A Closer Look at the Short Front Vowel Shift in Canada

Abstract

This paper examines several aspects of the “Short Front Vowel Shift” (SFVS) in Canadian English, known in most previous research as the “Canadian Vowel Shift.” It is based on acoustic analysis of a list of one hundred words produced by sixty-one Canadian and thirty-one American university students. The analysis focuses on three questions: (1) the relations among the vowels involved in the shift, including relations with vowels not traditionally considered part of the shift; (2) the behavior of individual words in each vowel category, which displays allophonic variation; and (3) the role of regional and national identity (western versus eastern Canadian, and Canadian versus American) and speaker sex in predicting the degree of participation in the shift, which is measured with a unitary quantitative index of the shift that is proposed here for the first time. The analysis finds that the short front vowels (kit, dress, and trap) lower and retract as a set, but that shifts of several back vowels (particularly foot, goat, and strut) are also correlated but not necessarily structurally connected with these; that following voiceless fricatives favor the SFVS while preceding velars disfavor it; that women are more advanced in the shift than men; that there is no regional difference within Canada in the progress of the shift; and, most surprisingly, that, once the American comparison group is restricted to those with a low-back merger, Americans are more shifted than their Canadian peers, calling into question the association of the shift with Canada in most previous research on Canadian English.

Foreign (a) in North American English: Variation and Change in Loan Phonology

“…In these cases, Canadian means are shown as black circles and American means as white circles. It is remarkable that the front vowels involved in the SFVS, /e/ and /æ/ ( dress and trap ), appear more shifted for the Americans than for the Canadians, with higher F1 but lower F2, a matter explored in Boberg (2019). The low vowels, in fact, are all significantly lower for the Americans than for the Canadians, a surprising result that does not at present have an evident explanation.…”

“…The Canadian trend toward non-front nativizations is complicated by a second, apparently unrelated change: the Canadian Vowel Shift, a lowering and retraction of the short front vowels that appears to result from the low-back merger (Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995; Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006:130, 220-221). Since a similar set of vowel shifts has been identified in western varieties of American English, the Canadian Shift now bears several other names, including the Short Front Vowel Shift (Boberg 2019) and the Low-Back Merger Shift (Becker 2019). In keeping with the term employed most recently in this journal by Boberg (2019), it will be referred to here as the “Short Front Vowel Shift” (SFVS).…”

“…Since a similar set of vowel shifts has been identified in western varieties of American English, the Canadian Shift now bears several other names, including the Short Front Vowel Shift (Boberg 2019) and the Low-Back Merger Shift (Becker 2019). In keeping with the term employed most recently in this journal by Boberg (2019), it will be referred to here as the “Short Front Vowel Shift” (SFVS). One of the main stages or components of the SFVS, first observed in Vancouver English by Esling and Warkentyne (1993), is a retraction of native /æ/ from [æ] to [a], a quality very similar, if not identical, to the inter-phonemic nativization of foreign (a) just discussed.…”

1. Introduction

“…In some accounts of the LBMS, these specific expectations are met, as in the seminal article by Clarke, Elms, and Youssef (1995) in Canada. In others, however, the vowels move differently; for example, a number of data sets provide evidence that bet and bit are primarily backing as opposed to lowering (Boberg 2005;Hagiwara 2006;Durian 2012). These findings led to a suggestion that the LBMS was not a chain shift but a parallel shift, where the motivation for shift is analogy, such that bet and bit mimic bat's movement.…”

“…Other scholars have adopted this view of a more general redistribution as opposed to an ordered chain shift, including D'Onofrio et al 2016and D'Onofrio, Pratt, and Van Hofwegen (2019), who argue for a holistic reorganization of the vowel space in California from a trapezoid to a triangle, with bat the lowest vowel in the vowel space. The same triangular outcome is presented in both Grama and Kennedy (2019 [this volume]) and Boberg (2010Boberg ( , 2011Boberg ( , 2019), 9 and we incorporate the triangular space into the schematic of LBMS in figure 1.1.…”