The Great Canadian Vowel Shift

> I just half-smile or say "I don't know"

Can confirm, kafkaesque must be Canadian. My most Canadian moment was apologizing while jumping out of someone's way while they were barreling down the sidewalk on a skateboard.

I've been told that my accent isn't so much a sound, but a mode of speech. You can spot the Canadians in LA because they are the ones using complete sentences.

There is a certain neutrality to the western-canadian accent, much like that of Minnesota. Take the word Going or anything else ending with ing. In much of the US it is pronounced "goin", dropping the g. In the UK it has become "going-g" ... they add an extra g sound. Right in the middle are the canadians and minnesotans who pronounce the word as written.

Canadians, watch this vid to see the similarity with minnesota: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-BCxjYoOl0 (I know this guy)

I've worked with Canadians and just thought they were Americans. This one guy told a joke, an the joke ended with, "It will cost you two loonies!" We looked up and asked, "What are Loonies?" (Their dollar bills)

I asked how come you don't have an accent? (I did apologize about our educational system--we weren't taught anything about Canadians?)

Well, he started to get mad about the accents. He said most of us don't have accents. I won't say what he said next, but from the few words I can repeat; he was burned in his formative years by a French woman, and didn't like Quebec accents? I asked, "I just thought the French accent would sound beautiful?" He said there's nothing beautiful about a Quebec accent! (We were both tired, working construction, and hated our jobs.) I was suprised how Conservative he was though--always complaining about Canadian taxes. That changed one Monday morning when he got the bill from the hospital he took his wife to for a suspected Panic Attack? He couldn't believe we pay the amount we do for medical care. (That entire summer's wage, and then some went to that bill.) His last words to me were, "I'm never coming back. It's not just because I was "jacked" by the hospital, but the amount of stress you have here is just not worth it. If those blood suckers are going to charge this much, why don't they hand out price lists in the lobby?" I agreed, and gave him half my anxiety pill.

I'm also a Canadian in LA.. It tends to be other Canadians who can pick out my accent (from Toronto originally).

I'm not sure that a linguist would paint all of canada with one brush. Any linguist worth being called such should at least recognize a couple english-french divides.

There have been several (mostly in Canadian television, of course), but "the québecois accent" isn't really a single thing. Depending on how you want to split it up, there are somewhere between three and six (or seven) regional Frenches in the area with different sound systems, and that results in a rather broad range of accents in English. I grew up in a part of Northern Ontario that was at least 50% francophone, with English as the "high language" (extending education in French past the 9th grade was a recent innovation), and it wasn't hard to spot the "immigrants" (people who had moved in from another part of Canada) by accent - almost to the street if they were Montrealers.

Bon Cop, Bad Cop[0] isn't TV (maybe a TV Movie, now) but its use of Quebecois was, to me (my formative years spent within 3km of the Quebec border), quite accurate.

[0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479647/

The problem with "aboot" is that it's not... quite that. I've lived in a few different English speaking countries, I'm from rural Canada, and I now living in Toronto, the epicentre of accents. Over time, I've started to hear some of the differences, but I won't claim to be an expert.

IMHO: We don't say "Aboot", but something closer to (but not quite) "Abehwt", compared to the American "Abowt". From what I can tell, Americans can hear a difference, and frankly we Canadians can't at all. But Americans seem to hear the difference as more exaggerated into the "Aboot" territory.

In short: We do say "About" very differently, and we're generally totally unaware of it.

As an Irishman, I can see where she was coming from. I was channel hopping one day and stumbled across a documentary, can't remember what it was about, but the people in it sounded Irish[1], but... off, somehow. There were little accent and vocabulary differences. Then one of them said something utterly Canadian, and that's when I realised that it was actually Newfoundland.

[1] To be precise, like as if they're from the south east, around Wexford and Waterford.

I have a lot of relatives in the Midwestern U.S. (specifically Minnesota), and you encounter that pronunciation in that region. I have no idea if it spills over into Manitoba or Ontario, but if it does, the location seems right for it.

Raised in Winnipeg from a very early age. My wife who is also from Winnipeg speaks the same way.

Manitobans are the worst offfenders on the "bag"/"bayg" meter. If anything, it's the trademark of their accent. It isn't until I point it out do they hear it. anything that Americans (californians especially) say with the short A sound that ends with a hard consonant is liable to be mangled by a manitoban. If you aren't hearing it, it's because your accent is getting in the way (the one you probably swear you don't have).

Ontario residents mangle their A sounds a little different. when you have an "ar" combination in a word, they pronounce it like "air", but as if you're simultaneously having a mild stroke. "Marnie had an Enlarged Heart" is always fun to hear one say.