R-dropping

..   Wednesday, January 26, 2005, 05:54 GMT
Adam L.,

Where are you getting your information?

I probably shouldn't even both with this, but I'd love to hear your "logic" behind this hypothesis of yours.

One other thing, is it bad that 25 million rhotic speakers are Canadian?
..   Wednesday, January 26, 2005, 05:56 GMT
By the way, there were only about 18 million english speakers in Canada in 1996, and the total population has only increased by about, maybe 1 million since then.
Jim   Wednesday, January 26, 2005, 07:33 GMT
Canada

Population:
32,507,874 (July 2004 est.)

Languages:
English 59.3% (official), French 23.2% (official), other 17.5%

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ca.html

59.3% of 32 507 874 is 19 277 169 (rounded to the nearest interger).
..   Wednesday, January 26, 2005, 07:40 GMT
Excellent work Jim, excellent.
Jim   Thursday, January 27, 2005, 01:21 GMT
Thank you, .., thank you. However, I've not really done a very good job on the calculation front. Of course, rounding the product off to the nearest interger might seem to make sense because because you can't have 0.28 of a person (even if they are Canadian) but this is actually not valid. I really should have rounded it off to three significant figures because the percentage given was no more precise than this. So here's the better answer.

19.3 million
..   Thursday, January 27, 2005, 02:45 GMT
Where has that Adam L. got to? I thought sure that he would be back here with the details of his hypothesis in order to defend his good name. Alas, perhaps I was wrong.
Antonio   Friday, January 28, 2005, 11:27 GMT
Jim:

I´m not sure about that phonetics you described in ´drawing´. Though i think that´s well possible... I would say ´drO:<i>N´
But I guess you´re right.