What's the difference?

I can't distinguish between a Canadian and a generic US accent. I can recognise a New York accent or a Southern drawl but other than that I wouldn't know either way.

Most of the Canadian i have met when working in the travel industry wear a maple leaf and very quickly say they are Canadian not American!

we travel with friends from Canada and they always have the maple leaf displayed on their day packs. They have even offered to send us a couple for our day packs.

I think Canadians from the "Midwest" sound like US citizens from our Upper Midwest … I think Canadians from BC have no discernable accent like us from the PNW.

I am with JC. And it doesn’t matter!

Canadians are superior physically, intellectually, morally, and spiritually.

Why the USA doesn't just take over that country is mystifying. It would take three days.

Yeah, no. I'd take that article with a pound of salt. Since she limits it to only middle class Anglophones born in Canada, but only those in urban centers west of Ottawa, she's ruled out about half the population. I also will give a side eye to someone who didn't grow up in either of these countries.

As a Canadian, I can usually pick out a Canadian (amongst the Americans) in conversation, from their accent, their vocabulary, or both. The maple leaf pins may be a hint, but I've seen too many Americans abroad with them, trying to "pass". So if I see one, I'll ask where they're from. I'm not sure that people from other countries often pick up on the subtle differences between central Canadian accents and general US accents. More often than not, in Europe, I will be asked if I'm American. Even in the States I've had people be surprised when I tell them I'm not American. But DH is a Maritimer, and even after living away for 40 years, the accent is still with him.

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard a fellow Canadian says “eh”

I have many Canadian relatives, all of whom live in Ontario. Several of them say "eh" a lot, but I believe that several of them don't. But other than that, I don't consider them to have any kind of a noticeable accent. However, my nephew-in-law always says "bahhsel" instead of "baysel" for basil. But that's really a British thing, and he's not British.

I have to disagree with Allan about the Canadian pronunciation of the “ou” sound, as in the word about. There is a definite, though subtle difference from how we Unitedstatesians (we’re all North Americans) pronounce it. I can almost always pick out Canadians if I hear them say out, about, or similar words .
As to behavior, while lots of my countrymen are polite, I would say that every Canadian I’ve met is mannerly and just so shockingly nice.
The spelling differences, of course, are a legacy of Canada’s longer colonial history. English language spelling wasn’t standardized until after the independence of the U.S., so it was done independently of that of English English.

As an American I can usually determine if someone is from Canada. I don’t think our Midwest accents sound Canadian at all.
I think some Americans started to say they were from Canada during the aircraft hijackings years ago.

Most of the Canadian i have met when working in the travel industry
wear a maple leaf and very quickly say they are Canadian not American!

we travel with friends from Canada and they always have the maple leaf
displayed on their day packs.

Sounds like dangerous nationalism to me. You know what comes next!!!

Yeah, no. I'd take that article with a pound of salt. Since she limits
it to only middle class Anglophones born in Canada, but only those in
urban centers west of Ottawa, she's ruled out about half the
population.

The author says just what you said - she acknowledges quite clearly both the limitations of the phrase "Standard Canadian English" and the existence of numerous other dialects. She's not trying to describe all of Canada's English dialects, just the one that linguists themselves call "standard." I think it's legitimate to question what makes a certain dialect "standard" and other dialects "non-standard", if that's your concern, but she's just using the term as academic linguists normally do.

I also will give a side eye to someone who didn't grow up in either of
these countries.

Well, this person is a linguist. One thing linguists agree on is that native speakers, no matter their language or dialect, do not fully understand how their own language really works - not without serious study, anyway. Most native American English speakers, for example, will tell you that English has 5 vowels - when in fact those same people actually use around 14-15 vowels every day. You can communicate perfectly in English without being able to explain a single thing about phonology or syntax.

It might sound counterintuitive, but it's actually a routine thing for linguists to research and analyze languages and dialects that they have never spoken or perhaps even heard previously. Several German-born linguists have contributed heavily to English-language linguistics. American sociolinguist William Labov (white academic) did not grow up speaking Black English, but he is one of the country's foremost authorities on it.

American English speakers, for example, will tell you that English has 5 vowels - when in fact those same people actually use around 14-15 vowels every day

And the other 9-10 are......?

Joe32F ,

And the other 9-10 are......?

