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In this episode, we turn our attention to the wordcraft of William Shakespeare. Today, many people have mixed opinions about his plays and poems. They know that he is widely regarded as the greatest English writer of all time, but they struggle with his language. This time, we explore what makes Shakespeare's use of the English language so unique and why it is so challenging for modern speakers. Ben Crystal joins the discussion to provide insight into the Elizabethan theater, Shakespeare's Original Pronunciation, and the way modern audiences respond to that original form of speech.

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In this episode, we examine the connection between poetry and plague in the early 1590s. An outbreak of the recurring sickness contributed to Shakespeare's early career as a poet, and that poetry likely included his many sonnets. We also examine how an old acquaintance from Shakespeare's hometown emerged as one of the leading printers in London and how his print shop influenced the development of English during the Elizabethan period.
TRANSCRIPT: EPISODE 170
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All languages have their own rhythm and cadence, and English is no exception. That rhythm has actually shaped the language over time. It contributed to the structure of English poetry, and during the Elizabethan period, it shaped the way drama was composed. In this episode, we look at the beginning of Modern English drama through the patterns of sound in ordinary speech.

Links to Videos in Episode:
The Perfect French with Dylane: Word Stress
The Rhythms of Latin Poetry: Hexameter
TRANSCRIPT: EPISODE 167
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In this episode from the Patreon archives, we examine the accent used by actors and actresses in very old movies. We look at the origin of that accent and examine why it was adopted by the film industry in the first few decades of sound in motion pictures.

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The History of English Podcast | The Spoken History of a Global Language

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In this episode, we turn our attention to the wordcraft of William Shakespeare. Today, many people have mixed opinions about his plays and poems. They know that he is widely regarded as the greatest English writer of all time, but they struggle with his language. This time, we explore what makes Sha…

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David Crystal charts the evolution of Old English through the 700 years during which it was written and spoken.

Old English - the earliest form of the English language - was spoken and written in Anglo-Saxon Britain from c. 450 CE until c. 1150 (thus it continued to be used for some decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066). According to Toronto University's Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the entire surviving body of Old English material from 600 to 1150 consists of only 3,037 texts (excluding manuscripts with minor variants), amounting to a mere three million words. A single prolific modern author easily exceeds this total: Charles Dickens's fiction, for example, amounts to over four million words. While three million words is not a great deal of data for a period in linguistic history extending over five centuries, it is enough to allow us to make a confident description of the linguistic character of Old English and to plot its evolution into Middle English. The development is most evident in vocabulary and grammar.

From monk to godspellboc: The influence of Latin on Old English

English vocabulary has never been purely Anglo-Saxon - not even in the Anglo-Saxon period. By the time the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain, there had already been four centuries of linguistic interchange between Germanic and Roman people on the European mainland. Latin words might have arrived in English through any of several possible routes. To begin with, they must have entered the Celtic speech of the Britons during the Roman occupation (43-c. 410), and some might have remained in daily use after the Romans finally left in the early 5th century so that they were picked up by the Anglo-Saxons in due course. Aristocratic Britons may also have continued to use the language as a medium of upper-class communication. If so, we might expect a significant number of Latin words to have been in daily use, some of which would have eventually been assimilated into English. Some Latin words would also have been brought in by the Anglo-Saxons invaders. And following the arrival of St Augustine in 597, the influence of the monks must have grown, with Latinisms being dropped into speech much as they still are today.

Usage terms

Public Domain in most countries other than the UK.

The Latin words express a considerable semantic range. They include words for plants and animals (e.g. pea, cat), food and drink (e.g. butter, wine), household objects (e.g. cup, candle), money (e.g. mynet, 'mint'), metals (e.g. copper), items of clothing (e.g. belt, sock), settlements, houses and building materials (e.g. street, wall, tile), as well as several notions to do with military, legal, medical and commercial matters (e.g. tribute, seal, pound). Most are nouns, such as camp, street and monk, with a sprinkling of verbs and adjectives. As we move into the period of early Anglo-Saxon settlement in England, we find these semantic areas continuing to expand, with the growing influence of missionary activity reflected in an increase in words to do with religion and learning.

Usage terms

Public Domain in most countries other than the UK.

Usage terms The British Library has decided to make the images of pre-1800 collection items available on this website. For more information please refer to the following guidance.

Borrowing Latin words was not the only way in which the missionaries engaged with this task. Rather more important, in fact, were other linguistic techniques. One method was to take a Germanic word and adapt its meaning so that it expressed the sense of a Latin word: an example is gast, originally 'demon' or 'evil spirit', which came to mean 'soul' or 'Holy Ghost'. Another technique, relying on a type of word creation which permeates Old English poetry, was to create new compound words - in this case, by translating the elements of a Latin word into Germanic equivalents. So, liber evangelii became godspellboc ('gospel book'), and trinitas became þriness (i.e. 'threeness' = 'trinity').

Professor Andy Orchard reads an extract from the Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, in the original Old English, followed by an English translation.

Usage terms

Public Domain in most countries other than the UK.

Place names and loanwords: The Scandinavian influence on Old English

The Vikings first made their presence felt in Britain in the 780s, but it was a further century before Old Norse words began to arrive in Old English. In c. 878-90 King Alfred (c. 849-899) made a treaty with the Viking leader Guthrum (d. 890), which roughly split England into two. Alfred was left in control of Wessex and London, and Guthrum took control over an area of eastern England which, because it was subject to Danish laws, came to be known as the Danelaw. Over 2,000 Scandinavian place-names are still found here, chiefly in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the East Midlands. These place-names are one of the most important linguistic developments of the period. Many are easily recognised. Over 600 end in - by, the Old Norse word for 'farmstead' or 'town', as in Rugby and Grimsby; the other element often referring to a person's name (Hroca's and Grim's farm, in these two cases), but sometimes to general features, as in Burnby ('farm by a stream') and Westerby ('western farm').

Despite the extensive period of settlement, and Danish becoming the language of power for a generation, the number of Scandinavian words that entered Old English is surprisingly small - about 150. But between Old and Middle English a considerable Scandinavian vocabulary was gradually being established in the language. Although there are no written records to show it, we know that this must have been so because the earliest Middle English literature, from around 1200, shows thousands of Old Norse words being used, especially in texts coming from the northern and eastern parts of the country, such as the Orrmulum and Havelock the Dane. There is no doubt that many of these words were well established, because they began to replace some common Anglo-Saxon words. The word for 'take', for example, was niman in Old English; Old Norse taka is first recorded in an English form toc ('took') during the late 11th century, but by the end of the Middle English period take had completely taken over the function of niman in general English.

Grammatical change

Old Norse also made a permanent impact on the grammar of the language. The most important of these changes was the introduction of a new set of third-person plural pronouns, they, them and their. These replaced the earlier Old English inflected forms: hi or hie (in the nominative and accusative cases, 'they/them'), hira or heora (in the genitive case, 'their, of them') and him or heom (in the dative case, 'to them, for them'). Pronouns do not change very often in the history of a language, and to see one set of forms replaced by another is truly noteworthy.
Another grammatical influence was the use of are as the third-person plural of the verb to be. This form had already been used sporadically in northern texts during the late Old English period - for example, in the Lindisfarne Gospels - but in Middle English it steadily moves south, eventually replacing the competing plural forms sindon and be.

Among other Scandinavian grammatical features are the pronouns both and same, and the prepositions til ('till' or 'to') and fro ('from'). The negative response word, nay, is also Norse in origin ( nei). And the - s ending for the third person singular present-tense form of the verb (as in she runs) was almost certainly a Scandinavian feature. In Old English this ending was usually - ð, as in hebbað ('raises') and gæð ('goes'); but in late Northumbrian texts we find an - s ending, and this too spread south to become the standard form.

The transition from Old English to Middle English

The transition from Old English to Middle English is primarily defined by the linguistic changes that were taking place in grammar, with Old English losing most of its inflectional endings, and word order becoming the primary means of expression. There is nonetheless a great deal of continuity between the grammatical systems of Old and Middle English. Word order was by no means random in Old English, nor was it totally fixed in Middle English. We can hear echoes of Old English word order even today. When we meet Yoda in the Star Wars films, we find him regularly inverting his word order, placing the object initially: If a Jedi knight you will become... This was a common Old English pattern - and we do not have any difficulty understanding it a thousand years on.

Usage terms

Public Domain in most countries other than the UK.

However, a major grammatical change of this kind - from inflection to word order - is of real significance. New words come into English on a daily basis, but new habits of grammatical construction do not. So when we see English altering its balance of grammatical constructions so radically, as happened chiefly during the 11th and 12th centuries, the kind of language which emerges as a consequence, Middle English, is rightly dignified by a different name.

Religious material from this period is of great sociolinguistic significance, revealing the continuity between the two languages. If the work of Ælfric (c. 950-1010) - an abbot who wrote homilies and saints' lives - was still being copied or quoted as late as around the year 1200, this gives us the strongest of hints that the language had not moved so far from Old English as to be totally unintelligible. The huge labour involved in copying would never have been undertaken if nobody had been able to understand the texts. On the other hand, we can sometimes sense a growing linguistic difficulty, as when the monks of Worcester requested William of Malmesbury to have the Old English Life of Wulfstan translated into Latin - presumably because they found Latin easier to read. By around 1300, we find someone adding the following note in the margin of an Old English text: non apreciatum propter ydioma incognita - 'not appreciated because unknown language'. At that point, the Old English period was very definitely over.

Ælfric's Lives of the Saints

Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 950-c. 1010) wrote the collection of texts known as the Lives of the Saints between 990 and 1002. Ælfric's writings were still being copied as late as 1200 (British Library, Cotton MS Julius E VII, f. 1v)

Usage terms

Public Domain in most countries other than the UK.

David Crystal is honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, and works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, lecturer, and broadcaster. His books include The Stories of English (2004), Pronouncing Shakespeare (2005), Think on My Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language (2008), Evolving English (2010), The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation (2016) and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (3rd edition 2018). He was Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare's Globe in 2003. He received an OBE for services to the English language in 1995.

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David Crystal charts the evolution of Old English through the 700 years during which it was written and spoken. Old English - the earliest form of the English language - was spoken and written in Anglo-Saxon Britain from c. 450 CE until c.

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John Baugh's online introduction to old English

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Series Introduction

Jonathan Slocum and Winfred P. Lehmann
All lessons now include audio!
Recorded by Thomas M. Cable, Professor Emeritus of the University of Texas at Austin.

Old English is the language of the Germanic inhabitants of England, dated from the time of their settlement in the 5th century to the end of the 11th century. It is also referred to as Anglo-Saxon, a name given in contrast with the Old Saxon of the inhabitants of northern Germany; these are two of the dialects of West Germanic, along with Old Frisian, Old Franconian, and Old High German. Sister families to West Germanic are North Germanic, with Old Norse (a.k.a. Old Icelandic) as its chief dialect, and East Germanic, with Gothic as its chief (and only attested) dialect. The Germanic parent language of these three families, referred to as Proto-Germanic, is not attested but may be reconstructed from evidence within the families, such as provided by Old English texts.

The early migrations of Germanic peoples from coastal regions of northern Europe to areas of modern-day England. The settlement regions correspond roughly to later dialect divisions of Old English. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Old English itself has three dialects: West Saxon, Kentish, and Anglian. West Saxon was the language of Alfred the Great (871-901) and therefore achieved the greatest prominence; accordingly, the chief Old English texts have survived in this dialect. In the course of time, Old English underwent various changes such as the loss of final syllables, which also led to simplification of the morphology. Upon the conquest of England by the Normans in 1066, numerous words came to be adopted from French and, subsequently, also from Latin.

For a reconstruction of the parent language of Old English, called Proto-Germanic, see Winfred Lehmann's book on this subject. For access to our online version of Bosworth and Toller's dictionary of Old English, see An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary.

