The Lax Vowel Subsystem in Canadian English Revisited

The Lax Vowel Subsystem in Canadian English Revisited* Rebecca Roeder and Lidia-Gabriela Jarmasz University of Toronto This study provides the first wide-scale, apparent time, instrumental description of the Canadian Shift in mainstream Toronto English. The Toronto data suggest that the general pattern of the shift—which affects the front lax vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/—involves simultaneous retraction and lowering. Findings also indicate that retraction, instead of lowering, has been the primary direction of more recent change, although little, if any, change has occurred in the speech of Torontonians since the WWII era. In light of these findings, a unified account of the Canadian Shift across speech communities in Canada is proposed that re-interprets the seemingly disparate results of previous studies. 1. Introduction A number of studies conducted over the last two decades have reported changes in the pronunciation of the lax front vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/, widely referred to as the “Canadian Shift” (e.g., Clarke et al. 1995), in several communities across Canada. Different studies, however, have found the shift to be characterized by a different primary direction of movement, namely, lowering or retraction, as illustrated in Figure 1. i u ɪ e ʊ o ɛ ʌ æ ɑ/ɔ Figure 1: Schematized diagram showing the reported trajectories of the vowels involved in the Canadian Shift * We would like to thank Sali Tagliamonte for sharing her data and Manami Hirayama for allowing us access to her results. We also thank Lizzie DiGiacomo for her help in preparing the sound clips for analysis, and we are grateful to the Language Variation and Change research group for their helpful comments. This work was funded, in part, by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistic (TWPL), Volume 31 © 2009 Rebecca Roeder and Lidia-Gabriela Jarmasz REBECCA ROEDER AND LIDIA-GABRIELA JARMASZ 2 Clarke et al. (1995) were the first to present the movement of the front lax vowels as a unified phenomenon. Based on impressionistic data, they described the Canadian Shift as a pull chain-shift triggered by a well-known characteristic of Canadian English, the low back vowel merger. According to them, as depicted in Figure 2, the shift rests primarily on the lowering of the vowels: first, (æ) lowers and retracts into the space created by the merger of /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, and then drags down (ɛ) and (ɪ). Figure 2: The Canadian Shift as described in Clarke et al. (adapted from 1995: 212) Following this seminal study — which focused primarily on Southern Ontario —subsequent studies have confirmed the presence of at least some aspect of the Canadian Shift, usually the lowering and retraction of (æ), across Canada (Vancouver: Esling & Warkentyne 1993, Hall 2000; several communities across western Canada: Hirayama 2000; Winnipeg: Hagiwara 2006; rural Southwestern Ontario: De Decker 2002, Lawrance 2002; Toronto: Hoffman 1998, 1999; Hoffman and Walker 2006; Montreal: Boberg 2005; St. John’s: D’Arcy 2005, Hollett 2006). Most recently, instrumental studies in various locales have raised questions about Clarke et al’s conception of the Canadian Shift, suggesting, in particular, that “lowering of the front lax vowels is a less conspicuous feature of Canadian dialects than retraction” (Hagiwara 2006: 134). Boberg (2005) found that in Montreal, while (æ) has indeed lowered and retracted over apparent time, the movement of (ɪ) and (ɛ) is more of a backing movement, than a downward movement. Likewise, based on a comparison with Peterson and Barney’s (1952) description of the “General American” dialect, Hagiwara (2006) concluded from his examination of the vowel system of young native speakers of Winnipeg English that, in his female speakers alone, (æ) was retracted, but not particularly lowered, and that (ɪ) and (ɛ) were slightly retracted, if at all shifted. In the Atlas of North American English (henceforth, ANAE), nevertheless, Labov, Ash and Boberg (2006) noted both retraction and lowering of (ɛ), along with the usual retraction of (æ), in their apparent-time, cross-Canada study. These findings are summarised in Table 1. 