Standard Canadian English
A subset of the dialect geographically at its central core, excluding British Columbia to the west and everything east of Montreal, has been called Inland Canadian English.
A striking feature of Atlantic Canadian speech (in the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland) is a nucleus that approaches the front region of the vowel space; it is accompanied by a strong rhoticity ranging from [ɜɹ] to [ɐɹ].
Words such as origin, Florida, horrible, quarrel, warren, as well as tomorrow, sorry, sorrow, generally use the sound sequence of FORCE, rather than START.
[citation needed] Loanwords that have a low central vowel in their language of origin, such as llama, pasta, and pyjamas, as well as place names like Gaza and Vietnam, tend to have /æ/, rather than /ɒ/ (which includes the historical /ɑ/, /ɒ/ and /ɔ/ because of the father–bother and cot–caught mergers).
[12][page needed] Some words, including plaza, façade, and lava will take a low central phone [ä], possibly distinct from both /æ/ and /ɒ/.
Indeed, /æ/ is farther back than in almost all other North American dialects,[15] and the retraction of /æ/ was independently observed in Vancouver[16] and is more advanced for Ontarians and for women than for people from the Prairies and Atlantic Canada and men.
Raising along the front periphery of the vowel space is restricted to two environments, before nasal and voiced velar consonants, and even then varies regionally.
On the other hand, some speakers in the Prairies and British Columbia have raising of /æ/ before voiced velars (/ɡ/ and /ŋ/, with an up-glide rather than an in-glide, such that bag may almost rhyme with vague.
In Ontario, it tends to have a mid-central or even mid-front articulation sometimes approaching [ɛʊ], but in the West and the Maritimes, a more retracted sound is heard, which is closer to [ʌʊ].
Because of Canadian raising, many speakers can distinguish between words such as writer and rider, which can otherwise be pronounced the same in North American dialects, which typically turn both intervocalic /t/ and /d/ into an alveolar flap.
The Cambridge History of the English Language states, "What perhaps most characterizes Canadian speakers, however, is their use of several possible variant pronunciations for the same word, sometimes even in the same sentence.
[9] In addition to that, flapping of intervocalic /t/ and /d/ to alveolar tap [ɾ] before reduced vowels is ubiquitous, so the words ladder and latter, for example, are mostly or entirely pronounced the same.
For some speakers, the merger is incomplete and 't' before a reduced vowel is sometimes not tapped following /eɪ/ or /ɪ/ when it represents underlying 't'; thus greater and grader, and unbitten and unbidden are distinguished.
Many Canadian speakers have the typical American dropping of /j/ after alveolar consonants, so that new, duke, Tuesday, suit, resume, lute, for instance, are pronounced /nu/ (rather than /nju/), /duk/, /ˈtuzdeɪ/, /sut/, /rəˈzum/, /lut/.
However, in a survey conducted in the Golden Horseshoe area of Southern Ontario in 1994, over 80% of respondents under the age of 40 pronounced student and news, for instance, without /j/.
Especially in Vancouver and Toronto, an increasing number of Canadians realize /ɪŋ/ as [in] when the raising of /ɪ/ to [i] before the underlying /ŋ/[49] is applied even after the "g" is dropped, leading to a variant pronunciation of taking, [ˈteɪkin].