Alphabet and Pronunciation

The alphabet used to write our Old English texts was adopted from Latin, which was introduced by Christian missionaries. Unfortunately, for the beginning student, spelling was never fully standardized: instead the alphabet, with continental values (sounds), was used by scribal monks to spell words "phonetically" with the result that each dialect, with its different sounds, was rendered differently -- and inconsistently, over time, due to dialectal evolution and/or scribal differences. King Alfred did attempt to regularize spelling in the 9th century, but by the 11th century continued changes in pronunciation once again exerted their disruptive effects on spelling. In modern transcriptions such as ours, editors often add diacritics to signal vowel pronunciation, though seldom more than macrons (long marks).

Anglo-Saxon scribes added two consonants to the Latin alphabet to render the th sounds: first the runic thorn (þ), and later eth (ð). However, there was never a consistent distinction between them as their modern IPA equivalents might suggest: different instances of the same word might use þ in one place and ð in another. We follow the practices of our sources in our textual transcriptions, but our dictionary forms tend to standardize on either þ or ð -- mostly the latter, though it depends on the word. To help reduce confusion, we sort these letters indistinguishably, after T; the reader should not infer any particular difference. Another added letter was the ligature ash (æ), used to represent the broad vowel sound now rendered by 'a' in, e.g., the word fast. A letter wynn was also added, to represent the English w sound, but it looks so much like thorn that modern transcriptions replace it with the more familiar 'w' to eliminate confusion.

The nature of non-standardized Anglo-Saxon spelling does offer compensation: no letters were "silent" (i.e., all were pronounced), and phonetic spelling helps identify and track dialectal differences through time. While the latter is not always relevant to the beginning student, it is nevertheless important to philologists and others interested in dialects and the evolution of the early English language.

Vocabulary

At first glance, Old English texts may look decidedly strange to a modern English speaker: many Old English words are no longer used in modern English, and the inflectional structure was far more rich than is true of its modern descendant. However, with small spelling differences and sometimes minor meaning changes, many of the most common words in Old and modern English are the same. For example, over 50 percent of the thousand most common words in Old English survive today -- and more than 75 percent of the top hundred. Conversely, more than 80 percent of the thousand most common words in modern English come from Old English. A few "teaser" examples appear below; our Master Glossary or Base-Form Dictionary may be scanned for examples drawn from our texts, and any modern English dictionary that includes etymologies will provide hundreds or thousands more.

Sentence Structure

In theory, Old English was a "synthetic" language, meaning inflectional endings signalled grammatical structure and word order was rather free, as for example in Latin; modern English, by contrast, is an "analytic" language, meaning word order is much more constrained (e.g., with clauses typically in Subject-Verb-Object order). But in practice, actual word order in Old English prose is not too often very different from that of modern English, with the chief differences being the positions of verbs (which might be moved, e.g., to the end of a clause for emphasis) and occasionally prepositions (which might become "postpositions"). In Old English verse, most bets are off: word order becomes much more free, and word inflections & meaning become even more important for deducing syntax. The same may be said, however, of modern English poetry, but in these lessons we tend to translate Old English poetry as prose. Altogether, once a modern English reader has mastered the common vocabulary and inflectional endings of Old English, the barriers to text comprehension are substantially reduced.

As we will see, Old English words were much inflected. Over time, most of this apparatus was lost and English became the analytic language we recognize today, but to read early English texts one must master the conjugations of verbs and the declensions of nouns, etc. Yet these inflectional systems had already been reduced by the time Old English was first being written, long after it had parted ways with its Proto-Germanic ancestor. The observation that matters "could have been worse" should serve as consolation to any modern English student who views conjugation and declension with trepidation.

Nouns, adjectives, and pronouns

These categories of Old English words are declined according to case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, or sometimes instrumental), number (singular, plural, or [for pronouns] dual meaning 'two'), and gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter: inherent in nouns, but inherited by adjectives and pronouns from the nouns they associate with). In addition, some adjectives are inflected to distinguish comparative and superlative uses.

Adjectives and regular nouns are either "strong" or "weak" in declension. In addition, irregular nouns belong to classes that reflect their earlier Germanic or even Indo-European roots; these classes, or more to the point their progenitors, will not be stressed in our lessons, but descriptions are found in the handbooks.

Pronouns are typically suppletive in their declension, meaning inflectional rules do not account for many forms so each form must be memorized (as is true of modern English I/me, you, he/she/it/his/her, etc). Tables will be provided. Similarly, a few nouns and adjectives are "indeclinable" and, again, some or all forms must be memorized.

Old English verbs are conjugated according to person (1st, 2nd, or 3rd), number (singular or plural), tense (present or past/preterite), mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive or perhaps optative), etc.

Most verbs are either "strong" or "weak" in conjugation; there are seven classes of strong verbs and three classes of weak verbs. A few other verbs, including modals (e.g. for 'can', 'must'), belong to a special category called "preterit-present," where different rules apply, and yet others (e.g. for 'be', 'do', 'go') are "anomalous," meaning each form must be memorized (as is true of modern English am/are/is, do/did, go/went, etc).

Other parts of speech

The numerals may be declined, albeit with fewer distinct forms than is normal for adjectives, and those for 'two' and 'three' may show gender. Other parts of speech are not inflected, except for some adverbs with comparative and superlative forms.

Lesson Recordings

This lesson series features audio recitations of each lesson text, accessible by clicking on the speaker icon (🔊) beside corresponding text sections. Prof. Thomas Cable, Emeritus, dedicated countless hours to the preparation and recording of these texts. The Linguistics Research Center is immensely grateful for Prof. Cable's generosity, patience, and good humor throughout the entire process.

Related Language Courses at UT

Most but not all language courses taught at The University of Texas concern modern languages; however, courses in Old and Middle English, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, are taught in the Department of English (link opens in a new browser window). Other online language courses for college credit are offered through the University Extension (new window).

West Germanic Resources Elsewhere

Our Web Links page includes pointers to West Germanic resources elsewhere.

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All lessons now include audio! Recorded by Thomas M. Cable, Professor Emeritus of the University of Texas at Austin. Old English is the language of the Germanic inhabitants of England, dated from the time of their settlement in the 5th century to the end of the 11th century.

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We all know that Brits speak differently depending on where they're from. But just how differently? And even if you're a non-British English speaker, might you share some vocabulary or pronunciations with people hailing from a UK region?

Find out with our quiz. Inspired by academic research on accents and dialects, it tests which region of the UK has locals that speak the most like you - even if you're not British.

Are you a match for Hugh Grant, Cheryl or Ewan McGregor? Your geographic home may be far from the UK, but your linguistic home may be anywhere from Edinburgh to Belfast, London to the Lake District.

You might also like:
* How Americans preserved British English
* Why British English is full of silly-sounding words
* How is the Queen's accent changing?
Quiz developed by Verve Search. Please note that Google Analytics is being used on this interactive; anonymised demographic results will be shared with the academic we consulted to help them with their research on accents and language.
This story is a part of BBC Britain - a series focused on exploring this extraordinary island, one story at a time. Readers outside of the UK can see every BBC Britain story by heading to the Britain homepage; you also can see our latest stories by following us on Facebook and Twitter.
And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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Do you have a hidden Hugh Grant or Highland Scot inside? Take our quiz and we'll pinpoint which part of the UK you most sound like you're from - even if you're not British.

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This article talks about how your accent betrays your origin and background, and what impact it may have on the course of your life.

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On 14 November 1922 the BBC broadcast its first radio report to the nation. We can't listen to it because it was not recorded, but we know this: the broadcast was read in flawless received pronunciation (RP), commonly known as the Queen's English. It is considered to be the language of elites, power and royalty.

For many years, the BBC would only allow RP accents to appear on its airwaves. That this accent became synonymous with the voice of a nation had clear connotations. RP was trusted, authoritarian and sincere. Fortunately, the BBC now allows all sorts of regional accents on its broadcasts - and even encourages it, aiming to both represent the diverse audience the BBC has and to draw new people in.

While the BBC no longer broadcasts only in RP, it turns out that the bias that once existed for it is still ripe in society today. Our accents can provide a window into our social backgrounds - and our biases. Our partialities can be so strong that they even affect our perception of who is, or is not, trustworthy.

Humans are very quick to judge a person based on accents, and are often unaware we do so. "Accent can trigger social categorisation in a prompt, automatic, and occasionally unconscious manner," says Ze Wang of the University of Central Florida. We often can identify a person's accent as soon they say hello.

Our trust for certain accent starts extremely young. There is evidence to show that affinity for language even starts before birth. We know for instance that babies prefer the language they heard most while in the womb. In one study, researchers repeatedly played a made-up word while women were pregnant. When the babies were born, brain scans showed that only babies who had heard this word responded to it.

By the time babies are several months old, they can differentiate between languages and dialects. Early on, babies start to have an affinity for others who speak their native language. In one 2007 Harvard University experiment, babies watched two people speak on a screen, one in a familiar tongue and one that was foreign. One on-screen speaker then offered the babies a toy - which magically popped up from behind the screen at the same time. The babies preferred the toy given by the person who spoke their native language and accent.

"Right away in the first year of life babies are starting to show this social preference - moving towards someone who speaks in a way that's familiar to them," says the study's lead researcher Katherine Kinzler, now at Cornell University.

To Kinzler, accents are under-studied. They tie us to our identity in a similar way that our gender and race does. For some children, accent can be a more powerful indicator of group identity than race, she has found. When five-year-olds were shown pictures of either black or white children, they preferred those who were the same race. At this age, they don't have the motivation to control prejudice in the way adults do, says Kinzler.

But when colour was pitted against accent, the children preferred those who shared their accent - even if they were of a different race.

This work reveals that in our early years, the accents we trust most are those which sound familiar. It makes sense that we trust somebody who speaks like us, says Kinzler; they are likely to know more information about your own community.

In another study, she found that children trust native speakers better than they do foreign-accented speakers.

As children grow up they become more attuned to the social status or stereotypes that have been glued on to various accents. RP English is said to sound posh and powerful, whereas people who speak Cockney English, the accent of working-class Londoners, often experience prejudice. The Birmingham accent fares even worse - which could be the result of TV shows which depicted its residents as "slow, lazy and thick", researchers wrote. Indeed, one poll found the Birmingham accent least attractive but rated Irish as having the nicest twang.
(Take our quiz on British accents to find out which part of Britain you speak most like - even if you aren't British.)

When it comes to trusting accents, there seem to be two things at play. First, an accent represents part of your identity. But as you get older this might clash with an accent you aspire to sound more like, say one that is deemed more prestigious, or less stuck-up. One 2013 poll of more than 4,000 people found RP and Devon accents the most trustworthy, while the least trustworthy was deemed to be Liverpudlian (from Liverpool). The Cockney accent came a close second for untrustworthiness. These accents scored similarly when asked about intelligence.

These are snapshot results, though. In real life, trust in accents can change over time depending on our social circles and daily relationships. A study by Ilaria Torre of Plymouth University found that trust in an accent can change depending on first impressions and judgements. In her study, participants heard either a standard southern English accent or a lesser-trusted Liverpudlian accent. If a person who spoke in the 'trustworthy'' accent then went onto behave fairly - by returning a generous monetary investment, for example - then this first impression of trustworthiness increased.

If, however, a person spoke with the 'trusted' accent and they went on to behave in an untrustworthy manner, they were deemed even less trustworthy than the person who had both an 'untrustworthy' accent and behaviour. The study participants "were punishing them, so to speak, for not living up to the participants' expectations," says Torre. The opposite happened, too: those who were judged as untrustworthy but acted nicely were able to undo negative preconceptions. In other words, the 'untrustworthy'-sounding Liverpudlians (apologies, any readers from Liverpool) were redeemed when they behaved in a desirable way.

