Clarification about a Canadian accent

>>''Forms such as the merger of [Q] and [A], on the other hand, are markers of urbanization and sophistication, and so they spread outward from cities into rural areas''<<

Honestly, this is the first time I've heard the cot-caught merger being spoken of as a marker of "urbanization" and "sophistication", I have to say.

>>''Forms such as the merger of [Q] and [A], on the other hand, are markers of urbanization and sophistication, and so they spread outward from cities into rural areas''<<

>> Honestly, this is the first time I've heard the cot-caught merger being spoken of as a marker of "urbanization" and "sophistication", I have to say.
<<

What it means is that changes often start in the major cities, and spread outwards--sort of like the NCVS.

>>What it means is that changes often start in the major cities, and spread outwards--sort of like the NCVS.<<

Tis true - it was just that the previous statement about urbanization and "sophistication" implied that the presence of the cot-caught merger has some sort of prestige attached to it relative to the lack of the cot-caught merger in NAE dialects, which is something that I have not seen any evidence for.

in Oklahoma, cot-caught-merger has prestige attached to it...
believe it or not...

I think that California English now provides the base of General American, rather than Midwestern English or any other regional American dialect.

>>I think that California English now provides the base of General American, rather than Midwestern English or any other regional American dialect.<<

The reason why I dispute this is that California English has clearly regional sound changes present in it today which are quite unlike General American. For starters, it has the California Vowel Shift, which while newer than the NCVS, still has a similar degree of potential impact; it is almost the same as the NCVS except that it is rotating low and mid vowels in the opposite direction as it. It also has other un-GA-like sound changes like the unrounding and fronting of mid and high back vowels and having "-ing" as /in/ rather than /In/. California English may have some degree of prestige attached to it, perhaps, but it is certainly not General American. Actually, more typical western, rather than specifically Californian, NAE dialects are probably significantly closer to General American than California English.

it's a paradox.
''Standard German''[Hochdeutsch] is based on the dialects of Hochdeutsch, but the most ''standard'' forms of German are now spoken in the North: cities like Hannover, Rostock or Hamburg...

the same happened to the US ENglish.... ''Standard US ENglish''
was Midwestern, but the new standard is ''Western US''
why is that ''transported'' accents are less colourful, more standard that is?
(''Standard German'' was implemented in Northern Germany 200 years a go...California became American 200 years ago...)

ps
I've watched a John Wayne movie...And he pronounced HAWK as HOCK ;)
I find this pronunciation more masculine :)

greetings from Europe

''For starters, it has the California Vowel Shift,''

CVS is not really widespread in California, it is more of a sociolect (Valley Girls accent)...even in California this accent sounds ''accented'' VGirlish ;0)
most people with NCVS are not aware of it, and people around them don't hear them different, it not a sociolect pronunciation

and there's more to the West aside from California...
Denver English, Las Vegas English, Phoenix English, Seattle Englsh...
they don't sound that Californian, but all sound similar, western, COT CAUGHT merged and very General American-like

>>CVS is not really widespread in California, it is more of a sociolect (Valley Girls accent)...even in California this accent sounds ''accented'' VGirlish ;0)
most people with NCVS are not aware of it, and people around them don't hear them different, it not a sociolect pronunciation<<

One factor you have to remember here is that the CVS is a significantly newer sound shift than the NCVS, and thus it is going to be primarily found in the speech of younger people and is likely to have not yet fully diffused through the population. The thing, though, is that it is still easy to miss sound shifts in one's own dialect unless they are very marked in nature (and thus it is likely that people will only notice it in the speech of the people who have it by far the most, like said "Valley Girls"). And mind you that the CVS is but one sound shift in California English - the fronting and unrounding of mid and high back vowels is another separate one.

>>and there's more to the West aside from California...
Denver English, Las Vegas English, Phoenix English, Seattle Englsh...
they don't sound that Californian, but all sound similar, western, COT CAUGHT merged and very General American-like<<

I said just that - that other western NAE dialects are very often much more GA-like than California English, often really only differing from GA in that they are cot-caught-merged.

this should be about Canadian accents, not General American :)


Canadian Raising in Victoria, B.C.
http://www.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/institut/lsmair/rosenfelder/material/Rosenfelder_Canadian_Raising_(Zula).pdf

Enjoy!