Difficult to express unless you know the International Phonetic Alphabet. Don't confuse the 5 (or 6, if you count "sometimes y") letters that we use to depict vowels sounds with the actual sounds themselves. Just think about all the different sounds we make that we spell with, oh, let's say, the letter "o." Or think about all the combinations of letters we use to come up with different pronunciations, because we don't have enough vowel symbols.

In another life, I was a linguist with an emphasis on phonology, and it's true that it is very difficult to analyze one's own language. Our preconceived notions get in the way of what the sounds actually are. The same holds for syntax.

Russ's discussion is dead on.

And Russ, in the summer of 1977, I took a course from Labov during a special summer session sponsored, I think, by the Linguistic Society of America. Wow.

Pretty cool, Jane. That beats me for contact with famous linguists, though I once had a 1-minute chat in early-80's San Diego with Stephen Krashen.

And the other 9-10 are......?

The 5-6 that you refer to are letters, but as Jane says, this is about speech sounds. The IPA symbols are visual representations for the actual sounds we make. But let's not go there. You can probably hear the different vowels if you say the words in bold below and focus on them.

make has two "letter vowels" but just one "sound vowel." Each of the other 14 words below also has one sound vowel, and each is a distinct sound from the vowel in "make." (There aren't enough "letter vowels" to represent all the actual vowel sounds, which is one reason that English spelling is not easy to learn.)

make
mack
mock
muck
meek
cook
kook
woke
wick
peck
loud
kite
toy
saw
bird

Russ's discussion may be "dead on", but let's not get bogged down in the minutiae of linguistic academics. The fact remains that in the real world there is no more a "standard" Canadian linguistic pattern than there is a standard American one. Both countries have so many regional variations, that it may well be easier to identify their country of origin by their "nonstandard" speech and vocabulary than some arbitrarily restrictive "standard" that applies only to one subsection. Aside from idle curiosity, or perhaps under examination from a skeptical border agent, I'm not sure many people really care.

CJean, but, but ... Russ and I are having so much fun!

I know, I know; this is a great example of hijacking someone's thread. I'm a great admirer of Allan and his threads, and hope to meet him and even travel with him some day, so I'll desist.

I had some other examples for joe32F, these dealing with consonants, which are even harder for non-linguists to accept. For example, did you know that the "p" sound in "pill" is not the same as the "p" sound in "spill"? And even harder, the "ll" in "baseball" is not even close to the "ll" sound in "ballet."

Okay, I'll stop. Carry on, Canadian vs Usian.

CJean: I don't think today's linguists think of the "standard" label as restrictive (or prescriptive) but see it rather as a useful generalization that captures common linguistic patterns. Many Americans DO speak the standard variety - or something very close to it. Standard American English is a pretty useful tool in the education of newcomers and English learners living abroad. All Americans are familiar with it because they listen to it every day in our media, where it is prominent no matter what region of the country you live in or how you speak there. In Germany, the standard/non-standard distinction is a little different but also strong. "High German" is spoken in certain regions but is similarly understood throughout the German-speaking world; it's perhaps even more useful and unifying there, where there is wider regional variation. But High German doesn't constrain the use of local dialect.

Labov's research did much to validate non-standard speech communities and their dialects - and to invalidate the efforts of some educators who sought to shame or outlaw non-standard dialects in decades past. He also demonstrated that US dialects today, generally speaking, are less regionally-determined and more socially-determined than ever before. But he didn't have to dismantle the concept of "Standard English" to do this. It does exist. And thank goodness it hasn't yet been dismantled in the arena of spelling! Just imagine the chaos if we all started writing the way we talk!

There is a useful and free IPA phonetic keyboard available for iOS here:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ipa-phonetic-keyboard/id1440241497

I realize that I live in a bubble in more ways than one, but it still sets my teeth on edge when I see sentiments expressed in a forum that I enjoy which typify the anti-intellectual trend in American culture(s) like those comments above which assume that precision and accuracy are only for specialists or nitpickers. Travel is supposed to be broadening to the mind. Or so I've heard.

I happen to agree with CJean that this is hardly a life-or-death topic! But with the current scarcity of real travel topics, sometimes the responses are the most interesting part.

It's all Greek to me...

waves hand - Uh - I say 'eh' a lot. shrugs

As for accents - my husband and I have been mistaken for Scottish or Irish - in Italy - one was a woman who said she was a linguist, the other - a couple from...Ontario - who thought my husband was Scottish. I do like to put a little burr in my pronunciation sometimes.