This reveals something Torre feels has been overlooked - our accent biases can be reduced by contact with individuals we initially think sound suspicious. "By interacting with speakers of many different accents we might realise our biases are unfounded and our trustworthy perception of that accent can change as well," she says.

The media plays a role too. Upmarket grocer Marks & Spencer frequently has a soothing, RP voice-over on its adverts, for example, while the more budget brand Iceland often featured former popstar Kerry Katona, who grew up in Warrington, a town between Manchester and Liverpool - until she was kicked off their adverts because of an alleged drug problem.

In the UK, some school teachers even have been asked to modify their accents to sound less regional. Of course, says the University of Manchester's Alexander Baratta, while some people find regional accents to sound less educated, others think they sound more in-touch, sincere and friendly and that posh accents are more cold or arrogant. (This may be one reason why the Queen has been toning down her RP voice throughout the decades.) Some studies have found that people from Yorkshire seem to sound more honest than Londoners, for instance.

Accent biases are common against foreign accents too. A study led by Ze Wang showed that US participants trusted British accents more than Indian accents. "People often have negative bias toward non-standard accents, particularly those with disadvantaged and low-prestige minority groups," she says. For instance, she found that those with Mexican or Greek accents were perceived as less intelligent or professional than those who speak standard US English.

Another study showed that our accents can even limit our professional opportunities. Regional German accents were seen as less desirable than standard German, despite the same being said. But in Switzerland people preferred their surgeon to have a regional accent than a "standard" German one, perhaps because Swiss German is the most commonly spoken dialect.

When it comes to trusting accents, we depend both on what we know and on what society has conditioned us to aspire to. But if we all took a moment to stop and really listen to each other, we might learn to love the eclectic and varied accents that make up our multicultural world... rather than basing our trust on implicit biases that we acquire even before birth.
Melissa Hogenboom is BBC Future's staff writer. She is @melissasuzanneh on twitter.
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On 14 November 1922 the BBC broadcast its first radio report to the nation. We can't listen to it because it was not recorded, but we know this: the broadcast was read in flawless received pronunciation (RP), commonly known as the Queen's English. It is considered to be the language of elites, power and royalty.

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Teacher and teacher trainer. Passionate about language.
More about me here.

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brief introduction in the OED

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Australian English differs from other Englishes primarily in its accent and vocabulary. The major features of the accent were established by the 1830s. In the period between colonial settlement (1788) and the 1830s, when the foundation accent was being forged, new lexical items to describe the new environment, especially its flora and fauna, were developed either from Aboriginal languages (, wombat, , , and so on) or from the 'transported' English word stock (native bear, wild cherry, and so on). Many more vocabulary items were later added in response to the nineteenth-century process of settlement and pastoral expansion. All of this seems at once predictable and inevitable-this is the way a colonial society imposes its linguistic footprint on a subjected land.

Pronunciation: cultivated, broad, and general Australian

And then, at the end of the nineteenth century, something curious and largely unpredictable happened to Australian English. In response to a newly-developed concept of Received Pronunciation in Britain, which was closely tied to notions of social prestige, some Australian speakers modified their vowels and diphthongs in order to move them towards the British exemplars. From the 1890s, and well into the 1950s, elocution was in the air, and elocution teachers found a ready market for the teaching of British vowels and diphthongs to the socially-aspirational classes. This modified form of Australian speech came to be called Cultivated Australian.

As if in response against this new British-based Cultivated Australian, a diametrically opposed form of Australian English developed in the first part of the twentieth century. This form moved the Australian vowels and diphthongs even further away from what was now the British standard of pronunciation, and emphasized nasality, flatness of intonation, and the elision of syllables.This second modified form of Australian speech came to be called Broad Australian. While it is true that when non-Australians hear any Australian say 'mate' or 'race' they are likely to mistake the words for 'mite' and 'rice', the mishearing is most likely to occur with speakers of Broad Australian.

The majority of Australians continued to speak with the accent that had been established in the first fifty years of settlement, and this form of speech came to be known as General Australian. General Australian was now book-ended by Cultivated Australian and Broad Australian, and these forms of Australian English came to carry with them very different sets of values. Cultivated Australian, for example, came to express a longing for British values and a nostalgia for a country that was still regarded by many as 'home'. Broad Australian was strongly nationalistic, and carried with it notions of egalitarianism that were antagonistic to a perceived class-obsessed and hierarchical Britain.

All three forms of Australian English included most of the vocabulary items that had developed in the second half of the nineteenth century: billy 'a cooking utensil'; swag (transferred from the underworld sense of 'booty') as the collection of belongings of a bush traveller, and as their bearer; fossick-perhaps a variant of the midland and southern English fussock (to bustle about)-meaning 'to search for gold', and then 'to rummage around for anything'; the outback and the never-never to describe country far from urban areas; brumby 'a wild horse'; 'an urban hooligan'; and so on.

The rise of an Australian lexis

In lexis, a number of the most culturally important Australian terms developed towards the end of the nineteenth century, at precisely the time that Australian English was generating its Cultivated and Broad forms. (especially in its present manifestation of little Aussie battler) is one of the most positive words in Australian English, and it usually refers to a person who works hard to make a decent living in difficult circumstances. Initially, the battler was a person who scrounged a living on the edges of society: an itinerant and irregularly employed rural worker struggling to survive (1898); a person who frequented racecourses in search of a living (1895); a prostitute (1898). Battler eventually divested itself of the associations of the mug punter and the prostitute, but even in its earliest uses there is evidence of strong sympathy and admiration for working-class people who eke out their existence with resilience and courage.

The opposite of the battler is the -one of the most derogatory of Australian words. The bludger is a person who lives off the efforts of others, a cadger and an idler, a person who expects others to do all the work. The history of this word helps to explain something of the moral condemnation that bludger and its verb to bludge typically carry. Australian bludger is a form of Standard English bludgeoner 'a person who is armed with and doesn't hesitate to use a bludgeon, a short stout club'. In Australia the bludger became a pimp who was prepared to protect his financial stake in a prostitute by resorting to the violence of the bludgeon. The salient feature in this, and all later senses, is that the person who is called a bludger is living off the work of another and, from this sense, it is a short step to the use of bludger as a generalized term of abuse.

Dinkum emerges at about the same time. is from British dialect, where it meant primarily 'work; a fair share of work'. The notion of 'fairness' has always been associated with dinkum, and it is from this connotation of 'fairness' that the particularly Australian meaning 'reliable, genuine, honest, true' developed in the first decade of the twentieth century. It was also at this time that the collocation fair go appeared, an important expression of egalitarian principles. The continuing significance of this phrase in Australian society is evidenced by the fact that a recent Federal Government booklet Life in Australia (2007), aimed at new migrants, explains what is meant by a fair go in Australia: 'Australians value equality of opportunity and what is often called a "fair go". This means that what someone achieves in life should be a product of their talents, work and effort rather than their birth or favouritism. Australians have a spirit of egalitarianism that embraces mutual respect, tolerance and fair play. ... The aim is to ensure there are no formal class distinctions in Australian society'. Although dinkum (and its variant fair dinkum) appeared in the 1890s, the evidence indicates that its really widespread use occurred during the First World War.

It was out of the First World War that (an acronym formed from the initial letters of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and (originally a soldier engaged in the digging of trenches, echoing its earlier use for a person digging for gold) emerged in the sense 'an Australian soldier'. By the end of the war both terms were being used emblematically to reflect the traditional view of the virtues displayed by those who served in the Gallipoli campaign, especially as these virtues were seen as national characteristics. Such terms are part of a rich tradition of Australian colloquialisms that became established in the first half of the twentieth century: 'excellent'; Buckley's chance 'no chance at all'; 'mate'; crook 'dishonest, unpleasant, ill'; dag 'a character, an entertaining eccentric' (later 'an unfashionable person, a nerd'); 'cheap wine' (an example of a word of Australian derivation adopted in Britain, and elsewhere, with little awareness of its origin); 'an English person'; rort 'an act of fraud or sharp practice'; wog 'a flu-like illness'; wowser 'a puritanical person, a killjoy', and so on.

Australian English and national identity

These Australianisms were very much a part of Broad Australian and General Australian. They were certainly not a part of Cultivated Australian, the prestige form of Australian English in the public domain where, in the first half of the twentieth century, the Australian accent and the colloquial elements of the Australian vocabulary were condemned, with reference to putative and actual British standards. Here was a paradox: the Australian accent and the core words that carried and embodied Australian values (and which were therefore central to notions of nationhood and identity) were judged to be substandard and second-rate.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the weakening ties with Britain (especially as a result of Britain's joining of the European Economic Community) and the emergence of new forms of nationalism, this situation was gradually reversed. Australian English became 'naturalized' in its own country, its accent and vocabulary were accepted as a national norm, and it was celebrated in such works as the Australian National Dictionary of 1988. In the first half of the twentieth century Cultivated Australian had been the socially prestigious accent; by the end of the century its utterance was likely to generate derision and laughter. As a result, Broad Australian, too, has been in decline, as if this extreme form was no longer required now that the imperial elements were dead. General Australian is now to the fore-as it had been before the false dawns of Cultivated and Broad.

Suggested reading

Bruce Moore, Speaking our Language. The Story of Australian English (OUP, 2008)
The opinions and other information contained in the OED blog posts and comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press.

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Australian English in the twentieth century | Oxford English Dictionary

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Australian English differs from other Englishes primarily in its accent and vocabulary. The major features of the accent were established by the 1830s.

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Canadian history, the development and characteristics of Canadian English

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English is the majority language in every Canadian province and territory except Quebec (which has a French-speaking majority) and Nunavut (which has an Inuit language majority who speak Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun). In Quebec, English is the mother tongue of 8.1 per cent of the population, and the first official language of 13.7 percent of the population.

Within Quebec, the proportion of English-speakers (or anglophones) has declined sharply from the 19th century, when it was about 25 per cent. A higher birthrate among French-speakers (or francophones) and the departure of many anglophones to pursue better economic opportunities in other provinces gradually reduced that proportion to about 14 per cent by the mid-20th century. Beginning in the 1970s, a more dramatic reduction was prompted by political developments. The provincial government introduced language laws designed to protect the vitality of French by restricting the use of English in business, education, government and public signage; English now has no official status at the provincial level in Quebec ( see Quebec Language Policy). At the same time, many francophones began calling for the separation of Quebec from Canada. Most anglophones objected to the language laws and opposed separation. Many responded to the conflict by leaving Quebec; by the 1990s, an exodus of close to 200,000 anglophones had reduced Montreal 's English-speaking community by one-third. Despite these losses, English is still the mother tongue of about 8 per cent of Quebec's population, and 44.5 per cent of the population report being able to speak both English and French. In greater Montreal, where the majority of Quebec's English-speakers now live, English is the mother tongue of 13.2 per cent of the metropolitan population (533,845 people).

Even where English is the majority language, it often coexists with other languages. In Toronto and Vancouver, high levels of immigration from non-English-speaking countries have reduced the proportion of native speakers of English to just over half of the metropolitan population. It should also be remembered that not all native speakers of English in Canada are native speakers of Canadian English; some are immigrants who grew up in other English-speaking countries and therefore speak other types of English. In the discussion that follows, Canadian English will be taken to mean the type of English spoken by people who acquired native competence in English while growing up mostly in Canada. ( See also French Language; Indigenous Languages of Canada; Languages in Use.)

History

Canadian English owes its very existence to important historical events, especially: the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the Seven Years' War and opened most of eastern Canada for English-speaking settlement; the American Revolution of 1775-83, which spurred the first large group of English-speakers to move to Canada; and the Industrial Revolution in Britain, which encouraged an even larger group to join them in the 19th century. These and other events determined the patterns of English-speaking settlement in Canada, which in turn influenced the current form of Canadian English.