>>it's a paradox.
''Standard German''[Hochdeutsch] is based on the dialects of Hochdeutsch, but the most ''standard'' forms of German are now spoken in the North: cities like Hannover, Rostock or Hamburg...

the same happened to the US ENglish.... ''Standard US ENglish''
was Midwestern, but the new standard is ''Western US''
why is that ''transported'' accents are less colourful, more standard that is?
(''Standard German'' was implemented in Northern Germany 200 years a go...California became American 200 years ago...)<<

Standard German in northern Germany and General American in the western US are two different matters. The thing with Standard German in northern Germany is that the people in much of northern Germany historically did not natively speak High German at all but rather spoken it purely as a learned foreign language; eventually, the Low Saxon and East Low German dialects in many areas were lost or severely marginalized, and people started speaking High German as their sole native language, but they spoke it very "well" because they did not have any native dialect of High German to begin with and rather *only* spoke Standard German.

General American in the western US is, on the other hand, more due to the settlement of the West being by a mishmash of people from throughout the US into areas that had no preestablished English dialect, so no particular dialect was really clearly established. In some areas of California which did have permanent settlement early on, such as San Francisco, did develop their own dialects, but these dialects were largely obliterated by large-scale internal immigration from the Midwest shortly after the end of WW2. These internal immigrants from the Midwest were similarly were from no specific part of the Midwest but did still bring some features of Midwestern speech of the time with them, such as the word "you guys" and the tendency towards having monophthongal tense mid vowels.

Note though that when people speak of General American having been from the Midwest, it should be *very* strongly emphasized that they do not mean the Upper Midwest, and especially the area comprising northern Illinois, Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Minnesota, and North Dakota. These areas really have never been General American-speaking, and have significant non-English substratum influences present as well, predating things like the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. Rather, what people mean is the more southern and western parts of the Midwest, that is, areas like central and southern Illinois and Iowa, which still has speech relatively close to General American and which has not been really affected by the NCVS.

"Wisconsin is probably the only place [in the U.S.] where two huge, highly conflicting linguistic patterns are colliding," says Purnell. One of the patterns, known to linguists as the "Low-back Merger," is influencing dialects just to the west of Wisconsin, in the region surrounding Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN. Its trademark, Purnell says, is that words like "caught" are increasingly pronounced like "cot."

Meanwhile, a different pattern known as the "Northern Cities Shift" has been dominating the southeastern reaches of Wisconsin, including Madison. Under this influence, the vowel in words like "cot" sounds more like "cat," just as the name "Dawn" is increasingly pronounced like "Dan," while "Dan" sounds more like "Don."

http://www.news.wisc.edu/12293

that's funny ;)

there's more ;)

''The respondents include 7 women and 6 men all lifelong residents of Eau Claire ranging
in age from 18-85. Respondents took part in a sociolinguistic interview and read a
reading passage and word list. From the word list data, 564 vowel tokens were analyzed
using Akustyk/Praat for location in vowel space (F1-F2 measurements) as well as
duration and relative spectral shape (cf. Majors 2005). Acoustic analysis showed no evidence of the Low Back Merger among older speakers, but some younger speakers are showing evidence of the merger. In fact, one young male speaker appeared to be fully merged, with /􀀣, 􀁮/ utterances sounding more like the vowel in cot. Additionally, noticeable raising of /æ/ in /hVd/-/hVt/ environments across all speakers may be a sign of
early Northern Cities Shift influence. Preliminary evidence suggests that both sound changes may be in their early stages in Eau Claire, potentially complicating accounts that the Northern Cities Shift serves as one of the ‘modes of resistance’ to the Low Back
Merger (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006:128). ''




http://www.ling.osu.edu/NWAV/Abstracts/Papr153.pdf

Honestly, that's not the most interesting stuff going on the speech here... For starters, we seem to be losing lateral consonants at all here - they really are only clearly preserved morpheme-initially, and then only in more careful speech. We also have some interesting elision and assimilation patterns, throwing allophony and phonotactics out of wack (vowel length and nasality do not transparently correspond to following consonants anymore, and a good range of previously forbidden vowel-consonant sequences are now allowed) and allowing overlong vowels, long consonants within morphemes (especially long nasals), and a whole bunch of novel diphthongs and (a few) triphthongs. I'm not really going to go into the details here, though, as all the details'd be *very* lengthy, and I am not certain about all the phonemic analysis of such...

Don't go looking for references for the above, though, as the literature on English just about anywhere here in English tends to be relatively minimal. A lot of it is more stuff that I myself have just run into - the closer I pay attention to speech here, the weirder it seems...

I am curious about what you said about lateral consonants, Travis. Are you trying to say dark L is disappearing where you are? If so, what is it being replaced by? Is it at all similar to how, for instance, "milk" tends to be pronounced by Londoners?