And my sister - who moved to the UK and works at a grocery store - said she was always being asked if she was Scot or Irish.

As for telling us apart - I guess if they had a strong accent - met a fellow in the South of France and we just knew he was from NY...and I could pick out a midwest 'Fargo' accent, and of course southern, otherwise, if they were from California or Chicago, I probably couldn't tell the diff between them and someone from TO or BC.

I know, I know; this is a great example of hijacking someone's thread.
I'm a great admirer of Allan and his threads, and hope to meet him and
even travel with him some day, so I'll desist.

I enjoyed the linguistic debate this turned into. In my pea sized brain I expected simple answers that yes, Canadian/American accents are distinct, or no, Canadian/American accents are the same.

*Jane, I'm glad our future date at an art museum is still on.

As for my view on the topic, in Canada, the only accent differences I notice are the maritime provinces and of course the French accents in Quebec., the rest sounds the same to me. I do tend to notice the varying American accents in the east and south, but I don't hear it in the midwest to California.

The best comment I've ever heard about telling the difference was in London a couple of years ago. We were in a restaurant in Covent Garden in London and our waiter asked us if we were American. I said no, we're Canadian. He then said he should have known because we didn't ask for ketchup. I'm not sure if that's an accurate nationality test, but to him it was a distinction.

"in London and our waiter asked us if we were American. I said no, we're Canadian. He then said he should have known because we didn't ask for ketchup."

Allan - you are so right.

Our dialect didn't give enough hints. In Rennes, Fr. we were identified as American (not British) when DH asked for a hamburger rare - not well done. I laughed at DH as I ate my escargot and he gratefully consumed the best hamburger ever.

So Allan, what food item was it that you didn't ask for ketchup on? (Awk, that sounded awkward.)

I generally think of ketchup (catsup?) as mostly just a kid thing now, sorta passé for adult Americans. I'd have thought they'd ask for ranch (fries, pizza??) these days. But perhaps a lot of US drive-through eaters have become European tourists in recent years??

BMWBGV, we did invade Canada twice, and failed: during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. So they must have something going for them.🙂

Anyone who is interested in the distinctions and origins of US regional accents, there are a couple of good youtube videos on the subject eric singer linguist that discusses the subject very well.

I think Brits would be surprised at how many (most?) Americans have trouble distinguishing between UK, Australian, Welsh, NI, and New Zealand accents, let alone the dozens of varieties of regional accents just in England itself.

As Donna said, to me, western Canada and Ontario accents sound pretty close to standard US language, but the middle part is similar to Minnesota/North Dakota, north Wisconsin. That is, Upper Midwest". We Lower Midwesterners sound normal.🙂 If I heard that "aboat" thing, I'd assume first it was a Minnesotan. That Quebec accent however sounds almost French.🤔

Hey, is that term "USians" a thing? Or was it just invented here?

Our dialect didn't give enough hints. In Rennes, Fr. we were identified as American (not British) when DH asked for a hamburger rare - not well done. I laughed at DH as I ate my escargot and he gratefully consumed the best hamburger ever.

There's a reason for the advice not to eat hamburgers rare and that's because of the risk of bacterial contamination. With a steak the outside of the meat is seared and any bacteria on the surface is killed, the same with a roasted joint of meat etc. When mincing meat you mix in the potentially contaminated surface meat with the rest and if serving it insufficiently cooked throughout you risk food poisoning.

There are plenty of restaurants in the UK serving 'pink' burgers but they have to source their meat in accordance with the Food Standards Agency who ensures that they comply with the rules or have a system in place such as 'sear and shave' or 'sear and mince' where the surface of the meat is briefly cooked sufficiently to kill off any bacteria and then either removed and minced or simply minced.

Unless I'm confident that the restaurant has followed appropriate guidelines when serving minced meat raw or undercooked then my burger is going to be served cooked throughout.

JC - I get the reasoning for well done vs pink... but thought it funny that they identified us by our choice - not voice.

Thanks for posting a fun topic. I’ve always been intrigued by dialects and accents. I’m born and bred Ohio and and am still amazed that Mary, merry and marry don’t sound the same to everyone else.

Denny—if I remember from long ago, Cleveland English was what was taught to radio announcers.