2 THE LAX VOWEL SUBSYSTEM IN CANADIAN ENGLISH REVISITED 3 Table 1: Summary of the principal characteristics of the Canadian Shift (æ)retraction Clarke et al. (1995) Boberg (2005) Hagiwara (2006) ANAE (2006) (æ)lowering ( )retraction ( )lowering (I)retraction (I)lowering ( ) ( ) ( ) All four studies agree on (æ)-retraction, but only two of them report (æ)-lowering. Both (ɛ)retraction and lowering are frequently cited, although not necessarily together. Finally, there is little agreement as to the occurrence of (ɪ)-retraction, and only one study finds (ɪ)-lowering. It must be stressed that these discrepancies do not stem solely from a conflict between instrumental and impressionistic approaches to phonetic variation: no consensus emerges even when we consider only the three instrumental studies, outlined in bold in Table 1. The inconsistent descriptions may, however, potentially be explained by the diversity of communities investigated, ranging from urban centres in Southern and Southwestern Ontario (Clarke et al. 1995), to Winnipeg (Hagiwara 2006), a mid-sized city, to Montreal (Boberg 2005), whose anglophone population is a minority, to all of mainland Canada (ANAE). Two scenarios are possible here. First, in spite of evidence in support of the ongoing homogeneity of mainstream, urban Canadian English (Scargill 1957; Davison 1987; Chambers 1986, 2006; Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006), the movement of the front lax vowels may reflect independent, though similar, phenomena, representing regional variation. Alternatively, the differing trajectories may inform us as to the diffusion of a single set of changes across the country. The goal of this paper is therefore to provide a benchmark in order to situate the other studies. We conducted a wide-scale, apparent time instrumental study of the front lax vowel system of Toronto English. This variety is arguably both the most representative example of mainstream Canadian English, as well as its most innovative variety, owing to Toronto’s status as the biggest city in Canada. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines the methodology used in our study. Section 3 reports our results, which we discuss and compare to the earlier studies in Section 4. 3 REBECCA ROEDER AND LIDIA-GABRIELA JARMASZ 2. 4 Methodology We examined the speech of 35 Toronto natives, distributed across age group and sex as shown in Table 2, with the goal of tracking change over apparent time. Table 2: Sample design (Total N = 35 speakers) Age 20-39 Age 40-54 Age 70-85 Men 6 6 4 Women 9 6 4 The data come from the corpus of Toronto English collected by Tagliamonte (2003-2006), which is compiled of 100 informal sociolinguistic interviews, each lasting about an hour and aimed at eliciting the most natural speech possible (Labov 1972). The corpus was stratified by age, sex and neighbourhood1 in the Greater Toronto Area. The speakers were recorded onto standard audio cassette tape using a Sony ECM T115 clip-on lavalier microphone. The analog recordings were digitized at a sample rate of 22,050 Hz and 16-bit quantization. A total of 1800 tokens—roughly 50 per speaker—were extracted for analysis. About three-quarters of the tokens contain the target front lax vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/, and the remaining tokens contain the vowels /i, u, ɔ/, allowing for observation of the relative positions of the target vowels in the overall vowel space. Using the speech analysis software Praat, broad-band spectrograms were used to take steady state measurements of first formant (F1) and second formant (F2) values at the approximate midpoint of each vowel.2 The vowels were then normalized using a Nearey normalization algorithm in Praat. Statistical significance (p ≤ .05) was determined by two one-way MANOVAs,3 with F1 and F2 for each of the front lax vowels run as the dependent variable and age group run as the independent social variable. The linguistic environment was controlled for stress, word type, place of articulation and manner of articulation. Only content words in which the vowel to be measured was in primary stress position were included in the analysis. In order to minimize the effects of co-articulation, vowels in a velar, liquid or glide context, as well as vowels preceding a nasal, were excluded. In addition, men and women were analyzed separately because the men’s vowel spaces, in general, proved smaller than the women’s even after normalization. 1 The subset of speakers analyzed for the present study come from two neighbourhoods in the city of Toronto—the Annex and Scarborough. Neighbourhood was not found to be a significant factor, however, and is therefore not discussed further here. 2 Although this technique is standard current practice in sociophonetic research on dialect variation and change, limitations do exist to this type of approach. For further discussion see Bladon and Lindblom 1981, Bladon 1982, Harrington and Cassidy 1994. 3 For each speaker, mean F1 and F2 for each vowel was used to calculate statistical significance across groups. 4 THE LAX VOWEL SUBSYSTEM IN CANADIAN ENGLISH REVISITED 3. 