Is the stereotypical Canadian accent- the most famous parts probably being aboot and eh- used in South Park episodes and Rick Moranis/Dave Thomas and by comedians- associated with a particular region of Canada? And do you actually hear it or is it like some of the more exaggerated American regional accents?
If I don’t try to head this off at the pass, I promise you that there will Canadians swearing up and down that no one says ‘aboot’ and the like except maybe some Newfoundlanders. They even think they are telling the truth because they literally can’t hear that pronunciation even though other people can. My ex-MIL was raised Canadian (English speaking Quebec) and she still uses those pronunciations and her relatives in Ontario do too. The people I have worked with from all over Canada use a minor version of those except for some people from Toronto and French speaking Quebecois. I am not sure about Vancouver. The accents in South Park are much stronger than ones you usually hear but they are based on common speech patterns.
It’s a little difficult to answer because Canada, like the U.S. is chock full of regional accents: in two official languages! Most of the stereotypical accent that you’re talking about is exaggerated for comedic affect: like Benny Hill’s version of a stereotypical American, for example.
The McKenzie brothers though did in fact sound like a lot of people that I grew up with, but without the “eh” at the end of every sentence. “Eh” is synonymous with “you know?” or “huh?” and is only used at the end of a statement in which the speaker is soliciting a response. It wouldn’t be used at the end of “Welcome to the Great White North, eh?” It would be used at the end of “Good game, eh?”
Aboot, we’ve talked about a lot on here before and some grammarians of both countries have various names for it. We don’t really say “aboot.” We begin the word just like most in the US, but somewhere between the “oww” sound and the final “t” sound there’s a brief “oo” sound. Hard to explain. AB-OWW-oo-T. I never noticed it until Bob and Doug did it in parody.
There’s a faint English accent heard on the West coast. There’s more than a faint Irish influence on the East coast. Quebec and a lot of New Brunswick English speakers have a French-Canadian accent (surprise, surprise) and the rest of us in the middle sound more or less like anyone from the mid-west United States.
There are pockets of regional influence throughout though. Here in the Ottawa valley, there’s what’s referred to as the Ottawa Valley twang. Which is like a watered-down Newfoundland accent, to my ears anyway.
ETA: Shagnasty We do not say aboot! (Do we? LOL)
The Canadian accent is stronger than Canadians think, and weaker than Americans think.
It always sounds closer to “aboat” to me. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve heard it not just in the Canadians I know(from BC and Ontario), but also in someone I know from Minnesota. The “aboat”, I mean, not the “eh?”.
It’s not that we can’t hear the difference. It’s that you can’t hear the difference. The Canadian ‘ou’ in ‘about’ is not the same sound as ‘oo’. Nor is it the same sound as the ‘ow’ in ‘crowd’. These are 3 distinct sounds for Canadians. In most American dialects, the ‘ou’ in ‘about’ is the same vowel as the ‘ow’ in ‘crowd’, and most Americans can’t hear the difference between Canadian ‘ou’ and ‘oo’. I assure you, we can.
I think ‘aboot’ is pretty much universal in Canadian dialects. The Bob and Doug caricature is somewhat specific to rural Ontario, but various elements of it are wider spread than that.
Yes, “aboat” (with something like a British realization of the “oh” vowel) is a much better description of this than “aboot”. It’s a real phenomenon, with the technical name “Canadian raising”; the phonemes typically realized by the /aU/ and /aI/ diphthongs, when preceding an unvoiced consonant, have their initial positions raised, becoming realized by /@U/ and /@I/ instead. The phenomenon is also widespread in America, but only for the /aI/ dipthhong; hence we don’t stereotype Canadians as saying “allreet”, even though the same process is going on there, because so many of us do it as well. (Note the difference in the vowel, should you have this accent feature, between “knife” and “knives”, for example. Or the difference between “writer” and “rider”, which shows that the process of Canadian raising takes place before the process of merger of intervocalic /t/ and /d/ to the same voiced alveolar flap)
Now I’m really curious to know if my accent when speaking English sounds more English Canadian or American. Is it time for a new accents thread?
Back in the ‘Celtic Tiger’ days, the Irish hospitality industry would recruit Newfoundlanders from the Southern Shore because they had solid Irish accents. They could be transplanted straight to the old country and have the required lilt.
That’s nothing on the odd words you here in NL. I still remember figuring out the sentence “Scattered time people are after telling me that.”
I was watching a documentary on fishermen in Newfoundland once and their accents were WAY closer to provincial Englishmen than to anything from North America. These were older guys- old enough to remember when Newfoundland joined Canada and still be pissed abou-oo-t it- and I’m guessing they were a bit rural, but is Newfoundland it’s own accent family?
When I stayed with my cousin in New Hampshire for a time I kept listening to hear the “ayup, cahn’t get theah from heah” Farmer Smurf accent, but only heard something like it once or twice and both times from much older people. Here in the U.S. south you still hear all manner of accents but with cable television and other mass media it’s softened a bit. Probably similar in Canada.
There is little evidence that television and such broadcast media have any great effect upon accents; linguists largely dismiss this theory. To the extent that accents have begun to converge within some area, it is far more likely to have been driven by increased travel and resettling within it.
My son pronounces “sorry” the U.S. way: as in SA-ree. The Canadian way is more like “SAW-ree.” This is most definitely due to hearing the former pronunciation repeatedly on T.V. And yes, the newer generation of Newfies have a much, much more rounded accent.
ETA: Of course Indistinguishable may be correct. I’m not a linguist. Not even a cunning one.
It’s not just Canada - I live in the metro Boston area and have met people here with the thick Boston accent who swear they don’t have an accent. They think they sound just like the people on national TV.
While we’re at it, I’ve been told that in the recent movie “Knight and Day”, supposedly portraying Boston-area characters, the female lead says something like “I was driving on the 93” (as in Route 93). No one here would put “the” in front of a route number. “The Turnpike”, yes, “the 93” no. I believe that’s a California phrasing (and to be distinguished from a pronunciation.)
Well, we can both be correct. Television does not have any great effect upon accents (being far swamped out by the people you actually speak back and forth with), but it may influence an isolated word’s pronunciation here and there.
Come visit. I can translate English-to-English for you. Mostly the NL accent is Anglo-Irish sounding, but it can be very very regional. In Corner Brook they pronounce ‘bagel’ like bag - el, not like bay - gel.
It’s actually a noted inter-California shibboleth; supposedly, North Californians leave out the “the” and South Californians leave it in. (The linguistic jargon for this being that NorCal considers route numbers anarthrous while SoCal does not)
Buh? I’ve never heard anyone say SA-ree. It’s usually SOH-ree or SAW-ree.
When Leaffan writes “SA-ree”, he means what you (Eyebrows) probably mean by “SAW-ree”, and what someone else might write as “SAH-ree”; that is, /sari/. When Leaffan writes “SAW-ree”, he means what you probably mean by “SOH-ree”, and what might be written as “soary”; that is, /sɔri/.
In other words, the first part of the typical American pronunciation of “sorry” is the same as in “sarcasm”, while the first part of the traditional Canadian pronunciation of “sorry” is the same as in “sore”.
Um, yeah. That’s pretty much it alright. Your phonetic example are much better than mine.
There’s a pretty standard western Canadian “about” at 2:46 in this Corner Gas clip. I posted this recently as an example of the western Canadian accent - I sound very much like the gas station guy (we were both born and raised in the same area of Saskatchewan).
Don’t let the Ontarians tell you they don’t say “aboot” - they get a lot closer to it than western Canadians do. 