«  The Quebec accent however sounds almost French. » LOL So true, 17th century, west coast of France, that is. One of my dearest friends is a French linguist from Quebec.

My best friend and her family are from Vancouver. They all say “eh” quite a bit. I can pick out a Canadian accent easily. They make fun of my slow Midwestern drawl.

just this morning I was zoom-adjacent to people from North Dakota and Alberta joking around, and I recognized references like Tim Horton's but did not recognize 'ketchup chips' and they explained to me that there are ketchup-flavored potato chips and they are popular in Canada -- I'd never heard of them before today, and I've been here since I was this tall, so that's counter to the notion that the USA has a ketchup advantage over Canada.

I have no idea why we brag about ketchup chips, yuck. I rank them at the same level as creamed corn and mushy peas.

I found ketchup crisps at a local store specializing in British food imports. Interesting but once was enough.

Ketchup still going strong among adults here in the midwest.

I grew up in Southeast Michigan. I pronounce "about" and "house" with a dipthong that starts approximately with an unrounded low-back vowel and glides to something close to a high back partly rounded vowel. I have heard Canadians pronounce the same ou phoneme, with a dipthong that ends the same way as my ou phoneme but starts with something approximately like a schwa, or approximately somewhere between an unrounded mid-central to mid-back vowel. So the starting point of this dipthong phoneme just seems to be raising and/or raising and centralizing, for some Canadians. I would expect Canadians in Windsor and locations near Michigan, to only have minor differences in accent compared to me. I am not able to verify whether some Canadians have have dropped the glide of the phoneme and turned it into a monothong high back rounded vowel.

I know there is something called Canadians raising, which characterises my speech: before unvoiced consonants, in words like ice, rice, dice, bite, and so on, I pronounce the vowel with a dipthong phoneme that starts on ^ in international phonetic symbols or a vowel similar to schwa but maybe more back and lower, like in "cut", and then glides towards something close to a high front unrounded vowel between the i- in bit and the ee in reach. Before voiced consonants, I have a dipthong that starts low, back and unrounded and ends at the same place and quality, like in ride, guide, tide; except for me, I have at least one weird minimal pair: "hire" as in to add an employee to a business has the "unvoiced" phoneme, but to be in a plane and get higher, as in increase in altitute, has the "voiced" phoneme. Otherwise I can't have the back-low unrounded to high front unrounded dipthong before a mid-central r-colored r-phoneme.

Well said, Mike L.
I think it might be part of a general raising as you go westward - I remember a friend, and linguistics amateur, from Baltimore who was alarmed to find that coastal Californians of the valley-girl stripe were pronouncing the exclamation
"Gee, these cookies are really good!"
with only one vowel all the way through. Wow, non?!

One more bit of local accent trivia. I grew up in Chicago. My cousin, who still lives in Milwaukee (100 miles away?) has a slightly but clearly different accent. I can usually pick out people from Milwaukee within seconds of hearing them speak.

One subtle difference I've noticed between Canadian and American speech is pronunciation of a few words, where the first syllable is emphasized. A few examples......

• Insurance - some Americans (especially from southern areas) seem to emphasize the first two letters, whereas Canadians don't.
• Transformer - again the first five letters are often emphasized by Americans. I heard that pronunciation quite regularly during my many years working for an electrical utility.

I don't know whether it's my pronunciation of words like "out" or "about", but I'm usually identified as a Canadian fairly quickly when I'm south of the 49th.

About ketchup - I learned from a Montrealer roommate, back in the day, that the only good way to eat fries (or chips) is sprinkled with malt vinegar. And all the Canadians I know call the last letter of the alphabet zed - it comes up fairly often in conversation because most of us play a lot of Scrabble.

I grew up in Chicago and after living here in Israel for a year, I went back for a visit and was horrified to hear (for the very first time in my life) the Chicago accent everyone had. Decades have passed and I now when I visit I hear the accent less and less, though if you are from Chicago, you know it's pronounced Chicawgo and you never go to someone's home, you go by them, as we went by Mom's for dinner last Sunday.

I find regional vocabulary as interesting. Soda vs pop or soda pop; interstate vs expressway vs highway vs freeway are just a couple of examples that spring to mind.