5 Results Overall findings reveal little change over time in either men’s or women’s speech. In fact, statistical results comparing speakers aged 20-39 to those aged 40-54 showed no statistical differences in F1 or F2 for any of the three target vowels (see appendix A for mean formant values by age group). This lack of any evidence of change in speakers under 55 indicates that the Canadian Shift has not been active in Toronto since the WWII era. Table 3 provides results for a comparison of speakers over age 70 (born between 1915 and 1930) and under age 55 (born between 1950 and 1985), exposing the last stages of the Canadian Shift in Toronto speech. Table 3: Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) results for F1 and F2 of (ɪ),(ɛ), and (æ) in participants over 70 as compared to participants under 55. Statistically significant results are shown in bold. Measure F-ratio Significance (p value) MEN F1 (ɪ) .8 (.385) F1 (ɛ) F1 (æ) F2 (ɪ) 3.1 (.101) 4 .133 (.066) (.721) F2 (ɛ) F2 (æ) WOMEN F1 (ɪ) 5.3 .037 21.5 <.001 .59 (.455) F1 (ɛ) F1 (æ) F2 (ɪ) 3.3 (.089) .63 .63 (.44) (.439) F2 (ɛ) F2 (æ) 5.1 .039 8.1 .011 Although earlier change may have occurred, pronunciation of the vowel /ɪ/ shows stability across age groups. If we assume the apparent time hypothesis, which states that individuals do not significantly alter their speech after childhood, this result suggests that virtually no movement has occurred in the pronunciation of this vowel since the before the early 20th century. Change is apparent in the pronunciation of both /æ/ and /ɛ/ between the oldest speakers and all others. People under 55 years of age are more retracted in their pronunciation of /æ/ and /ɛ/ than people over 70. Figures 3a and 3b illustrate these results by showing mean formant values for the front lax vowels across all three age groups, within the context of the larger vowel space. 5 REBECCA ROEDER AND LIDIA-GABRIELA JARMASZ 6 /i/ /u/ /ɪ/ /ɛ/ /ɔ/ /æ/ Figure 3a: Vowel chart of normalized F1 and F2 means of six vowels for 19 Toronto women across three age groups (YW = women aged 25-39; MW = women aged 40-55; OW = women aged 70-85) /i/ /u/ /ɪ/ /ɛ/ /ɔ/ /æ/ Figure 3b: Vowel chart of normalized F1 and F2 means of six vowels for 16 Toronto men across three age groups (YM = men aged 25-39; MM = men aged 40-55; OM = men aged 70-85) The most striking element of these vowel charts is the centralized location of the target vowels in all three age groups, indicating that variable (ɪ, ɛ, æ) were already well retracted in the speech of native Torontonians by the 1910’s, when the oldest speakers were born.4 The three vowels are stacked up in the middle of the vowel space, quite far back from the front periphery. The lack of more aggressive retraction over apparent time between the two younger generations indicates that the 4 As it is unrelated to the Canadian Shift, the obvious /u/-fronting that is occurring in this dialect will not be discussed here, although it provides clear evidence of additional ongoing change in the Toronto English vowel system. 6 THE LAX VOWEL SUBSYSTEM IN CANADIAN ENGLISH REVISITED 7 primary movement of these vowels occurred a while ago and has begun to stabilize, as mentioned above. Although the only statistically significant trend is retraction, Figure 3 also reveals that a combination of lowering and retraction has occurred in (æ) and (ɛ), supporting the possibility of a unified synthesis of previous research findings that found predominantly one or the other direction of change. The difference between the oldest speakers and the others for the F1 of (æ) is, in fact, marginally significant in the men’s speech (p = .066, F = 4). For both (æ) and (ɛ), in the speech of both men and women, the height trajectory between age groups is in the direction we expect, with younger speakers being both more retracted and more lowered. It is also clear that, for these two vowels, the middle aged and youngest speakers (triangles and squares, respectively) have very close means, but the oldest speakers (circles) stand apart. This observation illustrates the MANOVA result that no significant change has occurred in the speech of Torontonians born since WWII, and also indicates that (æ) and (ɛ) shifted position simultaneously in the past. This simultaneous movement, together with the observation that (ɪ) shows no change across generations, brings into question the theory that the Canadian Shift is a chain shift, with (æ) as the catalyst. If this theory were correct, it would be expected that (æ) would stop moving first, then (ɛ), and finally (ɪ). Just the opposite appears to be true, however. Variable (ɪ) has not moved at all over the last 85 years, whereas (æ) is the only one of the three vowels that still shows significant change in both dimensions over apparent time. We propose an alternative interpretation of the shift in Section 4. Figures 4 and 5, which show formant measurements by individual speaker for (æ), reinforce that change in F2 across generations has been larger and more consistent than change in F1. a. b. 1915-1930 1950-1965 1965-1985 1915-1930 1950-1965 1965-1985 Figure 4: Normalized mean F1 and F2 by individual for 16 male participants (squares = speakers age 25-39; triangles = speakers age 40-55; circles = speakers age 70-85) 7 REBECCA