So South Park can only be credited for making it more popular. Also in the show, there was a clip showing how they have a meat raffle and if you’re lucky, you win some meat for the weak. The classic purveyors of Canadian accents in the U.S.—from sketch comedy troupe SCTV. The two words - dialect & accent - are often used interchangeably, even within the accent/dialect industry. Then enters Canadian English. A postcard showing Broad Street in Victoria, BC. It’s sad to think that everything americans know (or think they know) about their neighbours to the north is based on something they saw on a cartoon. I was once talking to a girl from the Adirondacks, and somehow this came up. “These vowel sounds are very slippery and difficult to imitate,” says Taylor Roberts, a Canadian linguist who maintains a popular page on the topic of the Canadian dialect. About rhymes with shout, our rout (not the root British pronunciation) - or "owww" when you hurt yourself. ROSS MCLENNAN. Lol, I’m Canadian and the rumor here has always been that the *Americans* are the ones who say “aboot”, not us! “What?!? With the First Nations. When I actually listen to myself speaking and imaging myself saying “a boot” versus “about”, the word sounds more like “a-boat” than “a boot”. This is absolutely false. as foot, soot). Follow us on Twitter to get the latest on the world's hidden wonders. There are a few varieties of English that turn the "ou" sound into "oo," most notably the one spoken by Scottish Highlanders and Scrooge McDuck, but Canadians don't do it. If you want to generalize about both countries, or about people from both countries, use the terms North America/North Americans. The ‘ou’ in “about” is a diphthong, so it is pronounced “ow” (as in “Owwww!”) by nearly everyone I know and not as ‘oa’ in “oat” or ‘oo’ in “boot”. Americans hear this and they know it’s different—they’re hearing a difference but they don’t know exactly what that difference is.” Americans do not have the Canadian diphthong present in the word “about,” which makes it hard to understand. What I have heard, however, is pronunciations like “a-beh-oot” and “a-buh-oot”. Offer subject to change without notice. Of course we don’t. I also imagine that it would be very difficult (if not impossible) to undo it successfully. Well, we can hear that the Canadians are raising that first vowel in the diphthong, even if we don’t know what “raising” means. Canadians DO pronounce route [root]. A “k” is a “k” is a “k,” you know? As my father ,sighing ,once corrected my brother who was calling to him “I might look it but I am not Dead, yet. "s from him, but I like his accent and I see nothing wrong with it, the "oot" and "aboot… So basically Americans are just making fun on how Canadians usually pronounce the sound “ou”. (Photo: Lissandra Melo/shutterstock.com). It's a word that only appears once in a work, author's oeuvre, or an entire language's written record. Anecdotally, when I lived on the New Brunswick border (Campebello Island) I heard the pronunciation frequently; maybe 1 out of 8 times. I lived in the valley for two summers, and there definitely is an accent that it unique to it, and if I ever heard one of my fellow Canucks say anything close to “aboot”, it was there. Laura Vandervoort clearly says “aboot” at one point, and she is definitely Canadian. I’m not too good at imitating accents, so I guess if I was trying to do ‘Canadian’ I might go for the more exaggerated ‘boot’ rather than the more complex diphthong, ‘boat’. She wasn’t having any of it. Some of them think they’re being funny, others genuinely believe they’re ‘speaking the local lingo’. Maybe so, but I don’t know anyone who sings with the same accent they speak with. We don't. In order to drown out Macy’s pleas of being returned to the US, he begins to sing the Canadian national anthem. Listen to Kate Beirness on TSN say things like “out,” “house,” and “about.” Her “ou” comes out a little like “oo.”