Mike L: That hire/higher distinction is an interesting one. I sorta suspect that shire/shyer would also constitute a minimal pair for you (if in fact you ever were to utter "shire" for some reason.) Maybe the -er morpheme in that environment requires a level of "communication emphasis" for you - and it becomes its own syllable, thus moving from post-vocalic to syllable-initial position, and leaving your diphthong in an open syllable - which should result in a vowel pretty much the same as your pre-voiced-consonant vowel (as in "hide" or "shied.")

If this is so, then your "peculiarity" seems phonologically systematic IMO - and your two diphthongs are still allophones rather than phonemes.

A long, long time ago...when I was young...I accompanied our American CEO to some client meetings in Calgary. For some inexplicable reason (we were 3000 miles from Quebec), he started a long rant about how the Quebecois accent is so dreadful, not at all like proper Parisian French yadda yadda. I desperately wanted to tell him that he did not speak the Queen's English himself...but being young, female and at a much lower pay grade kept my mouth shut!

@Tom: “zed”, another remnant of Canada’s colonial past. Now how did it get transformed into “zee,” when it is zed in every other anglophone country?

@Chani: Ah, yes, that Chicago accent, mostly heard in a twangy way of pronouncing the short a vowel sound. A few years ago, I received a call from a cousin I hadn’t seen or heard from in, probably, 50 years, with family history questions. By the time he had uttered 4 or 5 words, I knew it was someone from Chicago. Since by then, I didn’t know anyone else in my hometown, I also knew that it was likely one of my relatives.
Btw, I still call it Chicawgo, not Chic(short o)go.

I find language evolution fascinating, especially in what it reveals about human history.

L

I would pronounce "Shire", the word I think refers to historic regions in England, with the "unvoiced" dipthong, starting with a mid-low semi back unrounded vowel the same or similar to the u in cut, gliding toward an unrounded high-front vowel between the vowel in fit and the vowel in "bead". So it would be 3 phonemes: post alveolar fricative-, unrounded dipthong starting near schwa but slightly more back and lower gliding to high front unrounded, then mid-central r-colored semi-vowel r-phoneme. "Shyer", as in more shy than somebody else, would have the "voiced" dipthong phoneme, low-back-unrounded to high-front-rounded. But I am vaguely aware that British speakers delete the dipthong in "shire", making it have only two phonemes, making it sound the same as how I say "sure". I say "sure" with only two phonemes, post-alveolar fricative-, mid-central unrounded r-colored semi-vowel. Some speakers have 3 phonemes in "sure", they have a high back rounded vowel before the r phoneme.

Hmmm, who knew? While the Canadian way of spelling has British tendencies, our accent was heavily influenced by the Americans;

Canadian English was partly shaped by early immigrants from the UK and Ireland, but it was affected much more by the arrival of about 45,000 loyalists to the British crown during the American Revolutionary War.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160921-where-does-canadas-accent-come-from

I generally can tell American from Canadian accents and usage, but not always.

The thing that surprised me is that many, if not most, French people cannot distinguish between American and British anglophones.

Then again, I suppose that would be like expecting the average American to distinguish between French and Belgian francophones.

I read more about Canadian raising. Canadian raising affects two pairs of dipthongs. My own speech (I grew up in southeast Michigan) only has the raising for the one pair i mentioned: low-back to high front dipthong before voiced consonants, raised to starting near the u sound of cut, a little more back and lower than schwa and gliding to high-front, before unvoiced consonants. Canadian English speakers have an additional raising in the low back to high back dipthong of words like house, round, about, out, and so on. I pronounce "round", "house", "ounce", sound" "out" all with the same low-back to high-back dipthong. But Canadians English speakers, or at least a lot of them, raise the starting place of the dipthong before voiced consonants: they would pronounce "round" the same way I do, but before unvoiced consonants, like in "house" or "about", the vowel is a dipthong starting approximately at mid-central to mid-back, gliding to high back. The idea that Canadians have a high-back-monothong vowel in "about" and "out" is a false exaggerations or false stereotype. So in Southeast Michigan, Canadian raising only affects the low-back to high front dipthong before unvoiced consonants; but the low-back to high-back dipthong is never raised, at least not yet, not that I am aware of.

I have another minimal pair: I would pronounce "tire", the black rubber part of the wheel of a vehicle, with the raised dipthong that sounds like it starts with the u of cut, lower and more back than schwa, to high front. But I would pronounce "tier" with the low back to high-front dipthong.

"Spire" for me has the raised dipthong.

