Charles Boberg

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor of Linguistics at McGill University

Canadian English phonology is described in a comparative framework, emphasizing both North American English features shared with many varieties of American English, like /r/ constriction, the lack of a trap – bath split, the palm = lot merger, flapping of /t/ and palatal glide loss, and distinctively Canadian features, like Canadian Raising of pric...

This paper examines the origin and historical development of the vowel system of Western Canadian English (WCE). It presents a sociophonetic analysis of interviews with two Western Canadian veterans of the First World War, born in 1890–91, and eight of the Second World War, born in 1917–1923. The data reveal that the comparative uniformity attribut...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

This chapter sets out the plan and aims of the book, discusses its theoretical context, forumlates its research questions, and discusses the status of film and television speech as data for studies of language variation and change and the authenticity of film and television speech.

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, ge...

As a follow-up to an analysis of New York City English in film recently published in this journal (Boberg 2018), this article turns its attention to the whole country over the same 80-year period of 1930-2010, using acoustic phonetic, quantitative and statistical analysis to identify the most important changes in the pronunciation of North American...

Previous research has shown that Canadian English displays a unique pattern of nativizing the stressed vowel of foreign words spelled with the letter , like lava, pasta, and spa, known as foreign (a), with more use of /æ/ (the trap vowel) and less use of /ah/ (the palm vowel) than American English. This paper analyzes one hundred examples of foreig...

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 r...

This article analyzes the frequency of three traditional features of New York City English-vocalized /r/, raised tense /áh/ (bath), and raised tense /oh/ (thought)-in the on-screen speech of 22 actors raised in the greater New York City region, in a diachronic selection of films that appeared between 1933 and 2003. Vocalization of /r/ is coded impr...

The Handbook of Dialectology provides an authoritative, up-to-date and unusually broad account of the study of dialect, in one volume. Each chapter reviews essential research, and offers a critical discussion of the past, present and future development of the area. The volume is based on state-of-the-art research in dialectology around the world, p...

Editors' introduction to 'The Handbook of Dialectology'

Audio recordings of English are available from the first half of the twentieth century and thus complement the written data sources for the recent history of the language. This book is the first to bring together a team of globally recognised scholars to document and analyse these early recordings in a single volume. Looking at examples of regional...

This article asks whether collaboration with a popular newspaper can be an effective means of collecting data on dialect variation and whether the resulting data are comparable with those gathered by more traditional dialectological methods. These questions are examined with a pair of dialect surveys carried out in 2014 by Metro News, in collaborat...

This paper reports on the first-ever linguistic study of the variety of English spoken in the Gaspé region of eastern Quebec, which is 86 percent French-speaking. An on-line survey was used to gather data from 200 participants on 58 phonological, grammatical and lexical variables, drawn mostly, for comparative purposes, from earlier research on Can...

This article reports on a study of ethnic variation in the phonetics of Montreal English. The speech of 93 native speakers of Montreal English from three ethnic groups, British-Irish, Italian and Jewish, was recorded and subjected to acoustic analysis. Several statistically significant differences among the ethnic groups were identified. The presen...

This article reports on a study of ethnic variation in the phonetics of Montreal English. The speech of 93 native speakers of Montreal English from three ethnic groups, British-Irish, Italian and Jewish, was recorded and subjected to acoustic analysis. Several statistically significant differences among the ethnic groups were identified. The presen...

This chapter will present a succinct but detailed description of the major features of Standard Canadian English in comparison to those of both Standard British and Standard American English. Its particular focus will be on two levels of analysis: vocabulary and pronunciation. In the former case, the alternation of British and American words in Can...

The variety of English spoken by about half a million people in the Canadian province of Quebec is a minority language in intensive contact with French, the local majority language. This unusual contact situation has produced a unique variety of English which displays many instances of French influence that distinguish it from other types of Canadi...

This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than...

This paper examines two current sound changes in Canadian English (CE): the Canadian Shift (CS) and the fronting of back-upgliding vowels. Among the changes involved in the CS is the retraction of the TRAP vowel from its initial position in the low-front quadrant of the vowel space to a new position in the low-central region. Among the changes affe...