. But it’s worth pointing out that the vowel raising doesn’t only affect the “ou” vowel. Not humour. We definitely do not say “abawt” or “abaht”. Well this guy is from Ottawa and he doesn’t say “aboot”. But because of our differences, this umbrella term is rarely useful or accurate. That sounds stupid, so we’re stuck with what we got. I’m from Quebec and no one in this province pronounces it “aboot” or ” aboat”. Stop watching T.V. No boats or boots, just a strong “out” sound. i'd somewhat propose attempting to hunt through Google for … Can you understand that? Pingback: "New Joysey" and "Oirish:" 6 Accent Myths | Dialect Blog, Pingback: Northern Cities Vowel Shift vs. Canadian Vowel Shift | Dialect Blog, I was intrigued to read that young Canadians are saying əbɛʊt as opposed to the traditional Canadian raising əbʌʊt. I’m living in Europe at the moment and this topic is making me homesick. I was similarly puzzled for years about Americans claiming that Canadians pronounce “about” as /əˈbut/ (aboot) instead of /əˈbaʊt/ (about) since I had never heard anyone pronounce the /aʊ/ (ou) diphthong even remotely that way. The Other variant is “aboat” (possibly the most common form) and even this prononciation varies by the strength of the person Canadian Raising. Most people can’t tell Canadians and Americans apart by accent but you will be able to instantly tell a Canadian accent when you learn just a few of its distinguishing features. That’s a stereotype about Americans (! Pingback: Why D.A.R.E. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog: “New Joysey” and “Oirish:” 6 Accent Myths, Canadian Raising: Nobody Says "Aboot" | Dialect Blog | For Omina Quries, http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/oot-aboot/, "New Joysey" and "Oirish:" 6 Accent Myths | Dialect Blog, Northern Cities Vowel Shift vs. Canadian Vowel Shift | Dialect Blog, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtOr65jRm0w&NR=1, Yes, Canada has Regional Dialects | Dialect Blog, A Canadian Greeting to All! Canadians also have a diphthong there, but a much weirder one than ours. There’s a whole pocket of eastern Virginia and eastern Maryland where they do this. The truth about it is that it’s hilarious to see a Canadian get so riled up and explain that they actually pronounce it this or that way, as if we are really stupid enough to think that we are being accurate by reproducing it as “aboot”. Who in their right mind would just begin belting our national anthem!!?!?! Dan Aykroyd? It’s an extremely difficult sound to reproduce, but basically it’s a quickly raised diphtong closer to the end of the word. Given this, they have a hard time imitating Canadians – “oo” is as close as most can get. The American was depicted as a drunken, illiterate brute who was threatening the Mountie with a pistol. 1. no one is inferring (or implying, which makes more sense in that sentence) that all Americans are impressionable fools. In general, I have to laugh when my fellow Canadians say “I don’t say aboot!” after an American says something about it, jokingly or otherwise. Even 30 years after Bob and Doug, present day cartoons in the form of the simpsons, american dad, etcetera, still use these created ‘canadianisms’. ), The Unsolvable Mystery of the Word 'Hoosier', The Delightful Perversity of Québec's Catholic Swears, Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge sound so insane. No sense of humour? Our best guess? Aboot is a pronunciation in some parts of the UK, of course. According to the 2016 census, English was the first language of more than 19.4 million Canadians or 58.1% of the total population; the remainder of the population were native speakers of Canadian French (20.8%) or other languages (21.1%). They got stuck with some lousy options. I am Canadian. So of course there are a variety of pronunciations for the same word. I was tree planting in British Columbia with a Newfoundlander. Canadian English, despite the gigantic size of the country, is nowhere near as diverse as American English; think of the vast differences between the accents of a Los Angeleno, a Bostonian, a Chicagoan, a Houstonian, and a New Yorker. What possible explanation can there be for the creation of this odd diphthong just north of the border? Standard Canadian English is the greatly homogeneous variety of Canadian English spoken particularly all across central and western Canada, as well as throughout Canada among urban middle-class speakers from English-speaking families, excluding the regional dialects of Atlantic Canadian English.English mostly has a uniform phonology and very little diversity of dialects in Canada … Is that even a thing? I get the sense it’s one of those North American dialects that has quickly receded in modern times. I hear this version in men over the age of 35 typically of lower evonomic status. Perhaps, to start off with, a lot of Canadians did use the more classically Scottish pronunciation of the word, aboot with a short ‘oo’, and that stereotype has just stuck? But we all definitely say “eh” though… I’m not