Origins

English was first spoken in Canada in the 17th century, in seasonal fishing communities along the Atlantic coast, including the island of Newfoundland, and at fur trade posts around Hudson Bay. Following the transfer of Nova Scotia to Britain under the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), permanent English-speaking settlements were established in that province, such as Halifax, founded in 1749. After the expulsion of the French-speaking Acadian population in the 1750s, Nova Scotia's English population was expanded with pioneers from New England. Extensive English-speaking settlement of the rest of eastern Canada was made possible by British victory in the Seven Years' War, after which France ceded its remaining Canadian territory to Britain in the Treaty of Paris (1763).

United Empire Loyalists

Two decades later, following the American Revolution, approximately 45,000 United Empire Loyalists, who had supported Britain during the war, fled to Canada, mostly from the mid-Atlantic and New England states. Their arrival in 1783-84 provided the first substantial English-speaking population in what would become Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Most of the Loyalists who arrived in Quebec were resettled further west, in Ontario, to avoid conflict with the French Canadian population. American immigration continued into the early 19th century - bolstering the population of Ontario and pioneering the Eastern Townships region of southern Quebec - but was brought to an end by the War of 1812. By this time, Ontario had a mostly ex-American population of around 100,000, stretching from Windsor to Cornwall, and Toronto had been founded as the town of York (1793). The late 18th century also saw smaller groups of British emigrants make their way to Canada; from southeastern Ireland and southwestern England to Newfoundland and from the Scottish Highlands to parts of the Maritimes and eastern Ontario (though many of these people spoke Irish or Gaelic, rather than English, when they arrived).

British Settlement

The next major wave of English-speaking settlement followed the Napoleonic Wars, when Britain faced problems connected with overpopulation and the economic and social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. These problems encouraged many British people to emigrate. Hundreds of thousands came to Canada in the early- and mid-19th century, more or less completing the settlement of the central and eastern parts of the country, from southern Ontario to the Atlantic coast. The largest numbers of these immigrants were Irish, with Ulster Irish predominating in frontier regions of Ontario and southern Irish in the lumber camps and major cities of Quebec and Atlantic Canada; English immigrants were the second largest group and Scots the third. As Canada's largest city, the centre of its industrial development and a major port of entry for immigrants, Montreal gained an English-speaking majority by the 1850s, including a large Irish working class and a smaller but highly influential Scottish merchant class, which directed much of Canada's commercial and industrial development.

Westward Expansion

The earliest English-speaking settlements in western Canada also began in the early and mid-19th century, with such settlers as Scottish farmers in Manitoba's Red River Colony, established in 1811, and American gold prospectors in British Columbia in 1858 ( see Fraser River Gold Rush). The West was also dotted with fur trading posts by this time, from Winnipeg ( Fort Garry, established in 1822) through Edmonton (1795) to Victoria (1843). But the majority of English-speaking settlement of the West was made possible by the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. A subsequent "land boom" brought millions of immigrants to Canada and encouraged many eastern Canadians to move west.

While large groups of western pioneers arrived from the United States, Britain and Europe, the dominant group in most places, both numerically and socially, was Canadian-born migrants from Ontario. Saskatoon, for instance, was founded in 1883 by the Temperance Colonization Society, a group of Methodists from Toronto, and eastern Canadians dominated the early elites across the West. The first mayors of Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg were all from Ontario; Calgary's was from New Brunswick. The first premier of the Northwest Territories and those of the new provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were also from Ontario. It was therefore Ontario English that became the main model for the English of western Canada, despite the diverse origins of the general population of the West.

Modern Canadian English

More recent immigration to Canada from all over the world, though involving much larger groups of people than earlier periods, has had comparatively little effect on the development of Canadian English, which reached something like its present form by Canada's Confederation in 1867. With such a large Canadian-born population to blend into, the children of today's immigrants rapidly assimilate to the patterns of the English already spoken by the majority of people in their adopted communities. Nevertheless, Canadian English, like all dialects and languages, continues to evolve, with small changes seen in each generation of speakers. We can measure these changes by comparing data on today's speech, collected in recent studies such as the Dialect Topography survey of J.K. Chambers, from the mid-1990s, or the North American Regional Vocabulary Survey and Phonetics of Canadian English projects of C. Boberg, from the late 1990s and early 2000s, to surveys of Canadian English carried out in the 1950s (by H.B. Allen, W.S. Avis and R.J. Gregg) and in 1972 ( The Survey of Canadian English: A Report, by M.H. Scargill and H.J. Warkentyne).

Even if the main features of Canadian English are relatively stable, new words and ways of saying things arise all the time, while older expressions go out of fashion and disappear. Some of these changes, together with the stable features of Canadian English, are discussed in the following sections.

A Unique Dialect

Canada's history of English-speaking settlement might be expected to have created a hybrid variety of English with a distinctive blend of American and British features. This is indeed what we find, together with a few features that are uniquely Canadian. Nevertheless, in the most general sense, the English spoken today by most Canadians from British Columbia to Nova Scotia is clearly a type of North American English, most similar to that of the western United States and to General American English. This is particularly true of its grammar (how words and sentences are put together, which linguists call morphology and syntax) and of the most systematic aspects of its pronunciation (what linguists call phonology and phonetics).

Many linguists attribute this North American character to the influence of the Loyalists and post-Loyalists, who to a large extent founded Canada's English-speaking population and thereby created a common origin with American English. In most places, the children of 19th-century British settlers and those who came after them would have adopted the local variety of English that had developed from 18th-century Loyalist speech, which was later transferred to western Canada when Ontarians settled there in the late-19th century. Several of the main features of Canadian English, however, can also be found in the regional dialects brought to Canada by British settlers from northern and western England, Scotland and Ireland, so their presence in Canada may reflect a combination of both sources of influence.

The English of Newfoundland, which remained a separate British colony until 1949, has traditionally been seen as distinct from that of mainland Canada, reflecting its more specific origins in southwestern England and southeastern Ireland (especially the region around Waterford). Though many young Newfoundlanders have recently been shifting their speech toward general Canadian patterns, the speech of most people in the capital, St. John's, still retains a notably Irish-influenced character that separates it from general Canadian English. The rich local vocabulary of Newfoundland has been catalogued in a Dictionary of Newfoundland English with thousands of entries ( see Dictionary).

Pronunciation

The colonial American English that the Loyalists brought to Canada was established in the 17th century, before several of the changes that created modern Standard British English had occurred in southeastern England. In particular, most modern North American English retains the /r/ sound after vowels, in words like start and north, and has the same short- a sound in words like trap and bath, rather than the lengthened and further-back /ah/-sound of bath and similar words ( past, staff, etc.) that is heard today in London.

Other general North American features shared by Canadian English may reflect more recent American influence. The /t/ sound, when it occurs after a stressed vowel in the middle of a word, as in city, better, Ottawa, battle and party, sounds more like a /d/: "siddy," "bedder," "Oddawa," "baddle" and "pardy" (linguists call this "flapping"). The vowel sound of words like news, student and Tuesday, which is like that of few in British English, is more like that of food in the US and Canada: "nooze," "stoodent," "toozeday" rather than "nyooze," "styoodent," "tyoozeday" (though some Canadians prefer the British variants).

(Courtesy Jimiticus.)

Low-back Merger and the Canadian Shift

Canadian Raising

Foreign "a" Words

British Pronunciations

Vocabulary

American Versus British Words

British and American English have developed distinct vocabularies for many aspects of modern life, especially in such semantic domains as clothing, food and transportation. In general, Canadians follow the American model in these cases; like Americans, they say apartment rather than flat, diaper rather than nappy, elevator rather than lift, flashlight rather than torch, freight car rather than goods wagon, fries rather than chips (Canadian chips are what the British call crisps), pants rather than trousers, sweater rather than jumper, truck rather than lorry, and wrench rather than spanner. Canadian cars, like American, have hoods, fenders, mufflers, trunks, turn signals and windshields - not bonnets, wings, silencers, boots, indicators and windscreens - and drive on gas from gas stations, not petrol from filling stations or petrol stations.

In a few cases, however, most Canadians prefer British words: bill rather than check for the tally of charges in a restaurant; cutlery rather than silverware for knives, forks and spoons; icing rather than frosting for the top layer of a cake; icing sugar rather than powdered sugar for the finely ground sugar sprinkled on desserts; tap rather than faucet for the device that controls the flow of water into a sink; and, rather than zee for the last letter of the alphabet.

Canadianisms

Canadians also display a small set of their own unique vocabulary, which can be called Canadianisms. In discussing Canadianisms, it is important to distinguish between international words for things that occur only or mostly in Canada, and uniquely Canadian words for things that occur internationally.

The first type of word represents the uniqueness of Canada but not of Canadian English. It is not difficult to think of distinctively Canadian things: flora and fauna that are found only or mostly in Canada, like the Canada goose, Canada jay or Canada lynx; aspects of Canadian Indigenous cultures, like the buffalo jump, pemmican or the totem pole; Canadian historical artifacts, like the Hudson's Bay point blanket, the Red River cart or the York boat; Canadian inventions, like IMAX films, kerosene, the McIntosh apple, Nanaimo bars, poutine, the Robertson screw or the snowmobile; Canadian institutions, like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the United Church of Canada. All of these things contribute to a Canadian cultural identity and their names are Canadian words in one sense, yet if people outside Canada found occasion to refer to them, they would use the same words as Canadians. In a parallel way, Canadians use Australian words like boomerang, didgeridoo, kangaroo and koala; these words are part of World English, not of Canadian or Australian English exclusively.

Only the second type of word, where Canadians use their own word for something that has other names in other dialects, is a true Canadianism in the linguistic sense. Some examples include the following: a small apartment without a separate bedroom is a bachelor in Canada but a studio in the US and Britain; a machine that performs banking services is a bank machine in Canada but an ATM in the US and a cash dispenser in Britain; the structures along the edge of a roof for collecting rainwater are eavestroughs in much of Canada but gutters in the US and Britain; the years of school are grade one, grade two, etc., in Canada but first grade, etc., in the US and year one, etc., in Britain; pencils used for colouring are usually pencil crayons in Canada but colored pencils in the US and colouring pencils in Britain; orange cones used to manage traffic during road repairs are pylons in Canada but traffic cones in the US and Britain; a tight-fitting woolen winter hat is a toque in Canada but a beanie in the US and Britain; and, a public toilet is a washroom in Canada but a restroom in the US and a lavatory or loo in Britain.

Nonetheless, Canadian English often shows variation in the use of these words, with Canadianisms competing with other words, usually the American variants. This sometimes results in the decline or disappearance of Canadianisms. The best-known example is chesterfield, which used to be the standard Canadian term for what is called a couch in the US and a sofa or settee in Britain; today, while some older Canadians continue to use chesterfield, most younger Canadians say couch.

Loanwords

Many terms connected with Indigenous cultures, like chief, , harpoon, peace pipe, , and sweat lodge, are also of European origin. In a few cases, however, words were borrowed from Indigenous languages. Many of these are shared with American English, since the international border is irrelevant to the natural and Indigenous worlds. A few examples of Indigenous loanwords in North American English are , , , husky, , , kamik, , , , mucky-muck, , , , , , , sockeye, , , and . Admittedly, most of these do not occur very often in everyday speech and their number is remarkably small, compared to the much larger vocabulary transferred from European languages. The major contribution of Indigenous languages to Canadian English is therefore not in common nouns or other parts of ordinary vocabulary, but in place names, something few modern Canadians stop to think about: the names ,Mississauga, , , , , , Saskatchewan, , , and - as well as the name itself - all come from Indigenous languages.

Eh?

