Canadian Vowels

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mark in Dallas.

Hello, Mark in Dallas. How are you?

I’m good, thanks.

I have a friend who grew up on a farm in North Dakota,

And except for a period when he lived here in Texas,

He’s lived in North Dakota his whole life.

In fact, he recently moved back there to live on the family farm he inherited,

Which is just a few miles from the Canadian border.

So we were talking on the phone, catching up,

And I was asking about things on the farm.

I’m a city dweller.

I’ve never lived on a farm myself.

And he happened to mention that he had recently walked into his kitchen,

And there in the middle of the room was a moose.

And I think that’s kind of amazing.

What was he doing?

Was he watching TV?

Having a beer?

No, he said there was a moose.

A moose?

Yeah, I think, well, okay, I’m a city dweller.

I don’t know, but it’s very rural there, and it’s so close to Canada.

I figure, you know, I must be crawling with moose.

Yeah, he might legitimately really have a moose.

They’re gigantic animals, but maybe he’s got a big kitchen.

Yeah.

I mean, one or two is bound to get into someone’s home.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

They’re like vermin up there, right?

Got a doggy door and a small moose.

He’s got a moose door.

He lets him right in.

So I said, well, what did you do?

What in the world did you do about this?

And he said, well, I took a broom and I trapped it in the corner and then I took a paper sack and I scooted it into the sack and then I took it outside.

And I said, oh, it was a mouse.

He said, yes, that’s what I said.

There was a moose in my hoose.

A moose in my hoose.

Yeah, that’s funny.

A moose in my hoose.

That’s funny.

So he lives close enough to Canada that he’s got a bit of that Canadian vowel sound then.

Is that what we’re gathering here?

Is that what it is?

Because he’s of Scandinavian descent, and I wondered if it had anything to do with that ancestry.

It’s possible, but it sounds more like the traditional Canadian way of pronouncing the ow sound.

There are three different ways that that sound is pronounced throughout Canada, and it’s not consistent.

And there isn’t really one grand, great, overarching Canadian accent.

But they are known for this particular feature.

You’ve heard people make fun of the Canadian pronunciation of about

And claim that they say a boot, but it’s more like a boat,

And it sounds like it’s close to what your friend was doing.

Again, there are three different pronunciations of that vowel in Canada.

Charles Boberg, I forget what university he is,

But he’s well-known as a Canadian dialect researcher,

Has written at length on this and has done surveys and studies across the country,

And you do find that that accent does tend to appear on the other side of the border between the two countries.

The border is not this impenetrable wall where dialect and accent features can’t cross.

There’s some overlap there.

So it could have been imported.

Yeah, it could have been imported.

But it’s really interesting stuff to get into these vowel sounds.

And when you start to map them and realize that you share this language feature with a whole group of people that you’ve never met.

And you don’t otherwise necessarily feel any affinity to.

Wow, fascinating.

It’s called Canadian raising,

And the raising refers to what happens to the vowel sounds in the mouth.

So mouse could easily sound a bit like moose.

Because the back of the mouth is…

You do, yeah, I won’t go too far into the actual physical,

What happens to the tongue and the lips and so forth,

But there’s some raising there, as they call it.

Actually, you can graph it.

There’s a graph that sociolinguistics use that shows the little dot moves up

When it changes from mouse to moose.

Well, that’s a big change.

I’m a rodent.

I was envisioning Bullwinkle.

Yeah, really.

Yeah, it can be gigantic.

But they’re both mammals and four-legged, so…

Yeah, so it’s not too far a leap.

Well, thank you very much.

It’s our pleasure, Mark.

Thank you for calling.

You bet.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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