Newfoundland English

Horace E.   Thu Aug 27, 2009 9:38 am GMT
Why is the accent spoken in Newfoundland, Canada so different from the rest of the North American English speaking world.
Trawicks   Thu Aug 27, 2009 2:16 pm GMT
Because Newfoundland is so isolated from the rest of North America. To get from Newfoundland to the nearest Canadian province requires you take a nearly six-hour ferry ride. To get from Newfoundland to anything resembling a Canadian city (Halifax, NS), it'll take you about ten hours. And to get from the only town remotely metropolitan in NF (St. John's) to anything resembling a city in the rest of Canada (Halifax), it's take you around 20 hours.

The bigger issue, though, is that Newfoundland is largely comprised of extremely isolated little communities. There is only one highway. There are numerous towns, to this day, that are barely even connected to any roads. So you don't see the process of dialect levelling more common in the rest of North America. The main influences on the NF accent--West Country and Irish English--have therefore remained remarkably untainted in rural areas of the province.
Milton   Thu Aug 27, 2009 3:18 pm GMT
The accent of St. John's is one of the least accented/marked accents in North America, it sounds much less regional/Canadian than other Canadian accent (it has no Canadian raising and no Canadian vowel shift), so the St. John's pronunciation can be found in Cambridge Advanced Learner's and MW Learner's Dictionaries:

ball [bɑl]*
doll [dɑl]*
don/Dawn [dɑn]*
house [haʊs]
out [aʊt]
long [lɑŋ]*

*As you can see, people from St. John's don't use rounded [ɒ] in these words but an unrounded vowel [ɑ] which can be pronounced even as a central vowel [ä] (That's why Continental Canadians often say St. John's accent sounds like ''Midwestern'' American)

(the only ''Canadian'' feature in St. John's accent is [o] rather than [ɑ]
in ''sorry'' and ''tomorrow''; in most aspects St. John's accent is identical
to accents of Denver or Phoenix (as well as traditional Californian accent with no shift or excessive L-coloring); prof. Labov states that Tucson AZ and St. John's NF have ''low central merger'' because the realization of
Don/Dawn /ɑ/ is much central than on the West Coast: it's [ä] )


sound samples:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MKPlsQuTjg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa3CY9YauGQ


further reading:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Dptsvykgk3IC&pg=PA371&dq=%22central+to+front+low+unrounded+vowel+for+all%22&lr=&as_brr=3&client=firefox-a&hl=pt-BR#v=onepage&q=%22central%20to%20front%20low%20unrounded%20vowel%20for%20all%22&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=3jnOb6rXZOwC&pg=PA203&dq=%22sandra+clarke%22&lr=&client=firefox-a&hl=pt-BR#v=onepage&q=%22sandra%20clarke%22&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=ifl9ajM20fMC&pg=PA108&dq=%22sandra+clarke%22&lr=&client=firefox-a&hl=pt-BR#v=onepage&q=%22sandra%20clarke%22&f=false
Milton   Thu Aug 27, 2009 3:24 pm GMT
The rural NF accents sound somewhat different, try here for a video sample:
http://www.cbc.ca/landandseanl/media/landsea.ram
Uriel   Thu Aug 27, 2009 6:06 pm GMT
The kids in those Youtube samples sounded like they could have been from anywhere in the US or Canada. What's so "different" about their accent?
Guest   Thu Aug 27, 2009 6:21 pm GMT
I've heard people from Newfoundland that wouldn't sound out of place in California.