Along with Canadian Raising of mouth words, discussed above, the most popular stereotype of Canadian English is the word , added to the end of a phrase to solicit confirmation that the hearer has understood or agrees with what the speaker is saying. A Canadian might say, "The game starts in half an hour, eh? So we have to leave now," or, "Put your jacket on, eh? It's cold outside," or "Let's go have some lunch, eh?" Like most stereotypes, however, this one is exaggerated and may now be obsolete; recent research suggests that, at least among younger Canadians, actual use of eh is much less frequent than its popularity as a stereotype would suggest ( see Eh).

Spelling

While some Canadians have strong opinions on these matters, often pointing to arbitrary and isolated examples of British spelling as symbols of Canadian cultural independence from the United States, most linguists agree that the main characteristic of Canadian spelling is the absence of any consistent pattern, with choices between American and British forms varying by word, context, publication, genre, region and social group, thereby reflecting Canada's transitional position between the two main standards of World English. It might be said that tolerance of disagreement about spelling is in any case a truer reflection of the modern Canadian character than a rigid adherence to British standards. As a result, however, Canadian writers, editors and other language professionals face sometimes perplexing choices and uncertainties that do not burden their British or American colleagues, at least not to the same extent.

Dictionaries and Style Guides

Setting a standard to follow in spelling, pronunciation and other aspects of usage is the job of the linguists and lexicographers who produce dictionaries and style guides. While many Canadians continue to consult American and British authorities on these matters, in keeping with its status as a unique and independent dialect, Canadian English now has its own set of such publications. There were two general-purpose comprehensive dictionaries produced entirely in Canada: first the Gage Canadian Dictionary and later the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, now largely used as the standard. (The Gage Canadian is no longer being produced but there are several other paperback made-for-Canada dictionaries available, including the Nelson Winston Canadian Paperback Dictionary and the Collins Gem Canadian English Dictionary.) There are also style guides for Canada's language-related professions; Canadian editors, for instance, can consult Editing Canadian English, while journalists can refer to The Canadian Press Stylebook and public servants to The Canadian Style, published by Public Works and Government Services Canada. Aimed at a more general audience is the Guide to Canadian English Usage by Oxford University Press. In 1981, the Strathy Language Unit was established in the Department of English of Queen's University with a mission to study standard English usage and produce a guide to Canadian English usage; its activities promoting research on Canadian English continue today.

Regional Variation

With the important exception of Newfoundland mentioned above, Canadian English is notable for its comparative lack of regional variation, with a very similar type of English spoken by most people across the vast territory between Victoria and Halifax. Compared to Britain and the eastern United States, regional differences are small and subtle and they decrease from east to west. In the Maritimes, distinctive enclaves of traditional speech remain on Cape Breton Island, in several parts of mainland Nova Scotia (like Pictou County) and on Prince Edward Island. Quebec English is highly distinctive because of its comparative lack of Loyalist influence and its close contact with French. The Ottawa Valley that divides Quebec and Ontario also has a distinctive traditional dialect reflecting Scottish and Irish settlement. Further west, from southern Ontario to British Columbia, only very subtle differences are found, with a few exceptions, like religious communities on the Prairies. In northern Canada, we find distinct types of English spoken by many Indigenous people, reflecting the influence of Indigenous languages, but most of the non-Indigenous population is too recent and diverse to have formed a regional dialect in the traditional sense. Even in eastern Canada, many traditional dialect enclaves are now recessive, as younger people shift their speech toward general Canadian models. The isolation that once sustained dialect enclaves has all but disappeared.
Regional Pronunciation
Despite this general homogeneity, important regional indicators can be identified, even within the domain of what we might label Standard Canadian English. Some of these involve pronunciation. For instance, the vowel of words like start (e.g., bar, far, market), is pronounced further forward in the mouth by Atlantic Canadians than by westerners, while Canadian Raising produces slightly different sounds in Ontario and the West. In words like doubt, house and mouth, the diphthong used by southern Ontarians begins with a sound something like the vowel of bet, whereas that used by people on the Prairies begins with a sound more like the vowel of but. In words like bag, flag and tag, westerners tend to use a higher vowel than central or eastern Canadians, like that of vague, so that bag sounds something like the first syllable of bagel. Montreal is the only place in mainland Canada where most people still distinguish between the trap and dress vowels when they occur before an intervocalic /r/, in words like arrow versus error, barrel versus berry, or marry versus merry. For most Canadians, the first syllables of these words sound the same, so arrow sounds like air, barrel like bare and marry like mare. In Montreal, as in the eastern US and Britain, they sound different, with the first word in each pair having a vowel sound more like that of trap than that of dress.
Regional Vocabulary
The most obvious regional differences concern vocabulary. One word that varies across the country is the term for a small house in the countryside, usually on a lake, where city people go for summer weekends. This is a cabin in the West and a cottage in most of the East. In northwestern Ontario, it's a camp, as it is quite often in New Brunswick. In Quebec, it's sometimes a chalet. (In Montreal, a cottage is a two-storey house in the city.) Another western word is parkade, for a multi-level parking structure, called a parking garage in Ontario. Westerners also call athletic shoes worn as casual attire runners, whereas Ontarians call them running shoes and Atlantic Canadians use the American term, sneakers. Students preparing to take notes in the Maritimes would pull their scribblers out of their book bags, whereas other Canadians would pull their notebooks out of their backpacks. Outside school, children in Newfoundland and Quebec might play on a see-saw, but elsewhere that would be a teeter-totter. As a generic term for non-alcoholic carbonated beverages, Canadians across the country use the Midwestern American term pop, except in Quebec and sometimes in Manitoba, where it's soft drink. The standard set of pizza toppings is called deluxe in the West, deluxe or everything-on-it in Ontario, all-dressed in Quebec and Saskatchewan, and the works in Atlantic Canada; similar variation applies to the toppings on hamburgers and hotdogs.

There are whole dictionaries of local words and meanings for many places in eastern Canada, as already mentioned in connection with Newfoundland, though many of these are specialized terms that have no equivalents in other regions. Even in less generally distinctive regions of Canada, however, a few unique words can be found in most places. Ontario, for instance, offers concession, meaning a tract of surveyed farmland, with its related terms concession line and concession road, and Ontario children start their education in junior kindergarten, which has other names in other regions (e.g., preschool or pre-K). On the Prairies, a dugout is an excavated reservoir for rainwater or spring runoff on a farm and a bluff is a clump of trees, not a cliff. In Saskatchewan, a hooded sweatshirt is called a bunnyhug, whereas other Canadians call it a hoodie. In Calgary, enclosed pedestrian bridges linking the second floors of adjacent buildings over a street are called plus-15s, while in Edmonton they are known as pedways and in Winnipeg as skywalks; in Montreal, pedestrians escape the Canadian winter in the underground city.
Quebec English
Social Variation

Another effect of minority status on Montreal English is a much higher degree of ethnic variation than is found in cities where English is the dominant language. In most cities, even those with large ethnic communities, ethno-linguistic differences usually disappear after one generation, as the children of immigrants assimilate to local speech patterns. In Montreal, by contrast, the local dominance of French insulates ethnic communities from the assimilatory power of Standard Canadian English, so that ethnic differences persist even among Canadian-born generations. These include distinct phonetic patterns associated with speakers of British, Italian and Jewish ancestry - three of the largest ethnic components of Montreal's English-speaking community. In other Canadian cities, ethno-linguistic differences often distinguish Indigenous from non-Indigenous types of English.

Variation among ethnic groups is only one of many ways that Canadian English varies according to social categories. This sort of variation is studied by sociolinguists, who examine the relationship between language and society, particularly the correlations between linguistic variables and social attributes such as age, sex and social class, as well as speech style or context of speaking. Urban sociolinguistic surveys of Vancouver (by R.J. Gregg), Toronto (by J.K. Chambers and S. Tagliamonte), Ottawa (by H.B. Woods), Montreal (by C. Boberg), and St. John's (by S. Clarke), based on previous research in American and British cities, have found similar patterns in Canada: younger people and women tend to lead language changes, while older people and men lag behind; middle-class people and women prefer a more standard variety of language; while working-class people and men display more non-standard language. All speakers display variation between contextual styles, with certain variants like talking or best friend or Toronto occurring more frequently in formal styles and others, like "talkin'" or "bessfrien'" or "Tronno," in casual styles. These general sociolinguistic patterns apply as much to Canadian English as to other dialects and languages; they are one of the ways in which individuals and groups signal their social identities and relationships with one another.

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English is the majority language in every Canadian province and territory except Quebec (which has a French-speaking majority) and Nunavut (which has an Inuit language majority who speak Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun). In Quebec, English is the mother tongue of 8.1 per cent of the population, and the first official language of 13.7 percent of the population.

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article on BBC.com

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Is there such a thing as Canadian English? If so, what is it?

The standard stereotype among Americans is that Canadians are like Americans, except they say 'eh' a lot and pronounce 'out and about' as 'oot and aboot'. Many Canadians, on the other hand, will tell you that Canadian English is more like British English, and as proof will hold aloft the spellings colour and centre and the name zed for the letter Z.

Canadian does exist as a separate variety of English, with subtly distinctive features of pronunciation and vocabulary. It has its own dictionaries; the Canadian Press has its own style guide; the Editors' Association of Canada has just released a second edition of Editing Canadian English. But an emblematic feature of Editing Canadian English is comparison tables of American versus British spellings so the Canadian editor can come to a reasonable decision on which to use... on each occasion. The core of Canadian English is a pervasive ambivalence.

Canadian history helps to explain this. In the beginning there were the indigenous peoples, with far more linguistic and cultural variety than Europe. They're still there, but Canadian English, like Canadian Anglophone society in general, gives them little more than desultory token nods. Fights between European settlers shaped Canadian English more. The French, starting in the 1600s, colonised the St Lawrence River region and the Atlantic coast south of it. In the mid-1700s, England got into a war with France, concluding with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which ceded 'New France' to England. The English allowed any French to stay who were willing to become subjects of the English King.

At the time of the Treaty of Paris, however, there were very few English speakers in Canada. The American Revolution changed that. The founding English-speaking people of Canada were United Empire Loyalists - people who fled American independence and were rewarded with land in Canada. Thus Canadian English was, from its very beginning, both American - because its speakers had come from the American colonies - and not American, because they rejected the newly independent nation.
Loyal to the Crown
Just as the Americans sought to have a truly distinct, independent American version of English, the loyalists sought to remain more like England... sort of. These were people whose variety of English was already diverging from the British and vice versa: when the residents of London and its environs began to drop their r 's and change some of their vowels people in certain parts of the United States adopted some of these changes, but Canadians did not.

There did end up being more British influx and influence in Canada. After the War of 1812, Mother England encouraged emigration to Canada to ensure that loyal sentiments prevailed. The accent did not become British, though British schoolteachers and authorities did leave their marks on spelling and grammar. Canadians are indeed subjects of the Queen, but they are also neighbours - and the greatest trading partners - of the United States. The British may be family, but Americans are friends. Or sometimes 'frenemies'.

Canadian English varies only a little across most of the continent. The Canadian west was not much settled by Europeans until the late 1800s, when land incentives were given to Anglo-Canadians from Ontario and to immigrants from Britain and some other countries (for example, Ukraine, from where immigrants began arriving in Canada in 1891). There are more distinctions in the Atlantic coast provinces, but especially in Newfoundland, which had been settled by Irish English-speakers and was not officially a province of Canada until 1949.

Today, one-fifth of Canadians have a mother tongue other than English or French - nearly as many as have French as their mother tongue. And yet the basic character of Canadian English still appears like a household of Anglophile Americans, with bits from other cultures mainly in the kitchen, a few traces of the indigenous cultures who used to be the only occupants, and some influence from the French roommate.
'Oot and aboot'
Canadian spelling is, as mentioned, a tug-of-war between the British and the Americans - jail but centre, analyze but colour. Because Canada is bilingual, French may also have an effect. For example, many signs and labels and institutional names are in French and English, and it's easier if you can press a word into double service: Shopping Centre d'Achats.

