR started up, CBC radio was the only option to listen to the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.
Even limited to that area, I know that cable subscribers in southern Saskatchewan get the US networks as part of their basic package, as mentioned above, and would be extremely surprised if it was not the same for southern Alberta (Spoons?)
And the responses from several posters about the saturation of Canada by US culture, sports, products etc. is not limited to big Canadian centres. It applies just as much to the rural areas of Canada which border on the US.