I know, standard disclaimer. There are many American accents and Canada has two official languages. I grew up in the Deep South so I am aware of the differences.
However, I wonder why Canada’s English template accent is so similar to that of the U.S. They are so close that people from some parts of the U.S. and Canada can’t tell it apart aside from an occasional word difference.
I thought the immigration influences on language would be different between the two or at least more complicated in the U.S. Australia, for example, went a different way.
I was in LA about seven months ago with a friend and we met two girls approximately the same age as us. We were 22, they were 20. They had assumed that we were Californian born and raised because of our accents. They were pretty shocked to find we were Canadian through and through.
I always assumed that people could tell we were Canadians by the way we talked. Maybe not…
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Well, there are many Canadian accents and America has two languages: at least in the south west.
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No. There are no states where Spanish (which I assume you are referencing) is a second official language. Yes, Spanish is quite common in many states, but the OP was talking about English and French in Canada, to which there is no US analog.
Maybe you should open a pit thread and see how that goes.
When I visited Scotland, a Scottish woman was able to tell that a friend I had with me was Canadian based solely on the way she talked. I was impressed; I wouldn’t have been able to tell based just on that.
There are differences in Canadian English that differentiate it from American English (especially in the vowels), but it’s a pretty subtle difference.
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Spanish as an analog. Spanish may not be an official language in Texas (and neither is English, so far as I know), but it is extremely common and public signs, warnings, instructions, etc. are often in both Spanish and English. There are plenty of communities of people in this state who only speak Spanish. If you’re bilingual around here, chances are it’s in Spanish and English.
Not up to the level of French in Canada, but pretty significant. And that’s the percentage for the US as a whole. Imagine the percentage in the Southwest by itself.
As noted, there’s plenty of variation in regional accents in both the U.S. and Canada. Maybe if you could identify two from either side of the border that are specifically similar?
Myself, I certainly don’t have any difficulty distinguishing between Americans and Canadians in the broadest sense, and can place people pretty accurately within specific regions in Canada, and (I believe) with general accuracy within the U.S.
About the closest accents I can think of would be a certain type of Maine accent and a certain type of New Brunswick accent – they definitely have some similar qualities. You can still tell which side of the border folks are from, though.
Maybe you are thinking of Broadcast English, the “accent” used by broadcast professionals? While it allows Peter Mansbridge to read the news in the U.S. without standing out as a foreigner, nobody talks that way naturally – people have to be trained to use artificial “regionless” accents for broadcasting.
(Just like you ought not to expect to meet a normal human being in the UK who speaks “BBC English” or “Received Pronunciation.”)
I grew up (in rural northwest Ohio) speaking with an accent that is very close to standard American broadcast English, I think. I don’t know where in Canada one would say that people grow up speaking something close to standard Canadian broadcast English, but let’s say that it’s in southern Ontario. If that’s true, then the regions that happened to get picked for standard American and standard Canadian English happen to be only a couple of hundred miles apart. In any case, part of the reason this can happen is that both the U.S. and Canada have relatively little differentiation in accents compared to, say, the British Isles. The relative small differentiation in accents combined with the fact that the accents chosen for standard broadcast speech are even closer than most accents in North America means that the two accents aren’t that much different. Furthermore, broadcast speech tends to be the speech of educated people, and this varies less than non-educated speech in different regions. So the words and grammatical patterns that can be found in regional dialects are deliberately suppressed.
But, I still say there is no analog in the US to French in Canada, which has an official status in the entire country and is the primary language of one Province.
Maybe you are thinking of Broadcast English, the “accent” used by broadcast professionals? While it allows Peter Mansbridge to read the news in the U.S. without standing out as a foreigner, nobody talks that way naturally – people have to be trained to use artificial “regionless” accents for broadcasting.
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Hmmm. I grew up in Washington state and Alaska. People on the radio and TV seem to be speaking exactly the way people here speak, they don’t “have an accent” to my ears. I know everybody has an accent or dialect, but there are plenty of people like me who naturally speak standard american english.