Also possibly influenced by French is the Canadian eh. French Canadians use hein (also colloquially spelled han) in most of the same kinds of places English Canadians use eh, and they use it more. The eh of Canadian English is not a Canadian invention; it is used in England and elsewhere, but it is used in more different ways in Canada, notably as an emphatic and to maintain conversational involvement: No kidding, eh; Thanks, eh; So I was going to the store, eh, and this guy cut me off. The truth of it is, though, that most Canadians will tell you they don't say "eh" much, and it is more associated with less-educated speech.

The Canadian accent - or accents, since there is a bit of variation across the country (and much more in Newfoundland) and a larger amount across socioeconomic levels - has a few signal features, and they, too, trace partly to the US and partly to Britain. The best-known feature is 'Canadian raising', which affects two specific diphthongs before voiceless consonants: the first part of the diphthong is higher in ice and out than it is in eyes and loud. The out raising makes the vowel sound more like 'oot' to American ears. This feature is present across much but not all of Canada. It may be influenced by Scottish English (many British emigres were Scots), or it may be a relic of Shakespeare-era pronunciation.

Another feature is the 'low back merger', which makes caught and cot sound the same. Following on this is what is called the "Canadian vowel shift", whereby bit sounds a bit like bet, bet sounds a bit like bat, and bat is said a bit farther back in the mouth. This shift is still in progress. These changes seem to have originated in Canada, though similar patterns can be seen in some parts of the US.
Happy 'May two-four weekend'!
Beyond these details, Canadians tend to sound like Americans, especially depending on where the Americans are from. This is why citizens of each country can be blindsided by the unexpected differences peppered throughout the vocabulary. There are many. Katherine Barber, former editor-in-chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, has collected many signature Canadianisms in her book Only in Canada, You Say.

Sometimes Canadians use the same words as Americans in different ways: in Canada, if you write a test, you're the one being tested, while in the US you're the test maker. Sometimes Canadians use different words for the same things: garburator for kitchen disposal, bachelor apartment for studio apartment, runner for sneaker or running shoe, two-four for a case of 24 bottles or cans of beer (the uniquely Canadian holiday Victoria Day, which occurs on a Monday near 24 May, is called the 'May two-four weekend' in reference to this).

Some words refer to things Americans don't seem to have: toque for a kind of fitted knitted hat; poutine, Nanaimo bars, and butter tarts for three of Canada's great culinary gifts to the world if the world would but accept them; Caesar for a bloody Mary made with clamato juice (tomato plus clam). There are hockey metaphors, of course, like deking someone out and stickhandling a problem. There are occasional borrowings from Quebec French (unrecognisable in France) such as the aforementioned poutine, and dépanneur for a convenience store.

These Canadianisms stand as evidence of the difference between Canadian and American culture. It is very important for Canadians to maintain that difference, even if people from Vancouver sound more like people from San Francisco than people from San Francisco sound like people from San Antonio. Though English-speaking Canadians remain loyal to the Queen, they aren't truly interested in being British or sounding British; they're just interested in using the British connection to assert their independence from the independent United States, which they left because they didn't want to leave. An ambivalent situation indeed.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

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Is there such a thing as Canadian English? If so, what is it? The standard stereotype among Americans is that Canadians are like Americans, except they say 'eh' a lot and pronounce 'out and about' as 'oot and aboot'.

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Drag and drop to translate Word (.docx) and PowerPoint (.pptx) files with our document translator.

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DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator

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Drag and drop to translate Word (.docx) and PowerPoint (.pptx) files with our document translator. Popular: Spanish to English, French to English, and Japanese to English. Other languages: Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Swedish.

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Welcome to Macmillan Education Customer Support

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Find definitions for over 300,000 words from the most authoritative English dictionary. Continuously updated with new words and meanings.

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You're welcome to add your favourite sources and sites here or share teaching tips.

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Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (by Barbara Seidlhofer at the University of Vienna) focussing of ELF usage

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In the early 21st century, English in the world finds itself in an "unstable equilibrium": On the one hand, the majority of the world's English users are not native speakers of the language, but use it as an additional language, as a convenient means for communicative interactions that cannot be conducted in their mother tongues.

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BBC documentary (8 episodes)

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The Adventure Of English - BBC Documentary - Google Search

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Various internet sources on the history of English

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Various internet sources on the history of English

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here

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Books | Television Series | Websites - Basic | Websites - More Detailed | Just For Fun

The Adventure of English by Melvin Bragg (Sceptre, 2003)

Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language by David Crystal (Cambridge University Press, 1995)

English as a Global Language by David Crystal (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson (Penguin Books, 1990)

The Adventure of English" (ITV, 2003)

The Story of English (PBS/BBC, 1986)

Alan Cooper's Homonym List (an alphabetical listing of homonyms): http://www.cooper.com/alan/homonym_list.html

Anagram Hall of Fame (some of the best, and longest, anagrams in English): http://wordsmith.org/anagram/hof.html

Anagram Server (generate anagrams for any word or phrase you like): http://wordsmith.org/anagram/

Bartleby.com (complete texts of classic works of literature, reference, Bibles, quotations, etc): http://www.bartleby.com/)

Canadian, British and American Spelling (differences between British and American spelling, and the Canadian hybrid of the two): http://www.lukemastin.com/testing/spelling/

Common Errors in English Usage (online version of Paul Brian's book on the most common vocabulary errors of native speakers): http://www.wsu.edu/%7Ebrians/errors/errors.html

Complete "Anguish Languish" Site (Howard L. Chace's homophonic transliteration of popular fairy tales): http://www.justanyone.com/allanguish.html (there is a version of the most popular of these, "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", with side-by-side translation, at http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/sensen/part2/ten/final_ed_fun_ans.html).

Concise History of the English Language (a rather jaundiced, humorous look at the development of English by Owen Alun and Brendan OCorraidhe): http://www.danshort.com/ie/ConciseHistory.htm

Dictionary of Difficult Words (some of the more obscure entries in the English lexicon): http://www.talktalk.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/difficultwords/

Foreign Phrases Commonly Used in English (words and phrases of foreign origin which are more or less commonly used in English): http://www.lukemastin.com/testing/phrases/

Literature Network (complete texts of almost 7,000 classic books, short stories and poems by over 250 authors): http://www.online-literature.com/ (ReadPrint is another similar site: http://www.readprint.com/)

Lost Beauties of the English Language (dictionary of obsolete and archaic English words): http://www.archive.org/texts/flipbook/flippy.php?id=lostbeautieseng00mackgoog

Modern English to Old English Vocabulary (dictionary of translations from Modern English to Old English): http://www.mun.ca/Ansaxdat/vocab/wordlist.html

Phrase Finder (meanings and origins of English phrases, sayings, idioms and expressions): http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/

RhymeZone (dictionary of rhymes, homophone, synonyms and antonyms): http://www.rhymezone.com/

SMS Dictionary (dictionary of cellphone shorthand abbreviations): http://www.smsfun.com.au/sms_dictionary.php

Thesaurus.com (online thesaurus of synonyms and antonyms): http://www.thesaurus.com/

Urban Dictionary (dictionary of current street slang and neologisms and their usage): http://www.urbandictionary.com/

SmartWritingService.com (Professional English essay writing help for students): https://smartwritingservice.com/english-essay.html

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The History of English - Sources and Links

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Books | Television Series | Websites - Basic | Websites - More Detailed | Just For Fun The Adventure of English by Melvin Bragg (Sceptre, 2003) Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language by David Crystal (Cambridge University Press, 1995) English as a Global Language by David Crystal (Cambridge University Press,

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talks, interviews, lectures on various aspects of the English language, its development and variation
For more info click on David Crystal click here.

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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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The electronic world atlas of varieties of English

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The electronic world atlas of varieties of English

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by Albert Ludwigs Universität Freiburg

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eWAVE 3.0

by Kortmann, Bernd & Lunkenheimer, Kerstin & Ehret, Katharina cite

Welcome to the new updated version of the electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English: eWAVE 3.0!

What is new?

eWAVE 3.0 comprises an additional variety of English, i.e. Croker Island English, and thus counts 77 Englishes spoken around the world. It is the largest available database of English varieties up to date.

eWAVE 3.0 includes new bibliographic references and examples. Some values for the various morphosyntactic features have been updated based on a survey among the 84 eWAVE contributors, directed by Bernd Kortmann and Katharina Ehret. Most notably, there have been substantial changes in the feature ratings of Kenyan English.

The new version of eWAVE also contains Glottocodes for 65 of the 77 varieties based on the classification of Glottolog 4.2.1. These codes serve as unique and persistent identifiers and may facilitate computational matching and retrieval of specific varieties, also across different databases. However, in some cases, in particular for dialects of English, an exact one-to-one match between eWAVE varieties and the Glottolog classification was not possible.

You can find a detailed description of all changes at GitHub.

About

eWAVE was designed and compiled at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and the English Department of the University of Freiburg, Germany, primarily between 2008 and 2011, when it was first released. Release 2.0 (November 2013) was substantially updated and extended. eWAVE is an interactive database on morphosyntactic variation in spontaneous spoken English mapping 235 features from a dozen domains of grammar in now 51 varieties of English (traditional dialects, high-contact mother-tongue Englishes, and indigenized second-language Englishes) and 26 English-based Pidgins and Creoles in eight Anglophone world regions (Africa, Asia, Australia, British Isles, Caribbean, North America, Pacific, and the South Atlantic; see here for a list). It was compiled from descriptive materials, naturalistic corpus data, and native speaker knowledge by a team of 84 contributors, all leading experts in their fields, directed by Bernd Kortmann and Kerstin Lunkenheimer. eWAVE is unique not only in its coverage and user-friendliness, but also in being an open access resource. As such it has the potential for serving both as a teaching tool in academic teaching around the world and as an indispensable research tool for specialists in many different fields of linguistics, including creolistics, dialectology, dialect syntax, language change, language typology, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and the study of World Englishes and learner Englishes.

eWAVE was partly designed and entirely programmed in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig), and is also hosted by the MPI. Since eWAVE is designed as an evolving interactive tool, we are planning to have regular updates. The most recent substantial update (November 2013) introduced two new datasets ( Cape Flats English and Philippine English) as well as a number of updates to existing data points, a host of new examples, and substantial changes to the user interface to fit in with the architecture of the MPI-EVA's other linguistic database projects - most notably APiCS Online (the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online; Michaelis, Maurer, Haspelmath and Huber, eds. 2013).

In January 2013 De Gruyter Mouton published in print the Mouton World Atlas of Variation of English, which offers perspectivizing accounts of the data sets in eWAVE as well as large-scale comparisons and synopses across the individual variety types and Anglophone world regions. Read more here .

What eWAVE can do for you

eWAVE facilitates the investigation of global-scale patterns of morphosyntactic variation in English and helps answering questions like the following:

Which features are most/least widespread across varieties of English worldwide?

How many varieties of English worldwide share feature X?

Is feature X restricted to or characteristic of a particular part of the English-speaking world?

Is feature X restricted to or characteristic of a particular group of varieties?

Does variety A have feature X?

In which area of grammar does variety A differ most from variety B?

The information required to answer questions of this kind can be found in the central parts of eWAVE: the varieties index, the features index, and the individual variety and feature profiles. These combine searchable catalogues of varieties and of morphosyntactic features with interactive maps, and allow you to explore in detail the distribution of features within and across varieties of English and English-based Pidgins and Creoles worldwide. Ultimately, the information provided in eWAVE can also be used for the investigation of more general questions, such as the following: Which features generally are characteristic of a particular variety type (e.g. L2 varieties)? In which domain of grammar is there most/least heterogeneity/homogeneity among varieties of English worldwide? Are English-based pidgins and creoles as a group significantly different from other varieties in terms of morphosyntax?

