It’s pretty insane how much mudslinging is going on over whether or not canadians say “aboot” or not. The latter is known stateside as the California Shift, and it’s what makes Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge sound so insane: a systematic migration of vowel sounds resulting in “kit” sounding like “ket,” “dress” sounding like “drass,” and “trap” sounding like “trop.” The SoCal accent, basically, is being replicated almost entirely in Canada. Canadian television probably abounds in what Canadians would not even notice as false Americanisms. Most commonly, the shift affects / aɪ / or / aʊ / (), or both, when they are pronounced before voiceless consonants (therefore, in words like price and clout, respectively, but not in prize and cloud). It’s an extremely difficult sound to reproduce, but basically it’s a quickly raised diphtong closer to the end of the word. I get the sense it’s one of those North American dialects that has quickly receded in modern times. Canadians do not say “aboot.” What they do say is actually much weirder. To say that Canadians are saying “aboot” is linguistically inaccurate; “ooh” is a monophthong and the proper Canadian dialect uses a diphthong. Some people say Canadian accents just sound like Californian accents, so that could be correct depending on the people you are comparing. Here’s a map (p. 292) of where people say “roof” with the vowel of “good”. Some of them think they’re being funny, others genuinely believe they’re ‘speaking the local lingo’. The word “about” is pronounced just the right way in Canada. I am now confused at a much higher level…, I visited my mother’s ancestral homeland in Ontario last year, and heard an old Scot immigrant saying something that I perceived as “aboot;” the sounds others used were different, and in any event there was no difficulty discerning the meaning–which is the basic function of language. This map features all of the basic vowels in English: “ah,” “ee,” “oh,” “ooh,” “eh,” that kind of thing. Us Canadians are always talking about how sexy European/Australian accents are, do you say the same thing? But the Canadian Shift is minor compared to Canadian Raising, a phenomenon describing the altered sounds of two notable vowel sounds, that has much bigger consequences for the country’s identity, at least in the U.S. That’s where we get all that “aboot” stuff. (Nobody knows why. The same accent comes to play when he speaks house as you get to hear something like hoose and not house. Neither group is correct. In order to drown out Macy’s pleas of being returned to the US, he begins to sing the Canadian national anthem. ha! (dammit – I hate spotting the typo after it’s already posted – In the opening paragraphs, that should have said “what they have somehow come TO conclude”. There is NOT that much variation of the standard Canadian accent across the country, it’s basically the same with only slight nuances in between Provinces. We DO have a rather strong accent and I’ll be the first to admit it. Yep.  In most Canadian accents, about sounds a bit like American a-boat (IPA əbʌʊt). The article has also been updated since it was first published to expand on the role that monophthongs vs. diphthongs play in the Canadian pronunciation of the word “boat.”. The Canadian diphthong in “about” starts with something closer to “eh,” and migrates to a blank space on the American linguistic map somewhere between “uh,” “oh,” and “ooh.” That transition is actually easier on the mouth than the American version; our vowels go from low to high, and theirs from mid to high. I’m living in Europe at the moment and this topic is making me homesick. I wish people would take the time to learn our differences or at least understand the concept that there WILL be differences from province to province, just like in any other country. The “Bob and Doug Mckenzie accent” is not stereotype folks, it’s a solid reality. I was watching a documentary where they had “polar bear” patrols in a Canadian town which has lots of polar bears that wander into town. “These vowel sounds are very slippery and difficult to imitate,” says Taylor Roberts, a Canadian linguist who maintains a popular page on the topic of the Canadian dialect. Canadian English was partly shaped by early immigrants from the UK and Ireland, but it … I found that map on Professor William Labov’s homepage. Perhaps, to start off with, a lot of Canadians did use the more classically Scottish pronunciation of the word, aboot with a short ‘oo’, and that stereotype has just stuck? Being on TV does not make something true, or widely assumed, but multiple people expressing shock when you tell them it’s not true tends to indicate that it’s a common belief. Probably the latter. It's not like aboot or something silly like that, but if you listen closely you hear it. NorthOfEdward: I always thought “ruff” and “rum” (with the BOOK vowel) were older Northern pronunciations in the U.S. They’re not uncommon (I use them), but I think the versions with the GOOSE vowel are more common. Many Americans that I have met personally, both those that were visiting Canada, as well as those I’ve met while visiting the USA, have in fact displayed the very stereotype you decry. In general, I have to laugh when my fellow Canadians say “I don’t say aboot!” after an American says something about it, jokingly or otherwise. The Canadian way to say about (aboot) The easiest way to recognise a Canadian … Most Canadians perceive themselves as talking the same as “Americans on T.V”(I used to as well) because the simply don’t notice their Canadian Raising or they’re ashamed to admit that they do indeed have an accent. United Statesians? Furthermore, South Park’s rendering of “aboot” for their Canadian characters is only funnier because we know how inaccurate and stereotypical it is! The new hot prime minister? What possible explanation can there be for the creation of this odd diphthong just north of the border? We say “a-boat” or a-‘bowt’. I was recently watching a Canadian public service announcement, depicting a 19th-century Mountie arresting an American for crossing the border and claiming land. So this is probably one of those bits of dialect folklore that survives despite evidence to the contrary. For the word “about,” we have a diphthong in the U.S., as well. “Abawt” is a fairly good approximation of General American. Anecdotally, when I lived on the New Brunswick border (Campebello Island) I heard the pronunciation frequently; maybe 1 out of 8 times. ... Way back in 1968, my then wife and I slapped a Canadian-flag sticker (as well as a photo of Pierre Trudeau) on the rear window of … Is that it? The Origins of the Pirate Accent, When Did Americans Stop "Talking British? Their Canadians also say ‘buddeh’ every two seconds and have two half circles for heads, but somehow only the ‘aboot’ thing seems to have stuck. Yes, but you have to remember that the vowel you use in words “oat” and “boat” may not be the same as the vowel many Americans use in those words. A point of clarification: Canadians do not say aboot.. Canadian English features something called Canadian Raising, which basically means that the diphthong in “now” is raised before t, s or other voiceless consonants (i.e. If Canadians would adopt the Americanism “whatever, man”, and tell us to screw ourselves, we might stop laughing at them. Not vowels. Because the more familiar pronunciation of /aw/ is articulated with the tongue in a low position, and because it raises to a mid position in Canadian English when the vowel precedes the voiceless obstruents listed above, speakers of other varieties of English will immediately detect the vowel raising, but will sometimes think that the vowel has raised farther than it actually does, all the way to /u/, which is a high vowel–hence the mishearing (and not-quite-right imitation) of this pronunciation as aboot. -Scott Fullerton, Los Angeles, California USA. Accent commonly refers to the sound changes, whereas dialectcommonly refers to word choice and phrasing. The American was depicted as a drunken, illiterate brute who was threatening the Mountie with a pistol. Have lived in several provinces, and work in the oil patch with people from all over the country. But it’s worth pointing out that the vowel raising doesn’t only affect the “ou” vowel. With the First Nations. It was a dramaticized scene during halloween when kids were going trick or treating so there was a high chance of polar bear attack happening but the residents still did it. i wonder how is the Canadian accent. It depends on where in America you’re talking about. The thing that makes it so funny to me is that Canadians pronounce most everything else very similarly to our own pronunciation, yet this one sound is so alien and bizarre to us that we can spot a Canadian in 3 seconds of dialog and vice versa. Offer subject to change without notice. The more annoyed they get, though, the funnier the stereotype seems to get. This happened in stages; that first word, “bite,” started out as “beet,” then became “bait,” then “beyt,” then “bite.” You can hear a nice spoken-aloud rundown of those here. As a Canadian, I would say that describes it perfectly. I’m glad this article tries to clear things up for non Canadians! As in “Ow, I hurt my spleen laughing at how Americans pronounce roof and creek”, The way Montreal Anglophones say “out” and “about” sounds like “eh-oot” and “a-beh-oot” to me. The UK Punk movement in the 70’s also had a lot of singing in strong British regional accents, probably as something of a political statement. When I actually listen to myself speaking and imaging myself saying “a boot” versus “about”, the word sounds more like “a-boat” than “a boot”. There is no drastic differences between someone from B.C and Ontario except the person in Ontario has slightly more pronounced Canadian Raising. 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