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Taking as a point of departure the preliminary view of regional phonetic differentiation in Canadian English developed by the Atlas of North American English, this article presents data from a new acoustic-phonetic study of regional variation in Canadian English carried out by the author at McGill University. While the Atlas analyzes mostly spontaneous speech data from thirty-three speakers covering a broad social range, the present study analyzes word list data from a larger number of speakers (eighty-six) drawn from a narrower social range, comprising young, university-educated speakers of Standard Canadian English from all across the country. The new data set permits a more detailed view of regional variation within Canada than was possible in the Atlas, which focuses on differentiating Canadian from neighboring varieties of American English. This view adds detail to the established account in some respects, while suggesting a revised regional taxonomy of Canadian English in others. In particular, this article reports on several phonetic isoglosses that divide Canada's Prairie region from Ontario, thereby splitting the “Inland Canada” region of the Atlas into western and eastern halves. In fact, the data presented here suggest a division of Standard Canadian English into six regions at the phonetic level, rather than the three proposed by the Atlas: British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec (Montreal), the Maritimes, and Newfoundland. This taxonomy corresponds to the six major regions identified in the study of lexical data reported in Boberg (2005b).

Based on an impressionistic study of 16 young Canadians, mostly from Ontario, Clarke, Elms, and Youssef (1995) reported that the short front vowels of Canadian English are involved in a chain shift, the "Canadian Shift," triggered by the merger of 0Á0 and 0O:0 in low-back position, whereby 0ae0 is retracted to low-central position, and 0E0 and 0I0 are lowered toward the low-front space vacated by 0ae0. This article extends the study of the Canadian Shift to the English-speaking community of Montreal, Quebec, using acoustic rather than impressionistic analysis and a larger and more diverse sample. The new data motivate a revised view of the Shift, at least as it operates in Montreal, in which the three front vowels are retracted in a set of parallel shifts, rather than rotating in a chain shift. In 1991, Labov demonstrated that the major dialects of North American English could be categorized in three groups, based on two phonological criteria. These involved the organization of the low-front and low-back corners of the vowel space. One criterion was the split of 0ae0 into tense and lax phonemes (tense 0ae:0 in past vs. lax 0ae0 in pat). The other was the merger of 0Á0 (cot) and 0O:0 (caught) as a single, low-back phoneme (the "low-back merger"). Labov further showed that these criteria were the structural basis for chain shifts affecting whole subsystems of vowels in the dialects of two of the groups, giving each a distinctive sound. These chain shifts-the Northern Cities Shift, affecting the Inland Northern region of the United States, and the Southern Shift, affecting the Southern United States-have been widely reported and discussed since their initial exposition in Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner (1972). Labov grouped most of the remaining varieties of North American English-those spoken in New England, Western Pennsylvania, the Western United States, and Canada-into a "Third Dialect." The basis for this geographically discontinuous group was that all of its members feature single phonemes in both corners of the low vowel space. In the low-front space they have a single 0ae0 phoneme with purely phonetic tensing and raising An earlier version of this paper was presented at NWAVE 32 (University of Pennsylvania, October 10, 2003). Thanks are due to members of the audience at that presentation, as well as to anonymous reviewers of the present version of the article, for helpful comments. In the preparation of the present version, the author is especially indebted to Anicka Fast and Erika Lawrance for research assistance and to Myrtis Fossey for assistance with statistical analysis. This research received financial support from three sources: the

English coronal stop deletion is constrained by the preceding segment, so that stops and sibilants favor deletion more than liquids and nonsibilant fricatives. Previous explanations of this constraint (e.g., the sonority hierarchy) have failed to account for the details, but we show that it can be comprehensively treated as a consequence of the obligatory contour principle (OCP). The OCP, introduced to account for a variety of categorical constraints against adjacent identical tones, segments, and so forth, can be generalized as a universal disfavoring of sequences of like features: *[aF] [aFJ. Therefore, coronal stop deletion, which targets the set of segments /t,d/ defined by the features [-son, -cont, +cor], is favored when the preceding segment shares any of these features. But this requires adopting the assumption of inherent variability and interpreting the OCP as a probabilistic constraint with cumulative effects (the more shared features, the greater likelihood of deletion). This suggests an attractive theoretical integration of categorical and variable processes in the grammar.