How to cite eWAVE

eWAVE in general can be referred to in the following way: cite

Kortmann, Bernd & Lunkenheimer, Kerstin & Ehret, Katharina (eds.) 2020.
The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English. Zenodo.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3712132
(Available online at http://ewave-atlas.org, Accessed on 2021-02-26.)

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by Kortmann, Bernd & Lunkenheimer, Kerstin & Ehret, Katharina cite Welcome to the new updated version of the electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English: eWAVE 3.0! eWAVE 3.0 comprises an additional variety of English, i.e. Croker Island English, and thus counts 77 Englishes spoken around the world.

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by Open University

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How did English become the global force it is today? This free course, English in the world today, explores the status of the language and its worldwide diversity. It looks at how social and...

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compiled by Encyclopedia Britannice, supplemented by entertaining short tutorials (videos) by Open Universtiy

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English language | Origin, History, Development, Characteristics, & Facts

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English language, a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to the Frisian, German, and Dutch languages. It originated in England and is the dominant language of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. It has become the world's lingua franca.

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PBS series on English in the USA

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Thirteen/WNET New York's Do You Speak American? - featuring celebrated journalist and writer Robert MacNeil in his first public television documentary since 1995 - is a celebration of Americans as seen - and heard - through the way we speak.

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get to know more about words not based on alphabetic structure but relatedness in concepts

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A resource of about 118 hours of recorded interviews, oral histories and conversations, made between 1941 and 1984

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The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects. The recordings include speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches. They were drawn from various archives, and from the private collections of fifty collectors, including linguists, dialectologists, and folklorists. They were submitted to the Center for Applied Linguistics as part of a project entitled "A Survey and Collection of American English Dialect Recordings," which was funded by the Center for Applied Linguistics and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The collection includes recordings from forty-three states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and parts of Canada. They were made from 1941 to 1984, with the bulk being recorded between 1968 and 1982. In some cases, transcripts (and partial transcripts) made by the collectors are available as part of this web presentation. The survey's documentation covers social aspects of English language usage in different regions of the United States. It reveals distinctions in speech related to gender, race, social class, education, age, literacy, ethnic background, and occupational group (including the specialized jargon or vocabulary of various occupations). The oral history interviews are a rich resource on many topics, such as storytelling and family histories; descriptions of holiday celebrations, traditional farming, schools, education, health care, and the uses of traditional medicines; and discussions of race relations, politics, and natural disasters such as floods.

In 1983, The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, initiated the "Survey and Collection of American English Dialect Recordings," which was undertaken to compile a directory of American speech samples, and ultimately to improve access to them. There were two parts to the project. The first part surveyed collectors of speech samples and resulted in a report entitled " American English Speech Recordings: A Guide to Collections" (PDF, 3MB) which describes over 200 collections. The second part of the project was designed to select from the 200 collections a representative sample of recordings with the goal of "creating a centralized source of American dialect samples and to provide for the preservation of this valuable resource that might otherwise be lost." Additional information about the project may be found in " A Survey and Collection of American English Dialect Recordings" (PDF, 6.1MB).

The recordings from the project's second phase were donated to the Library of Congress in May 1986, and comprise the Center for Applied Linguistics Collection (AFC 1986/022). The collection contains speech samples from over 50 collectors. There are 405 recordings which average about 15 minutes in length. In addition to providing a wide variety of material for the study of American speech, the recordings capture a diverse range of topics and people.

Some of the voices will be quite familiar, such as those of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Other voices, despite the speakers' fame, are seldom heard, such as those of Amelia Earhart, Jack Dempsey, and H. L. Mencken. Most of the recordings, however, are of the voices of people whose specific identities are unknown, but whose comments represent the richness of the American experience. There are Gullah speakers from coastal South Carolina, sharecroppers from Arkansas, Puerto Rican teenagers in New York City, Basque sheepherders from Colorado, Chesapeake Bay watermen, Vietnamese immigrants from Northern Virginia, and many others.

A selection of 350 of the collection's entire 405 audio recordings are available on this website; of these, 148 have accompanying transcripts. The remaining recordings, which could not be posted due to copyright issues and other restrictions, may be heard in the Folklife Reading Room.

Users may notice that descriptive data for the website varies from recording to recording. That is a result of the collection containing material from a wide variety of collectors. The data presented, for the most part, is that which was supplied by the collector.

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About this Collection | American English Dialect Recordings: The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects. The recordings include speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches. They were drawn from various archives, and from the private collections of fifty collectors, including linguists, dialectologists, and folklorists.

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A collection of links to various corpora

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A collection of links to various corpora

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corpora corpus english american iweb movies tv bnc byu coca coha time soap glowbe word frequency

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English Corpora: most widely used online corpora. Billions of words of data: free online access

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Compare genres, dialects, time periods. Search by PoS, collocates, synonyms, and much more.

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The Corpus of Contemporary American English

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The Corpus of Contemporary American English

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Find out about usage of lexical items or chunks in North American English

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american national corpus corpora englishdavies word lists wordlists frequency

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[Davies] 1.1 billion word corpus of American English, 1990-2010. Compare to the BNC and ANC. Large, balanced, up-to-date, and freely-available online.

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by William Labov (University of Pennsylvania)

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This short paper is a slightly enlarged version of a presentation given at ICSLP4, the Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing at Philadelphia, October 6, 1996. This is the first of a series of reports to the speech recognition industry on the present state of sound changes in the United States. It was not included in the Proceedings of the conference since the central data is conveyed in a series of maps of the United States in 8-bit color which could not be accommodated in that publication. In response to a number of requests, it is here made available on the home page of the Phonological Atlas of North America. The data given here will be regularly updated. It will be followed by a more extensive series of maps of the United States and Canada, with full details on the sampling methods, analytic techniques, and demographic data.
The Organization of Dialect Diversity in North America

William Labov,

University of Pennsylvania

Table of Contents

It is now widely recognized that a crucial test for speaker independent recognition systems is their success in dealing with dialect diversity. Sociolinguistic research on linguistic change in progress has found rapid development of sound changes in most urbanized areas of North America, leading to increased dialect diversity. It appears that the dialects of New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Saint Louis, Dallas and Los Angeles are now more different from each other than they were 50 or 100 years ago.

Most efforts to establish dialect regions in the U.S. are based on dialectological studies of vocabulary, begun in the 1930's by Kurath (1939), and completed for the U.S. by the Dictionary of American Regional English (Carver 1987). For most regions, it is not clear how these dialect divisions correspond to differences in pronunciation that would be important for speech recognition. It seems evident to us that any dialect divisions that would be relevant to speech recognition must be based on the distribution of differences in phonological organization, as determined by acoustic analysis.

For the past three years, the Linguistics Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania has been engaged in an effort to supply this information through Telsur, a telephone survey of North America, supported by NSF, NEH and Bell Northern Research. The survey is based on a sampling method that is sensitive to both population and geography. The end product of the survey is the Phonological Atlas of North America, which maps the phonological organization of all English dialects and the extent of ongoing sound changes. The current results of the survey show 500 speakers representing the urbanized areas above 200,000 and a number of smaller localities.

There are two major types of sound changes which affect success rates in speech recognition: mergers and chain shifts. The Telsur interview includes a number of direct inquiries aimed at the presence or absence of phonological mergers, in both perception and production. The maps to follow are based on the phonetic transcription of the 500 interviews, including both spontaneous speech and more formal elicitations by minimal pairs and other methods. The study of urbanized areas is not quite complete, but enough has been done to give a clear picture of national trends.

The first consideration in estimating the extent of dialect diversity is the phonological inventory: how many different segments there are to be modeled, and what distinctions should be shown in the dictionary representations. North American dialects are differentiated by unconditioned mergers, which affect the phonemes wherever they appear, and by conditioned mergers, which occur in a particular environment. There is only one unconditioned merger in the vowel system: the collapse of the distinction between short /o/ and long open /oh/, which distinguishes cot and caught, hock and hawk, Don and dawn. In about half of the geographic United States and all of Canada, these pairs are pronounced the same.

Map 1 shows the extent of this merger in speech production before /t/, as in cot vs. caught. The symbols labelled "same" show speakers who are merged; symbols marked "close" shows pairs that are produced phonetically in close approximation as judged by the analyst, and the symbols labelled "distinct" show speakers who produce a clear distinction. It is immediately apparent that the geographic extent of the merger is quite broad; it covers half the geographic area of the United States (and Canada), though most of the heavily populated areas in the North, North Midland and mid-Atlantic States keep these word classes separate.

The four areas where the merger predominates are delineated by the isoglosses on Map 1a. (1) is Northeastern New England, here shown as including Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and the northeastern portion of Massachusetts, stopping -not far south of the Boston area. Area (2) is Western Pennsylvania. In the Linguistic Atlas maps reflecting the situation in the 1940's (Kurath and McDavid 1961), this region was confined to the area around Pittsburgh. Here it extends northward to include Erie, Pennsylvania on Lake Erie, westward to include a number of cities in Ohio, and southward to West Virginia and northern Kentucky. Though not shown here, the merger is quite solid in Canada, and area (3) appears to be a southward extension of the Canadian merger. Finally, most of the American West is included in area (4), though some variation remains in certain large cities: Los Angeles, the Bay area, and Denver. This merger is continuing to expand and is stronger with younger speakers. Some of the variation in the west reflects the differential ages of the speakers, and some the influence of Southern dialect from settlement patterns of the late 19th century (as in Montana). However, there is no indication that this merger is progressing so rapidly that speech recognition programs can ignore the distinction: on the contrary, the inland North, most of the South, and the mid-Atlantic states show considerable resistance to the spread of this merger. In fact, the transition zone in the midwest, through the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas is just about where it was in the only other national map available, a survey of long distance telephone operators in 1968 (Labov 1991, Figure 1.12).

One of the most widespread conditioned mergers concerns the distinction between /i/ and /e/ before /m/ and /n/, as in pin vs. pen, him vs. hem. This is usually reflected in a high front vowel for both, so that both pin and pen sound like pin to speakers of other dialects. As a result, the two words are normally distinguished as ink pen and safety pin in these areas. The "same" symbols indicate the loss of the distinction; "close" designates speakers who produce the two vowels very close to each other; and the "distinct" tokens are speakers who make a plain distinction. This merger has long been known to be characteristic of Southern States dialects (Kurath and McDavid 1961). Brown 1990 and Bailey and Ross 1992 showed that it was still in the process of expansion in the South. Map 2 indicates that it is quite widespread throughout the South Midland (southern Ohio, central Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Kansas), Texas, and a scattering of points in the West. The areas where the pin ~ pen distinction is solidly maintained include the inland and much of the South Midland, all of Pennsylvania and the Middle Atlantic States. On the other hand, the merger is spreading northward and westward from its base in the South, with a broad zone of variation in the South Midland.

The greatest difficulties for speech recognition are posed not by mergers but by chain shifts of vowels. Over the past two decades, two major patterns of chain shifting have been identified, which rotate the vowels of English in opposite directions (Labov, Yaeger & Steiner 1972, Labov 1990, Labov 1994). To examine these, I will draw upon the 220 speakers for whom complete acoustic analyses are now available. The first chain shift is the Northern Cities Shift, shown in Figure 1 below.