I always prounce "fire" with the raised dipthong, whether I am referring to the hot chemical reaction that usually emits flames of visible light, or dismissing an employee from an organization.

"Dire" has the raised dipthong.

On BBC Radio comedies one way they mark northern England residents, and josh them, is with a similar raising that you mention here, Mike L, regarding 'round' and 'house';
there's some kind of long-running gardening show, I believe, who has a northerner as co-host and who exhibits this kind of pronunciation, to general tittering by those closer to London and the professions.

"But I would pronounce "tier" with the low back to high-front dipthong."

You're losing me here, Mike. This "tier" doesn't rhyme with "pier" - right? So what the heck does it mean? "One who ties" perhaps? Weird word, but I think that's the word you mean.

If that's it, then you have what looks like a consistent phonological pattern. You use that low-back-starting diphthong before an -er suffix:

high + -er
shy + -er
ti/ty + -er

And when the "r" sound is not part of a separate morpheme or suffix (as in "hire" or "shire" or "tier") you use the "raised" diphthong.

This difference is driven by morphology but I don't think it's peculiar - and I will still call it a systematic phonological pattern within your dialect.

The "unraised" diphthong is not something used only before final consonants, but also when there is no final consonant... it's the same vowel that you would use in an open syllable like (no final consonant) as in "high" or "shy" or "tie" - right? So I'm pretty sure what's happening is this... the "r" in the suffix examples is turned into a second syllable (syllabic consonant) because of the meaning the suffix "r" adds (it's your inner language mechanism's way of adding emphasis to the -er morpheme.) And and now that it stands as its own syllable, the base word (high, shy, tie) becomes the initial syllable - and that syllable is now "open" because it ends in a vowel - and since that vowel is your diphthong, the "unraised" version of it is the only one possible; a raised diphthong in this position would be completely irregular without a voiceless consonant to follow it.

So IMHO, in your dialect/idiolect, the two diphthongs you are discussing are not separate phonemes that serve to distinguish minimal pairs (minimal pairs must have the same syllabification to qualify) but instead allophonic variants of the same diphthong phoneme.

The thing that surprised me is that many, if not most, French people cannot distinguish between American and British anglophones. Then
again, I suppose that would be like expecting the average American to
distinguish between French and Belgian francophones.

A couple years on our RS Loire to the South of France tour, our guide talked about regional accents in France and how easy it was to tell where a person was from. She used herself and our driver as an example. It all sounded French to me.

'Mauve' Here is an audio clip of 4 different pronounciations. Canadian pronounciation, that I hear, is more British, but less accent and slightly longer hold of the 'long O' sound. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CrKF3_qr4Io
The use of 'drug' as a past tense of 'drag'. 🤔😕
Not sure anyone clicked one of the articles at the end explaining why European french cannot understand Quebecois.
Put it all down to historical influence and evolution...and totally understandable. Neither right or wrong....well, except for the usage of 'drug'....

Russ: I was mispronouncing "tier" when used to mean "a level, rank, row, or shelf". My dictionary suggests the vowel is like the i in hit, or a high front lax monothong vowel, or high front vowel slightly lower and more back than the ee of feet. But yeah, your observations are right and my speech is still phonological consistent. The weird thing is, i believe that since i was a kid i just always consciously thought of the "raised" and "unraised" dipthongs as as two different vowels, before I went to college and took a phonological class, before I found out the two sounds are in complimentary distribution..... I thought i learned that usually, native speakers underlying think two allophones are "the same" or they can't distinguish the difference between two allophones and then a rule makes them different on the surface.

Another phonomena: Northern cities vowel shift. My low front vowel, like the a in cat, has been raised, in all environm environments as far as I can discern, so that it sounds almost like the low-mid front vowel of e in red. Also, I have a mid-low front vowel like e in red, in "catch"; and "can" when used to mean "to be able to"; "catch" does not it does not rhyme with "batch". (Everything is always unless I consciously ever feel the need to adjust my pronunciation for some listeners).

The e in "yellow" and "jello", for me, has been "backed" and turned into something between schwa and like the u in "cut".

The a in "mom" has a very nasal quality, possibly unlike most non-Michigan speakers. The low front vowel becomes nasal in some environments, maybe before or after the nasal consonants, I am not sure the exact rule.

In "Milk, pillow, vanilla, dissertation, and semitic", the stressed vowel is lowered to a low-mid front vowel similar to or the same like e in red; the first 3 words have the stress on the first syllable, the last two words have the stress on the second syllable.