ROEDER AND LIDIA-GABRIELA JARMASZ a. 8 b. 1915-1930 1950-1965 1965-1985 1915-1930 1950-1965 1965-1985 Figure 5: Normalized mean F1 and F2 by individual for 19 female participants (squares = speakers age 25-39; triangles = speakers age 40-55; circles = speakers age 70-85) In Figures 4 and 5, speakers are arranged by age, with the oldest on the left and the youngest on the right, allowing for a rough visual image from left to right of change over apparent time. Birth year range is given below each group. As in Figure 3, speakers aged 20-39 are represented with squares; speakers aged 40-54 are represented with triangles; and speakers aged 70-85 are represented with circles. The lower a point is, the more shifted that speaker is for that particular vowel. Figure 4a, which shows the mean F1 of (æ) for each of the 16 men in the study, indicates a definite tendency towards lowering over time. The majority of speakers under age 55 have a fairly low pronunciation for this vowel, displaying an average F1 of 750 Hz or higher. In contrast, all of the speakers over age 70 have an F1 for (æ) that is below 750 Hz. But there is also considerable variation in mean F1 between speakers, including overlap even between the oldest group and the youngest group. In contrast, mean F2 values for men over 70 and men under 40 make up two non-intersecting groups. All of the youngest men are more retracted than any of the oldest men, and only one middle-aged man lags behind. Results for the women, shown in Figure 5, are similar to those of the men, with no trend visible in the F1 measurements and a clear diachronic trend towards retraction of (æ) visible in the F2 means. In summary, the Toronto findings indicate that the Canadian Shift was completed in Toronto by the 1950’s, with retraction being a stronger directional shift than lowering, although both appear to have occurred simultaneously. In addition, our observations do not support the conclusion that the Canadian Shift is a chain shift. These results are discussed further in the next section. 8 THE LAX VOWEL SUBSYSTEM IN CANADIAN ENGLISH REVISITED 4. 9 Discussion and conclusion We suggest that, rather than participating in a chain shift, the front lax vowels have simply been redistributed within the reconfigured vowel space resulting from the low back vowel merger. 5 Figure 6 illustrates this hypothesis. a. b. i u I i u I ɛ æ ɛ ɔ ɑ/ɔ æ ɑ c. d. i u I ɛ i ɑ/ɔ u I ɛ æ ɑ/ɔ æ Figure 6: Redistribution of the front lax vowels in a reconfigured vowel space. Figure 6a represents a hypothetical pre-merger vowel trapezoid, with (ɑ) occupying the low back corner, and (ɔ) in mid back position. The merger, depicted in Figure 6b, results in a single mid-low - vowel in the low back quadrant of the vowel trapezoid. The loss of this distinction therefore opens up the area formerly occupied by (ɑ) at the bottom of the vowel trapezoid, subsequently creating more space in both the height and front-back dimensions, as illustrated in Figure 6c. Since there is more space on both dimensions, the front lax vowels (ɪ, ɛ, æ) are free to both retract and lower, as shown in Figure 6d. We thus put forward that lowering may be a natural consequence and companion of retraction, given the shape of the vowel trapezoid (see Roeder, forthcoming, for a more detailed explanation of the theoretical underpinnings of the movement of lax vowels). To conclude, let us return to the question of whether the Canadian Shift betrays Canada’s reputation as a homogeneous dialect area. Recall that virtually every study of the front lax vowels in Canadian English reports a different trajectory. Can these findings be reconciled in light of the situation in Toronto? The Canadian Shift is no longer active in Toronto, and has not been for the past 60 years. In Montreal, however, all three vowels are still retracting, and in fact, Boberg (2005) reports that F2 is only significantly different between the baby boomers and the speakers born after 5 See Hagiwara (2006) for a similar interpretation of the Canadian Shift. 9 REBECCA ROEDER AND LIDIA-GABRIELA JARMASZ 10 1965, indicating that the shift really only took off once it was over in Toronto. In Winnipeg, the only other single mainland urban centre studied instrumentally, female speakers currently show retraction of (æ) and incipient retraction of (ɪ) and (ɛ) (Hagiwara 2006). This community therefore lags still further. The timeline in Figure 7 summarises the years in which the Shift was active in these three communities (the black band represents Toronto, the solid grey band, Montreal, and the striped pale grey band, Winnipeg). Toronto Montreal 1950 Winnipeg 2000 Figure 7: Suggested timeline of transmission of Canadian Shift during the second half of the 20th century The chronological progression of the shift mirrors the relationship between the communities in terms of their relative size. Toronto, where it came to