The Northern Cities Shift is found throughout the industrial inland North and most strongly advanced in the largest cities: Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Flint, Gary, Chicago, Rockford. The shift begins when /æ/, the vowel of cad, moves to the position of the vowel of idea /i'/ (1). The vowel /o/ in cod then shifts forward so that it sounds like cad to speakers of other dialects (2). /oh/ in cawedmoves down to the position formerly occupied by cod (3), /e/ in Ked moves down and back to sound like the vowel of cud (4), / cud moves back to the position formerly occupied by cawed (5), and /i/ in kid moves back in parallel to the movement of /e/ (6).

A more concrete view of the Northern Cities Shift can be obtained from Chart 1/Rochester. The chart shows the F1, F2 measurements of the six vowels involved for Sharon K., a 35-year old woman from Rochester, NY. The mean value for each vowel is displayed in a white circle. In Sharon K.'s speech stages 1-5 of the shift have gone to completion. (1) Short /æ/ has moved from lower front to high front position, while (2) short /o/ has moved forward to the position vacated by /æ/, and (3) long open /oh/ has moved down to the position vacated by /o/. At the same time, short /e/ has moved down and back until it is positioned in low central position, directly above /o/, while wedge, the vowel of cut has moved back to the position vacated by /oh/.

To assess the effects of the Northern Cities Shift, it may be helpful to compare the relative positions of the vowels involved for two advanced representatives of the shift with two speakers who are quite remote from its influence. Figure 2 displays the normalized means of five short vowels and /oh/. The two Southern speakers, from Springfield, Missouri and Greenville, South Carolina, show the short front vowels vertically aligned, and wedge somewhat front of short /o/, which is in low back position, not far from /oh/. Below them are two Detroit speakers, mother and daughter, who show a developed and advanced stage of the Northern Cities Shift. Here /æ/ has risen to upper mid front position, considerably fronter than short /i/, and /e/ has fallen to mid central position. For Leslie R., /e/ is still to the front of /o/, but for the daughter, Janice, the fronting of /o/ and the further backing of /e/ has led to what is almost a vertical alignment. At the same time, wedge has moved back and /oh/ down, so that it is now directly above /oh/.

Figure 2. Normalized means of the vowels involved in the Northern Cities Shift for two Southern and two Northern speakers.

On the other hand, the Southern Shift, found throughout the Southern States, South Midland, and many other areas, moves vowels in an opposite direction. The shift begins when /ay/ becomes monophthongized and shifts slightly to the front (1). The nucleus of the diphthong /ey/ then falls along a non-peripheral track until it becomes the lowest vowel in the system (2). The nucleus of the diphthong /iy/ follows a parallel path towards mid-center position (3). The short front vowels /i, e/ shift forward and up until they reach the front peripheral positions formerly occupied by /iy/ and /ey/, and /æ/ moves in parallel (4). The nuclei of /uw/ and /ow/ then shift forward to front and center positions (5,6). /ohr/ (now most often merged with /owr/ ) moves up to high back position (7), and /ahr/ shifts up and back to the position that /ohr/ vacated (8).

The operation of the Southern Shift is illustrated in detail in Chart 2/Birmingham , which shows the relevant vowels in the normalized system of Thelma M. from Birmingham, Alabama. In this doubly linear plot, the vertical dimension is the first formant, which corresponds roughly to phonetic height, and the horizontal dimension is the second formant, which corresponds roughly to fronting and backing of the vowel. The individual vowel tokens are plotted with colored symbols, and the means as black and white circles. The key to each vowel token is given at the right: the vowels that are actually plotted are shown with lettering in reverse. In Chart 2/Birmingham, the schematic view of the Southern Shift in Figure 3 is shown as it actually realized. The three short front vowels, /i/, /e/, /æ/ have retained their vertical organization, and have moved up and to the front, in a peripheral position. On the other hand, the long vowel /iy/ in be and the long vowel /ey/ in made have shifted down and to the center along a centralized, non-peripheral track. The /ey/ vowel now has a low nucleus, extending down to overlap to a considerable extent with /ay/, which is monopthongized to [a:]. The back vowels /uw/ and /ow/ have moved strongly to the front, while /ahr/ and /ohr/ show an upward chain shift in the back.

The Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Shift are both complex relations of 6 to 10 vowels. One of the goals of the Telsur project is to derive a small set of numerical parameters which can place each speaker's system within the overall configuration of the regional dialects of North America in a way that reflects both geographic and linguistic regularities. Two such parameters will be presented here: /e reversal and e/o alignment.They are designed primarily as measures of participation in the Northern Cities Shift, but they also isolate Southern systems, since the movements of the Southern Shift are diametrically opposed to movements of the Northern Cities Shift.

The first parameter is a discrete transformation of the quantitative relations of short /æ/ in man, bad, cat, etc. and short /e/ in pen, bet, bed, etc. Step 1 of Figure 1 begins with /æ/ in low front position, further back and lower than /e/. As /æ/ moves forward, their relative positions change. First /æ/ shifts to a position where it is fronter than /e/ but still lower, and eventually reaches a position where it is both higher and fronter. This reversal is accelerated as /e/ moves down and back in step 4 of Figure 1.

Map 3 shows the geographic distribution of these relative positions of short // and short /e/. As indicated by the legend, the red circles show the situation characteristic of conservative and Southern dialects, where /e/ is lower and backer than /æ/. The yellow circles show speakers where /æ/ has moved to the front, but is not yet higher than /e/; the blue circles are all those systems where the relative positions are now reversed.

It is immediately clear that the blue circles are confined to the area of the Northern dialect region, ranging from Chicago in the western portion to Grand Rapids, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse. The grey line through Pennsylvania and the Midwest is a useful point of reference here. This is the line separating the Northern dialect area from the North Midland, drawn by Carver (1987) on the basis of the distribution of words in the Dictionary of American Regional English. The lexical isogloss drawn from the DARE data, separating North from North Midland, sharply delimits this aspect of the Northern Cities Shift. On the other hand, the most conservative relation between /æ/ and /e/ dominates the Southern and Western dialects, with the intermediate stage characteristic of the North Midland.

A second parameter of the Northern Cities Shift concerns the front/back alignment of short /e/ and short /o/. The starting point for these sound changes, indicated by the position of the ellipses in Figure 1, shows short /e/ well in front and higher than short /o/. In step 2 of Figure 1, /o/ moves forward, and in step 4, /e/ moves to the back. Each step in the Northern Cities Shift reduces the difference between the F2 of /e/ and the F2 of /o/, so that for the most advanced stage of the shift, seen in Figure 2, /e/ is directly aligned with /o/ on the F2 axis.

Map 4 shows six categories in the F2 differentiation of short /e/ and /o/. Red circles show speakers whose mean F2 difference between /e/ and /o/ is over 800 Hz. These are clearly confined to the Southern dialect area. Orange circles, with 600-800 Hz differences are characteristic of the South Midland and the West extending from Ohio to Kansas. Closer positions of /e/ and /o/ are shown by green and light blue symbols; the dark blue symbols show the speakers for whom /e/ and /o/ are vertically aligned, characteristic of the advanced stages of the Northern Cities Shift. Again, this pattern is found only in the Northern dialect region, and appears in all of the large cities of that area.

A third index of the North/South axis is independent of the Northern Cities Shift: it concerns the relative fronting of /aw/ and /ay/. In the North, most speakers have a nucleus of /aw/ back of center, while /ay/ is center or front of center. In the North Midland and the South, and most of the West, these relations are reversed, as shown in Map 5.

On Map 5, the darkest circles labelled "< 50" in the legend indicate speakers for whom the difference between the mean F2 of /aw/ and the mean F2 of /ay/ is less than 50 Hz; The medium circles labelled "50-300" show all those speakers with a difference between 50 and 300 Hz; the circles labelled "> 300" show strong fronting of /aw/, with a difference of over 300 Hz. It is evident that the blue circles are confined to an area north of the North/Midland isogloss, but here this northern trait extends westward through the North Central states. The green circles are characteristic of the South, but are also well represented in the South Midland portions of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and dominate the more western extension of the South Midland in Missouri and Kansas.

Given the number of parameters involved in comparing two-dimensional plots of sixteen vowels, it seems reasonable to submit the matrix to a principal components analysis and see whether the geographic areas identified on the map will emerge from the overall pattern of the data Chart 3 shows the first two components that emerge from a matrix of nineteen acoustic measures for the 220 speakers analyzed. The first component, U1, has an eigenvalue that accounts for exactly one third of the variance; U2, for one eighth. (U3 is slightly less than an eighth, and the other eigenvalues are much smaller.)

The various points, each corresponding to a speaker, are colored according to the dialect: dark blue is the Northern Cities and blue-green is North Central. These clearly cluster at the high end of U1. Red circles show Southern speakers, and purple South Midland, which clearly cluster at the low end of U1. It is quite clear that U1 is the North/South axis which several of the earlier figures have shown to be an organizing principle of dialect differentiation. It also represents the advancement of the two sets of sound changes. Note that the high point, labeled Detroit 14, is the 14-year-old daughter of the speaker labeled Detroit 42. The lowest outlier is 39-year-old Thelma M. from Birmingham, whom we saw earlier as the most advanced representative of the Southern Shift in the set of acoustic analyses done so far.

Along the U2 axis, we see the separation of the eastern from the western sections of the South Midland: Four Kansas speakers, who aligned strongly with the South on the /aw/-/ay/ parameter, are clustered at right with high values of U2, while the Southern mountain speakers are grouped at left, with low U2 values.

Our data collection in the South and Canada is still incomplete, and there is much more to be said about the dialectal situation in the West. Yet as a first result, these acoustic analyses yield new quantitative methods for aligning dialects along the North/South axis which we believe will be quite useful in speech recognition. It must be noted that the sharpest North/South division is far from the Mason-Dixon line: it is the great divide between the North and North Midland dialects. On one side of this line are the large cities of the inland North from Madison in the west to Syracuse in the east, which follow the Northern Cities Shift with extraordinary homogeneity. South of this line are the large cities of the North Midland, which follow other and more diverse principles: Pittsburgh, Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Evansville, Saint Louis. South of the Ohio River, we find once again uniform patterns of vowel shifting: the Southern Shift governs the vowel development of Appalachia as well as the coastal South.

The Phonological Atlas provides the first national view of American phonology, more systematic and considerably simpler than the information that has been gleaned from dialectology over the past sixty years. In place of the gradual decay of rural dialects, we see the rapid development of new sound changes in all the urbanized areas. Instead of a long list of dialect features, the Telsur telephone survey provide a small set of parameters that can be located at any given dialect in relation to others. At the same time, the Telsur project has verified the revolutionary conclusions that Kurath and McDavid derived from the Linguistic Atlas : that there are three coequal regions of American dialects, the North, the Midland and the South. The boundary between the North and the North Midland, which is hidden from popular awareness and seemed obscure to many scholars, emerges as the most important feature on the landscape of American English.

References

Bailey, Guy and Garry Ross 1992. The evolution of a vernacular. In M. Rissanen et al., History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 519-531.

Brown, Vivian. 1990. The social and linguistic history of a merger: /i/ and /e/ before nasals in Southern American English. Texas A & M University dissertation.

Carver, Craig M.. 1987. American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press.

Kurath, Hans and Raven I. McDavid, Jr. 1961. The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan.

Labov, William. 1991. The three dialects of English. In P. Eckert (ed.), New Ways of Analyzing Sound Change. New York: Academic Press. Pp. 1-44.

Labov, William 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 1: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Labov, William, Malcah Yaeger & Richard Steiner. 1972. A Quantitative Study of Sound Change in Progress. Philadelphia: U. S. Regional Survey.

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The Organization of Dialect Diversity in North America

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This short paper is a slightly enlarged version of a presentation given at ICSLP4, the Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing at Philadelphia, October 6, 1996. This is the first of a series of reports to the speech recognition industry on the present state of sound changes in the United States.

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by George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia (USA) - browse the archive for a comparison of English accents based on a reading of the same text by various native and non-native speakers of English

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The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.