Vowel Production and Canadian Raising in Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan English

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Wittrock, Bryce Jacob

• This thesis presents an acoustic analysis of a collected corpus of Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan English (SASE). Acoustic information of vowels (formant values, duration, etc.) are measured for SASE monophthongs and Canadian Raising (CR) diphthongs. Variation in the acoustic properties of these vowel productions related to social variables (age, sex, style) is explored within the corpus and compared (to the extent it is possible at this stage) to findings in other regions. Results show homogeneity within Inland Canadian English but substantial style differences for productions of monophthongs and CR diphthongs within the collected data. Age/sex differences are described that suggest both female- and male-led innovations regarding the Canadian Shift, centralized [u], and CR. Canadian Raising/aɪ- and aʊ-raising is shown to be highly variable in production, depending on phonetic environment and speaker characteristics. Support is found for a separate formant trajectory of CR diphthongs before [ɹ] in the prairies. It has been shown that [aɪ] patterns differently in this environment than before voiced or voiceless obstruents (Onosson, 2010) and the present work shows that [aʊ] does as well, among other findings.

• Date created

  2020-04-24

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Canadian English
  • Sociolinguistics
  • Sociophonetics
  • Language Variation and Change
  • Style Shifting
  • Acoustic Analysis
  • Canadian Raising
  • Dialectology
  • Phonetics

• Type of Item

  Report

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-z51x-9n55

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International