even gonna try to deny that 😉. Most people don’t realise they do this though. We pronounce it as “abowt”… Maybe “aboot” is more of a Halifax accent than a Canadian one, though personally I think regions that have heavy Scottish influence are much more likely to pronounce it that way. There is a theory—not necessarily accepted by all—that Canadian Raised vowels are actually a preserved remnant of the Great Vowel Shift, an in-between vowel sound that was somehow stuck in amber in the Great White North. They took an usual word, about, and created an urban myth with it!!! Canadians are NOT Americans! I don’t have a technical answer for that, just that to my ear what Canadians do with “about” sounds like part of a larger pattern: loud/lout, dies/dice, etc. Okay but she’s one person, she doesn’t represent all of us, especially those of us from different provinces. It’s pretty insane how much mudslinging is going on over whether or not canadians say “aboot” or not. Not all Canadians pronounce out and about with the Canadian Raising, so this is not a universal, pan-Canadian pronounciation. I suspect that the myth’s origins are somewhere to be found in the roof/ruff thing. He uses the a–boat [əbʌʊt] pronunciation that trawicks mentioned, which still sounds pretty distinctive to my American ears. I think there has definitely been some confusion along the lines here o.0. The Battery, part of the city of St John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. To say that Canadians are saying “aboot” is linguistically inaccurate; “ooh” is a monophthong and the proper Canadian dialect uses a diphthong. How a Blacksmith in Jordan Created His Own Sign Language, In Naples, Praying With Skulls Is an Ancient Tradition, Inside a Domed Pyramid With Astounding Acoustics and a History of Miracles, See the Mysterious Horned Helmet of Henry VIII, Searching for Home and Connection Through Typewritten Poetry. I Am from Ontario and I spoke to a woman last week from British Columbia and our accent was very similar except her “about” was slightly more Americanized sounding (though she still had a tad of “raising”) and her intonation was a little less sing-songy than mine. What's Going On With the Way Canadians Say 'About'? South Park debuted in 1997. Where did they ever get this idea? You fail to recognize these errors in your own argument, such as your example of ‘impersonating a Scot’, as you put it. In a prison? I may have pronounced it that way at one time (the change seems too easy), but I have been pronouncing the vowel as in “shoot” for some time. That merger is very widespread and standard in North America. This latter is an example of Canadian Raising. This is an exclusively Canadian sound, one that the vast majority of Americans not only don’t use where Canadians use it, they don’t use it at all. Of course there is a Canadian accent because face it, we don't pronounce a lot of sounds all that clearly. People need to stop lumping us all together and try to remember that pronunciation and accents differ from region to region. For example, Phoenix, who are from France. As for run of the mill americans, it’s a bit sad to think they swallow this hook, line and sinker, and just assume that if they saw it on TV, it must be correct – not even current TV shows at that – a few months ago there was a crowd in Seattle forming the beginnings of a riot – they spotted a canadian license plate on a car – as the driver entered his car to leave the growing disturbance, some of them shouted at him ‘yeah, get out of here you hoser!’. Accent commonly refers to the sound changes, whereas dialectcommonly refers to word choice and phrasing. The cops in Toronto are nearly indistinguishable from police in say, New York or Detroit. The more annoyed they get, though, the funnier the stereotype seems to get. It’s funny though, many of my American friends hear “aboot” when I say “about” but I think that that is only what they want to hear. I did a post on it myself a while back: http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/oot-aboot/. I think the Canadian words sometimes sound the way I’d say them in my Scottish accent. Scots don’t get all bent when you poke fun at them, though. Scottish people don’t often utter “hoot the noo”, but I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if I haven’t heard about a million people say it while impersonating a Scot. ), You Canadian cats need to chill. It was a dramaticized scene during halloween when kids were going trick or treating so