completion first, is not only Canada’s largest city, but also its economic and cultural centre. Montreal, where the shift has been active throughout the latter half of the 20th century, is the second largest city in Canada, although its native Anglophone population is isolated from English Canada. Perhaps more relevant still, its influence was in decline by 1950, while Toronto’s hegemony had been consolidated. Finally, Winnipeg, where the change is apparently incipient, is a substantially smaller city. If we assume, along with Clarke et al. (1995), that lax vowel shifting started in Toronto, then this pattern of diffusion fits the cascade model (Callary 1975, Trudgill 1974), according to which a change spreads from the largest city, to the next largest, and so forth. We conclude, therefore, that the regional implementations of the Canadian Shift can be integrated into one model of change which features a combination of lowering and retraction. This synthesis of all studies therefore supports the hypothesis that Canadian English is homogeneous, with innovations radiating out of major urban centres. References Bladon, Anthony. 1982. Arguments against formants in the auditory representation of speech. In Rolf Carlson and Björn Granström (eds.) The Representation of Speech in the Peripheral Auditory System. Amsterdam: Elsevier Biomedical Press, 95–102. Bladon, R. A. W. and Björn Lindblom. 1981. Modeling the judgement of vowel quality differences. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 69(5): 1414–22. 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Beyond the City Limits: the Canadian Vowel Shift in an Ontario small town. MA thesis, York University, Toronto, ON. Esling, John and Henry Warkentyne. 1993. Retracting of /æ/ in Vancouver English. In S. Clarke (ed.) Focus on Canada. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 229—246. Hagiwara, Robert. 2006. Vowel production in Winnipeg. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51 (2/3): 127—141. Hall, Erin. 2000. Regional variation in Canadian English vowel backing. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 18: 21—27. Harrington, Jonathan and Stephen Cassidy. 1994. Dynamic and target theories of vowel classification: Evidence from monophthongs and diphthongs in Australian English. Language and Speech 37: 357—373. Heffernan, Kevin. 2007. Phonetic Distinctiveness as a Sociolinguistic Variable. Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto. Hirayama, Manami. 2000. Vowels of Western Canadian English. Changes in Progress. MA thesis, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Hoffman, Michol. 1998. Looking for a theng: The progress of lax vowel lowering. Paper presented at NWAV 27, University of Georgia. Hoffman, Michol. 1999. Really expansive: The progress of lax vowel lowering in a chain shift. Paper presented at NWAV 28, University of Toronto. Hoffman, Michol and James A. Walker. 2006. The linguistic consequences of language shift: Evidence from Toronto. Paper presented at the Canadian Linguistic Association. York University, Toronto, ON. Hollett, Pauline. 2006. Investigating St. John’s English: Real- and apparent-time perspectives. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51 (2/3): 143—160. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lawrance, Erika. 2002. A Shift in Focus: A New, Geolinguistic Perspective on the Canadian Shift (And Old Questions Revisited). MA thesis, McGill University, Montreal, QC. Peterson, Gordon and Harold Barney. 1952. Control methods used in a study of the vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 24: 175-184. Roeder, Rebecca. Forthcoming. English in the Canadian Heartland: Vowel change in progress. Roeder, Rebecca and Lidia-Gabriela Jarmasz. 2007. The Canadian Shift in Toronto. Paper presented at NWAV 36, University of Pennsylvania. Scargill, M.H. 1957. The Sources of Canadian English. In J. K. Chambers (ed.) Canadian English. Toronto: Methuen, 12-15. Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2003-2006. Linguistic changes in Canada entering the 21st century. Research Grant. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC). #410-2003-0005. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. Linguistic change and diffusion: Description and explanation in sociolinguistic dialect geography. Language in Society 3: 215—246. 11 REBECCA ROEDER AND LIDIA-GABRIELA JARMASZ 12 Appendix A. Normalized means and standard deviations for (ɪ, ɛ, æ) F1 (ɪ) Stan. dev. F2 (ɪ) Stan. dev. F1 (ɛ) Stan. dev. F2 (ɛ) Stan. dev. F1 (æ) Stan. dev. F2 (æ) Stan. dev. M(20-39) 507 M(40-54) 496 M(70-85) 485 W(20-39) 557 W(40-54) 526 W(70-85) 525 28 1772 42 1789 17 1803 51 1925 40 1951 33 1978 99 662 116 643 112 603 68 713 103 741 142 680 20 1563 20 1637 25 1719 44 1737 40 1764 41 1857 89 772 95 748 60 687 47 856 51 832 171 819 45 1510 83 1535 61 1735 59 1626 62 1592 75 1752 85 76 85 75 91 113 12