I think there was a thread on this like a year ago. But how do we explain those of us who may inadvertently start to mimic or reflect the accents or inflections of others?
For background, I grew up in iowa and my baseline is perfect Tom Brokaw neutral, which I maintained through 8 years of living in Missouri
When I went to grad school in Boston, my roommate was a friend from Missouri and my new best buddy in grad school was from Mississippi. Surrounded by that very specific Boston accent and not much tom Brokaw, I somehow developed some weird southern thing not quite Mississippi but definitely south of st Louis.... a return to Iowa caused that to eventually disappear.

Mike L:

"...since i was a kid i just always consciously thought of the "raised" and "unraised" dipthongs as as two different vowels..."

A few thoughts.

Individuals differ a lot in their level of "metalinguistic awareness" and sensitivity. You might be the kind of kid who is naturally aware of different allophones. Some of it depends on how different the allophones are in actuality. Initial "r" and final "r" in standard English are so different that I think every kid notices the difference - and would never call them the "same sound" or the "same vowel" unless he'd been taught to do so by the orthographic system or an educator. These two diphthongs you discuss aren't quite so different acoustically, so I think you might just be inclined toward making sound distinctions.

Your awareness of a distinction may also be the result of hearing/listening to a lot of standard American English as a  speaker of non-standard English.  You heard and understood utterances that use the unraised diphthong where you might use the raised one - so you were always comparing your own code with the standard (and perhaps other) codes.  Standard English native speakers who grow up hearing mostly or only Standard-English-using teachers, TV, etc. do not have the same opportunity to hear differences and do not have the same compelling interest in making sense of other codes.

Your main raised/unraised example was the "hire/higher" distinction.  Maybe those two were the basis for your calling them separate phonemes as a kid.  Word-final liquids like "r" are very "messy" when it comes to syllabification. If you hear/see them both as one-syllable words, then the diphthongs are a "minimal pair" in your mind - at least for that phonological environment.  Linguistics uses tight generalizations like "minimal pair"  in an attempt to understand language behaviors.  These generalizations are very useful on the whole - but they are not firm rules, and the generalizations are always subject to refinement. Language behaviors are in fact very messy in reality and not guided by the generalizations of formal Linguistics, but instead by the individual language generalizations each individual comes up with.  Especially when you are young, your inner language mechanism is constantly testing new theories about what is phonemic and what isn't.   Vowels and liquids within the same speech community involve a lot of articulation variety from person to person already. Diphthongs + "r's" might be the sounds where our individual perceptions and use vary the most. It's probably very, very normal that like snowflakes, no two adults end up with identical understandings of our mostly-shared phonological system. 

The e in "yellow" and "jello", for me, has been "backed" and turned
into something between schwa and like the u in "cut".

Yes, you are very oriented toward noticing differences that most native speakers of English would never notice. This example of "assimilation" shows well the messiness that English vowels and liquids sometimes produce when they get together.

Your example is a good one for showing how phonological rules and processes are always in flux too. "Jullow" would be a phonologically acceptable in English word if anyone had the mind to use it for something and it went into common usage. Let's say some actress named "Marie Jullow" came on the scene in a big way. But then, you might not pronounce "Jello" as you do now - for communication clarity, you could be tempted to adjust the vowel to create a difference with "Jullow." But you would probably not change your whole sound system - in other words, you would still do the assimilation thing and pronounce the word "yellow" with your schwa sound (like "yullow") - right? I think there are a lot of phonological inconsistencies like this in every language/dialect/idiolect that come about - and that sometimes become systematic - but are not predictable if you are only looking within standard phonology for the answers.

I was pronouncing "yellow with the first vowel close to the u in "cut", which is not what I am calling a schwa. What i am calling a schwa only occurs in totally unstressed syllables, like the first vowel in "computer", the second vowel in the name "rene" (the second vowel being a dipthong going mid-front to high front); certain words to me sound equally good with a schwa or a more articulated vowel, like the first vowel in "reduction" could either be schwa or high front, depending on how carefully i feel like I need to articulate, perhaps depending on my brain's perception of whether my listener understands me after a few uncafefully articulated words.