there was a high chance of polar bear attack happening but the residents still did it. 3. re. That first sound, the “agh,” is an extremely low vowel on that chart. USer? I’ve only ever heard it as ‘ow’t and ab’ow’t. It is perhaps the least stable diphthong in English. Yes, but you have to remember that the vowel you use in words “oat” and “boat” may not be the same as the vowel many Americans use in those words. I can obviously hear the ou/oo distinction, but if I didn’t need to be precise about it (no change in meaning), I guess I might lump the two together. What I can remember about the show is that they followed a polar bear patrol officer as he drove his 4×4 around looking for any sign of polar bears. No, saying oot and aboot is not declining. Stop trying to be European, you unoriginal faggots.). I could actually see how somebody from Southern England might hear “a-boot.” Around London or thereabouts the “oo” sound is more of a diphthong. Hmm, I recall there being a Kids in the Halls sketch where Mark McKinney spoke with a brogue-like accent. Canadian television probably abounds in what Canadians would not even notice as false Americanisms. In Canada, there are some weird pockets: Newfoundland and Labrador speak a sort of Irish-cockney-sounding dialect, and there are some unique characteristics in English-speaking Quebec. They are large, intimidating figures with guns, who don’t take sh*t. This is Toronto, not Prince Edward Island; we have gun crimes, murder, rape, all the newsworthy crimes. Canadian English features something called Canadian Raising, which basically means that the diphthong in “now” is raised before t, s or other voiceless consonants (i.e. Is Important | Dialect Blog. You are in fact correct in that it is the hearer who makes the dstinction. Because the more familiar pronunciation of /aw/ is articulated with the tongue in a low position, and because it raises to a mid position in Canadian English when the vowel precedes the voiceless obstruents listed above, speakers of other varieties of English will immediately detect the vowel raising, but will sometimes think that the vowel has raised farther than it actually does, all the way to /u/, which is a high vowel–hence the mishearing (and not-quite-right imitation) of this pronunciation as aboot. When I was watching the news about the attawapiskat issue that started in the winter there’s an interview with the chief and he also says aboot. The Battery, part of the city of St John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. It’s completely foreign. Also, Canada is very diverse and it’s hard to find a definite accent - most people actually say “abowt”, not “aboot”.  It’s a bit like New Jersey’s reputation for being pronounced “New Joysey” even though virtually nobody in Jersey says it like that anymore (and even when they did, this pronunciation would have been confined to a small area near New York). Linguists do not generally attempt to answer questions of causality.  But regardless of the pronunciation, nobody in Canada ever says “aboot.”*. Americans don’t believe everything they see on television. The show was about how fewer and fewer bears came into town because they were being affected by ice melting etc. “The Canadians do pronounce it differently. “Fishing” also gets skewed into something closer to “feshing”. How Did Madagascar Become the World's Biggest Producer of Vanilla? Nice post and great examples. This unique dialect separates Canada from the US, but many Canadians will tell you that they don’t always… For example t's often get turned into d's. In general, the accent that gets used on TV is not typical of a Canadian, but I think that’s because they’re hamming it up for comedic effect. a-beh-oot (IPA əbɛʊt) sounds pretty similar to to the way people in Newport, South Wales pronounce ‘about’. (dammit – I hate spotting the typo after it’s already posted – In the opening paragraphs, that should have said “what they have somehow come TO conclude”. Ah, yes, we’re back to TV again – that which does not influence you. Since you mention Scotland… weren’t a lot of the original (English-speaking) Canadian settlers from Scotland? Very lilted sounding. ), Mr. Righteous. Spell check is for the ‘righteous’ who compose a script on a word-processing platform before they post it, Scott. ... Way back in 1968, my then wife and I slapped a Canadian-flag sticker (as well as a photo of Pierre Trudeau) on the rear window of … I’m glad you mentioned Scotland and northeastern England. Do