I’m from Cleveland and I don’t break the /uː/ vowel.
I learned from The Diplomat that fire has two syllables in America and one syllable in the UK.
Of course diphthongs like the I sound in ‘time’, or the Y sound in ‘try’ will become two syllables if enunciated deliberately. You can listen to both those words sung by Linda Perry beginning at 2:24 in this
Great song
Hell, Mick Jagger can stuff at least four syllables into “time” when he wants to.
Well, it is on his side.
Funny, I never noticed anything strange about “about”, at least in Montreal. And I have a good friend from Toronto. The one oddity I notice (aside from the name of the last letter) is a word in which “ieu” is pronounced “eft”.
Incidentally, in my dialect (from Philly), “did you” with pronounced “dijuh” (ending in a schwa). And “sandwich” is pronounced “sãwich” (nasalized vowel).
Do you hear the accent in the “about” here where he says “this series is about me trying to make different foods.” For me it sticks out very obviously, but I’m pretty tuned in to that sound for some reason. It’s about twelve seconds in:
I don’t hear it, and it’s not my dialect.
That may be why you don’t hear it. It’s an allophone of ow. It’s similar to how I have trouble hearing “Mary, marry, and merry” as different vowels, even though many people don’t merge those vowels into one. To me Cansdian raising sticks out, and I like to play “spot the Canadian” when I hear a new voice on the radio or YouTube or in person. As far as I know, every person I’ve checked I correctly identified as Canadian. Of course, I may have missed many, too, but if I hear that sound, I know it. I found this guy on another video where he was making something non-Canadian in his New York apartment and because I play Spot the Canadian, I checked up on him. I know. I have weird hobbies.
I heard it. Sounds like he’s trying to cover up his accent. It’s similar to some British accents that deepen a soft ‘o’ or ‘ow’ into an ‘oo’ sound as in ‘groom’ or ‘doom’. I’ve heard Canadians say something that would sound like ‘aboot’ to most of the US, and the rest of the world I assume.
Montreal is all the way over by New Hampshire, and “Torono” is near Illinois.
The US region most known for that accent is Michigan and “Nort Dakota”. That’s Winnipeg.
It’s very likely the accent differences vary across Canada, too. I mean, Montreal is in Quebec. It’s got a whole different language influence going on.
Sure, just like the US, and the much smaller England, there’s a lot of variation in the extremely moldable language group we call English.
To me, it sounds closer to “aboat” than “aboot.” I’ve not found an “ow” sound that Canadians turn into what I perceive as an “oo.” But we all hear things differently. It’s more usually a diphthong that starts with an “uh” sound rather than an “ah” type of sound. And there’s linguistic rules ad to when it happens. Not all “ow”s get Canadian raising.
Yes, Canadian accents differ quite a lot, especially once you get to the Maritimes. Some fun accents there. But I definitely hear it in Toronto-area natives. And the exact vowel that diphthong starts with varies: I’ve heard from “uh” to “eh” before gliding into the second half.
How things sound to my tin ears is a poor way to evaluate this. Your observations are likely more accurate and useful. I can tell when something sounds different, but I’m not so good at defining that difference for other.
Living in the greater Detroit area, I’m pretty familiar with the accent variations of our neighbors to the south (yes, south-- Detroit to Windsor is the only US to Canada crossing that goes north to south).
There’s the stereotypical Canadian ‘sorry’ which is pronounced with an ‘o’ like the one in ‘home’, ‘sow-ry’ as opposed to the more American ‘sah-ry’. Same with ‘process’ I believe- Canadian is like the ‘o’ in ‘home’, US is more ‘prah-cess’.
Whenever I would watch Degrassi I thought they just sounded like standard American until they would say “sorry” or “about” and then I’d immediately remember “Oh right! This is a Canadian show.” Those words instantly stood out to my ears.
It’s quite obvious to me even though he sort of hurries past the word. It is not “aboot”. But it’s quite a ways in that direction compared to normal US “abowt”.
Interestingly, he says the word “food” a couple of sentences before “about” and then again just after “about” in your cited sentence. The first time it sounds more like “fud” and the second time it has the oddly stretched “foood” pursed lips sound that resembles the “aboot” just in front of it.
He is definitely talking very fast and I wonder if that’s actually him speaking that way, a la a commercial radio announcer, or is him having sped up and pitch corrected his canned intro speech in his post-processing to leave more time in the vid for his actual content? If the latter, all sorts of interesting artifacts might be introduced.
I do. It’s clearly not the same as I (British RP) would say, but it’s also not the same as the “a boat” I usually associate with Canadians - to my ears, it’s closer to the Dutch sound spelt as “ui”. Make of that what you will!
My mother was a linguist, and I inherited a lot of her reference books. According to one of them, a language or dialect with a lot of diphthongs is called “high-diphthong.” What the OP is describing sounds to me like a diphthong, so I think that might be the term that is sought.
There’s also a term for turning two vowels into one (“Brine” for “Brian,” which one poster noted, or the one I really hate-- “roond” for “ruined”); it’s “monophthong.”
“Phthong” means voice in Greek.
There’s also a unit smaller than a syllable, called a mora (pl. morae) that is used to count the time is takes to say a syllable. Some vowels may be only one syllable, but 2 morae, while others may be 1 syllable, and one mora.
Sometimes the vowels in these dialects may be lengthening syllable that are 1 mora in the standard dialect, to 2 morae.
A 2 morae syllable is “heavy,” so a language with a lot of them is also called heavy.
Very interesting post, thanks! I had not been aware of the term ‘mora’.
As has been pointed out upthread, single-syllable words that have a vowel before an ‘R’ or an ‘L’ often sound like they are almost 2-syllable words, since you have to change the mouth shape significantly to voice the consonant. Like ‘fire’: you can almost make out a second syllable-- ‘fiy-er’. Would that be an example of a word that’s one syllable, but 2 morae?