The English Language in Canada examines the current status, history and principal features of Canadian English, focusing on the ‘standard' variety heard across the country today. The discussion of the status of Canadian English considers the number and distribution of its speakers, its relation to French and other Canadian languages and to American...

The nativization or phonological adaptation of words transferred from other languages can have structural-phonological consequences for the recipient language. In English, nativization of words in which the stressed vowel is spelled with the letter , here called “foreign (a)” words, leads to variable outcomes, because English represents not one but...

AuerPeter, HinskensFrans & KerswillPaul (eds.), Dialect change: Convergence and divergence in European languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 415. Hb $75.00. - Volume 37 Issue 3 - Charles Boberg

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 spontan...

The Atlas of North American English provides the first overall view of the pronunciation and vowel systems of the dialects of the U.S. and Canada. The Atlas re-defines the regional dialects of American English on the basis of sound changes active in the 1990s and draws new boundaries reflecting those changes. It is based on a telephone survey of 76...

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 in low-back position, whereby is retracted to low-central position, and are lowered toward th...

This paper presents the results of a new survey of lexical variation in North American English, called the North American Regional Vocabulary Survey (NARVS). Apart from introducing many new variables that have not been previously studied, the paper examines the use of two quantitative methods, NET VARIATION and MAJOR ISOGLOSSES, as ways of distingu...

A new survey of variation and change in Canadian English, called Dialect Topography, has been extended from Southern Ontario, where it was conceived and originally implemented, to Montreal. In the tradition of earlier questionnaires investigating Canadian English, the new data contribute to our knowledge of Canadian English at several levels of str...

Most North American cities no longer display strong ethnic differentiation of speech within the European-origin population. This is not true in the English-speaking community of Montreal, Canada, where English is a minority language. Differences in the phonetic realization of vowels by Montrealers of Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnic origin are inv...

Linguists often rely on synchronic generational differences in language to supply evidence of language change in progress in “apparent time,” yet this approach must always be evaluated against the possibility that such differences reflect change over speakers' lifetimes (“age grading”), rather than language change. The present paper compares appare...

The variety of American English spoken in western New England has received relatively little attention compared to other regional varieties of American English. In fact, though Western New England (WNE) has been identified as a separate dialect area in major studies of the dialect geography of American English, this status has been promulgated in p...

Les recherches en linguistique sur l'anglais americain du Nord Ouest ont considerablement avance depuis ces dernieres decennies. Pourtant l'interieur du Midland du Nord a echappe a ces progres descriptifs alors que de recentes etudes montrent que les villes principales de cette region presentent un structure linguistique originale. Ce travail s'int...

The way in which language changes diffuse over space—geolinguistic diffusion—is a central problem of both historical linguistics and dialectology. Trudgill (1974) proposed that distance, population, and linguistic similarity are crucial factors in determining diffusion patterns. His hierarchical gravity model has made correct predictions abou...

When foreign words spelled with (e. g., llama, Mazda, pasta, spa, tobacco) are phonologically nativized in modern English, the foreign vowel [a] is variably realized as one of two English phonemes: short /æ/ (as in fat) or long/a:/(as in father). This is the linguistic variable “foreign (a).” British and American English show different nativization...

This issue includes the following articles: "Towards a Sociolinguistics of Style" (Alan Bell, Gary Johnson); "Engendering Identities: Pronoun Selection as an Indicator of Salient Intergroup Identities" (Miriam Meyerhoff); "A Majority Sound Change in a Minority Community" (Carmen Fought); "Addressing the Actuation Question for Local Linguistic Commu...

The phonological nativization of foreign (a) in English (as in tobacco, potato and bravado) exhibits complex, intersecting patterns of diachronic, geographic, social and lexical variation that have never before been examined in depth. The aim of this disseration is to describe the variation, develop a probabilistic model of nativization outcomes in...

This paper presents new data on one such city, Cincinnati, gathered within the framework of the larger research project. Cincinnati is the center of a metropolitan area of 1.7 million people in southwestern Ohio, on the Ohio River across from Kentucky. The city is on the southern border of what traditional dialectology has established as the Lower...

Some junior high school students report on their explorations in solid geometry.