Canadians all use words like "eh" and "aboot" in everyday conversation? The accent is similar to Cardiffian with a stronger West Country influence (plus around there was large scale Irish immigration during the late 19th/early 20th century). Drake? What explains Americans' insistence that Canadians all say "aboot"? Winner will be selected at random on 01/01/2021. Shocking, I know. I would say it’s distinctive. Vowel chart of Canada Raising. The Canadian diphthong in “about” starts with something closer to “eh,” and migrates to a blank space on the American linguistic map somewhere between “uh,” “oh,” and “ooh.” That transition is actually easier on the mouth than the American version; our vowels go from low to high, and theirs from mid to high. I would never have known if I hadn’t read or heard it. The only other Canadian export to America besides “aboot” and Drake seems to be poutine. I just wahted to say I an from southern Ontario and I’ve heard several variations of the “ou” diphthong in “about”. Im from Vancouver and I’m certain that young people from here say əbʌʊt and definitely not əbɛʊt but I do notice əbɛʊt a lot when I talk to people from Ontario, I also noticed that people from the Prairies pronounce about more like “a boat.” As for “aboot” the only time I think I’ve heard it is watching Ricky from the Trailer park boys, I don’t know if it’s a Nova Scotia thing but if you fast forward to 1:21 it sounds like he says it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtOr65jRm0w&NR=1. The only thing that it sounded similar to was the Newfoundlander accent, although the two are audibly distinct. Or “from the Americas” if for some reason you need to reference the whole shebang. A point of clarification: Canadians do not say aboot.. Canadian English features something called Canadian Raising, which basically means that the diphthong in “now” is raised before t, s or other voiceless consonants (i.e. “Why? I was recently watching a Canadian public service announcement, depicting a 19th-century Mountie arresting an American for crossing the border and claiming land. In most Canadian accents, about sounds a bit like American a-boat (IPA əbʌʊt). Neither group is correct. Like ouch. It might be close, but Canadians aren’t doing a monophthong in “about.” They’re not saying “a-boat.” They’re doing something that Americans simply can’t wrap their heads around. before words like about and house). The “Bob and Doug Mckenzie accent” is not stereotype folks, it’s a solid reality. There are pretty big differences how Canadians talk depending on their province of origin, interestingly people from Ontario sound a lot like people from New York and strangely like people from California and BC, which are on the other side of the continent. The UK Punk movement in the 70’s also had a lot of singing in strong British regional accents, probably as something of a political statement. When I purposefully pronounce it as “a boat”, it sounds like I’m speaking with an accent. When you combine them you end up with a whole new palette of sounds known as diphthongs, sort of a compound vowel. Yeah, I lived in Deep River for two summers as an undergrad working at AECL. I'm sometimes listed as the dialect coach when the only thing I worked on, technically, was the accent. My mother (from England) frequently corrected me when I pronounced “about”in the vernacular. The television personality Pat Robertson pronounces “about” the same way as Canadians. When we talk about accents in English, we’re almost exclusively talking about vowels; with the exception of dropping “r” sounds at the end of words, English dialects pretty much stick to the same consonant sounds. Carrying on, in the area where I now live supposedly the vowels in “pen” and “pin” are pronounced the same, but I have never heard it–surely because I expect to, and consequently do, hear the vowels as different–as where I grew up. You will hear instead: “you have to follow this first [root], and at the fork, take the left [root]…”. There is no drastic differences between someone from B.C and Ontario except the person in Ontario has slightly more pronounced Canadian Raising. (Photo: Carolyn Parsons-Janes/shutterstock.com). I have never ever once said or heard another Canadian saying “oot and aboot” unless it was as a joke relating to this topic, or an obvious attempt to play on it. That’s a relief. Both Canadians and Americans reserve that word for people in the US. 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