Canada has a wide variety of accents, reflecting the country’s diversity in both geography and population. One reason for Canada’s rich accent diversity is that the country has two official languages: French and English. As a result, Canadian dialects vary widely from the east to the west coast of the country.
Here’s an overview of five Canadian accents you should know. Let’s dive into them more in-depth below:
- Ottawa Valley
- Toronto
- Quebec English
- Newfoundland
- Alberta
Ottawa Valley
Situated along the boundary between Eastern Ontario and Quebec, the Ottawa Valley’s dialect, known as Ottawa Valley English (OVE) features many Scottish and Irish influences.
Toronto
The accent known as Multicultural Toronto English (MTE) is primarily employed among young non-white working-class speakers. The dialect is said to draw heavy influence from Caribbean, East African, and Middle Eastern languages.
Quebec
Greatly influenced by English and French. Quebec English tends to maintain the distinction in words like Mary/merry versus marry; perish versus parish; and Erin versus Aaron. The vowels remain, as in traditional East-Coast American English and often British English. English-speakers in Quebec commonly use French-language names of places, local institutions and organizations with no official English names, pronounced as they would be in French.
Newfoundland
The languages and dialects of British, Irish and French settlers, as well as the indigenous people of the island, influenced the evolution of the dialect known as “Newfinese.” An island in the North Atlantic Ocean, Newfoundland is separated from Canada’s main land so the rest of the country didn’t significantly influence Newfoundlanders’ speech pattern.
Alberta
The Albertan accent is perhaps the closest Canadian dialect to the prevailing one spoken in the United States. This is because Alberta the other western provinces were primarily settled by people from the United States. As a result, western Canadians sound a lot like their southern neighbor—mostly. There are some slight differences because the speech pattern known as “Canadian Raising” is present in the Albertan accent.
What is Canadian Raising?
While referred to as “raising,” the speech pattern is actually the result of not lowering—rather than raising—certain vowels. Some gliding vowels are pronounced with the tongue placed higher in the mouth and the jaw tightened. Said to be a holdover from Middle English, the dialect prevalent during the time of Chaucer, Canadian Raising enunciates “ee” and “oo” as “eh” and “ew.” As a result, the word “about” is pronounced more like “a-buh-ot.” This differs from the eastern Canadian provinces where the word is enunciated more along the lines of “a-beh-ot.” Meanwhile, a word like “bag” might be pronounced more like “bayg,” in which the middle vowel is raised in Alberta and the other Prairie Provinces.
Accents and Geography
As is true in other parts of the world, contemporary accents evolved from the speech patterns of the peoples who came to predominate a given area. Moreover, given Canada’s geographic vastness, its natural that a wide variety of accents would be encountered across the nation. As perhaps is also an understandable happenstance, native speakers, when conversing with others from their region, don’t hear accents at all. They only come into play when conversing with people from different regions.
Accent Translation and AI
This phenomenon can be particularly exaggerated when native English speakers converse with people for whom English is their second language. In some cases, such as when conducting business with offshore call centers, this can be problematic. Sometimes people are distrustful of others whose speech patterns they find difficult to fully comprehend.
To counter this problem, Tomato.ai has developed an accent translation AI algorithm, which makes accented speech easier to comprehend. This has led to greater customer satisfaction, improved employee satisfaction and increased customer loyalty for the companies implementing the platform.
Learn how Tomato.ai can improve profitability with more positive customer relations and expanded employee retention. Request a demo today.