That’s the idea, in the main. If you put folks under a microscope, you’ll most likely find that there are specific quirks that make a Washington State accent different from an Ohio accent. At the very least, you can generally tell “Oh, this person is from the Pacific Northwest,” or “Ah, you’re a midwestern fella.”
American Broadcast English is probably closest to an midwestern accent, and Canadian Broadcast English is probably closest to an Ontario accent.
If you take the time to learn a form of Broadcast English, though, you learn to avoid the strongest cues that really narrow someone down to a specific region.
For instance, one of the most notable differences between a Toronto accent and a Canadian Broadcast English accent is that, in CBE, wherever you have a voiceless consonant, the diphthong before it will have a slightly lower pitch. This is a subtle enough difference that it’s practically undetectable to folks from Ontario, unless they’re looking for it – the guy on the radio still “Talks like us,” as far as they’re concerned – but it makes a world of difference in sneaking past folks from further west without tripping the “Hey! That guy’s from Ontario!” response.
This quality of the Ontario accent is probably the most noticible thing about Canadian accents in general, compared with American accents – but it’s all relative in that someone from Saskatoon will notice that funny high-pitched thing going on with the fella from Sudbury, but not really be aware that, to someone from South Sioux City, that funny high-pitched thing sounds pretty much the same in folks from Sudbury and Saskatoon. (Link is .mp3 stream.)
That had occurred to me, too… Why should they be different? But then I got to thinking about the various accents of Great Britain. You could fit the entire island into a a region of North America where the accents are indistinguishable, yet there’s a huge difference between the accents of England, Scotland, and Wales. Is this just because the ethic groups currently in the British Isles have been there for so much longer than those in North America?
If you look at maps of Europe, political boundaries and linguistic boundaries don’t always line up, artificial borders unite different languages and split languages and dialects between countries. Why should it be different in North America?
I’m not a linguist, but I hope you don’t mind a little arm-chair theorizing. It seems obvious to me that modern technology made all the difference.
Great Britain had many centuries where, without modern transportation and communication, distinct dialects of English formed over relatively small regions. The same is true of the German-speaking lands (Austria, Switzerland, and the states that would later make Germany), France, Spain, and pretty much any European country larger than Luxembourg.
The U.S. and Canada, on the other hand, happened to begin life near the start of the Industrial Revolution. The printing press already existed and was widely used to make cheap newspapers and books. Universal education and literacy were widespread. Moreover, within two centuries of 1776 there would be railways, steamships, telegraph lines, telephones, cars, airplanes, radio, and television, along with populations that liked to move around a lot. Whatever sharp differences in accent there might have been in the beginning were quickly smoothed out. (In fact, I understand many European dialects have been vanishing, for these exact reasons.)
If none of that technology had been invented, I’d bet that today’s English-speaking North America would be much more like 18th-century Britain, linguistically speaking. By now West-coasters would be unintelligible to East-coasters, and Canadians to southern Americans. Some of the American founding fathers expected this very thing to happen eventually, as the nation spread out across the continent. Of course they didn’t know what was coming down the pike.
I generally take exception to the notion that American broadcast English is confined to an area in the Midwest. I grew up in the Deep South and live in Massachusetts now. I hate the Boston accent too. People in my town tend to use broadcast English as do many of the wealthier towns. My wife grew up in affluent suburb close to Boston (Winchester) with a Canadian mother and a father that has an Italian Boston accent. She has never had any trace of a regional accent and neither do any of her friends. She has fit in anywhere in the U.S. or Canada. People may not know that is from there but they can’t place the country or region as foreign.
My Deep Southern accent is largely gone because I moved around for a while and spent some time in academics. I wish I didn’t lose it but I did anyway.
I have this personal theory that if a person moves around alot in the U.S. or Canada then his/her accent will converge on the Broadcast standard. Certain words and phrases will remain but the trend is towards the middle. Certain accents like a Boston accent or the Bronx can be debilitating for life (like my SIL) but the effect will tone down through moderating influences.
An opposing theory would be that a person with a strong regional accent would aquire traits of another strong regional accent once they moved there. I have never heard anyone have overwhelming traits of both a Boston and say, an Appalachian accent at the same time. I have seen accents converge on the standard accent many times.