I often find it disturbing to turn vowels in weird technical words into schwa, even when I look up the word and my dictionary gives schwas in the suggested pronunciation, for example the suggested pronunciations of "australopithicus" has a schwa for the o, but I find it disturbing to not pronounce the o as a mid-back-unrounded to high-back-rounded vowel. Perhaps the problem is has to do with the subconscious language processing part of my brain's attempt to figure out the stress pattern of rare unfamiliar words seen in print but not heard, perhaps when my brain is in doubt about words I have not heard yet, I err on the side of articulating something suggested by the spelling and not a schwa, even when a syllable has a lack of primary or secondary stress.

Edit: "Australopithicus" reminds me of "Thessalonici" or "Thessalonica" because both might have 3 syllables before the stressed syllable, and maybe my brain doesn't know which stress pattern to articulate. I think for this town i will go with approximately the Greek pronunciation, but for certain towns better known to English speakers, like Paris, Munich, Seville, i will continue articulating the common English pronunciation when talking English to English other speakers.

I'm American but lived in Toronto for four years. Not once during that whole time was I ever identified as an American because of my accent. I was however identified as an American by some of my word pronunciations and names for things. Calling it whole wheat bread instead of brown bread or saying the word process as "prah-cess" instead of "proh-cess" for instance.

As for regional variations within Canada, it is very true that they exist. I now live north of Seattle and (pre-pandemic) would be in Vancouver and Victoria often and noticed that their accent is pretty much indistinguishable from those of us on this side of the border, with the "aboat" and "eh,?" that I remember from my Ontario days largely absent. Then there was the time I travelled around Ireland with someone from Newfoundland. It was fun watching people's looks as they heard him talking and trying to place his oddball accent.

By law, Canadians have to repeat everything they say in french. :)
Selon la loi, les Canadiens doivent répéter tout ce qu'ils disent en français. :)

And in some provinces, they are also required to include what ever the local First Nation's language is.
Et dans certaines provinces, ils sont également tenus d'inclure quelle que soit la langue de la Première nation locale.
Na mpaghara ụfọdụ, achọrọ ka ha tinye ihe asụsụ mba nke izizi bụ.

This, sometimes, makes conversation difficult.
Cela rend parfois la conversation difficile.
Nke a, mgbe ụfọdụ, na-eme ka mkparịta ụka sie ike.

Fortunately, the law only requires this on Canada's National Language Day, on April 1st.

Interesting topic, but through all of this I can't believe no one has mentioned what I think is the biggest dead giveaway for Canadians, their pronunciation of "sorry" to rhyme with "story". Some Canadians will have a more obvious long-O sound than others, but I haven't met any Americans who pronounce it that way.

No surprise Canadians have a unique pronunciation for 'sorry'

They are so nice they rarely need to apologize, so mangling the pronunciation is just a lack of practice!

The biggest "tell" for me is how Canadian's pronounce contracted words, and many other non-contracted words that end with a T. And at least in Western Canada, the T is almost always silent and the sound of the letter before the T is elongated as a substitution. The time of the word is the same as said, yet without any hard T at the end. :)

Francis, thanks for the smile.

Thanks for the giggle, Francis.

It would be interesting to delve into the linguistic history of Wisconsin. I am from south central Wisconsin, and I am saying "sorry" and "story' to myself, and it sounds the same to me. An Australian who sees a lot of tourists in his work said I sounded Canadian, but I have never been to Canada. (Sorry to admit that.)

The voice recognition in my phone is apparently Canadian, last night it offered up the spelling
"Neighbour"

(This is meant to be humourous, I hope you appreciate it in that light, eh?)

I'm used to saying CAL-guh-ree but everyone I know from Alberta says cal-GARY, right?

Northern tier Americans sound like Canadians, that's for sure.

I once misplaced my ski cap. Fortunately a Canadian spotted my tuque for me.

French Canadiens insist they speak French. I haven't met anyone in France, however, who agrees.

As many Canadians on the ice have said to me, "You want to go? We'll go." ;-)

I'm used to saying CAL-guh-ree but everyone I know from Alberta says
cal-GARY, right?

Nope. I can't speak for the entire country, but I usually hear CAL gary, but if you're born and raised in Calgary you say CAL gree

As many Canadians on the ice have said to me, "You want to go? We'll
go." ;-)

• Drop the mits
• Drop the gloves
• Let's go
• Yer gonna be spittin' chiclets

Do they even still make chicklet????

I loved the fruit flavored ones