Canadian Shift

The Canadian Shift is a linguistic vowel shift found in Canadian English. It was first described by Clarke, Elms and Youssef in 1995, based on impressionistic analysis.

The shift involves the front lax vowels /æ/ (the short-a of trap), /ɛ/ (the short-e of dress), and /ɪ/ (the short-i of kit).

It is triggered by the cot–caught merger: /ɒ/ (as in cot) and /ɔ/ (as in caught) merge as, a low back rounded vowel. As each space opens up, the next vowel along moves into it. Thus, the short a /æ/ retracts from a near-low front position to a low central position, with a quality similar to the vowel heard in Northern England . The retraction of /æ/ was independently observed in Vancouver and is more advanced for Ontarians and women than for people from the Prairies or Atlantic Canada and men.

However, scholars disagree on the behaviour of /ɛ/ and /ɪ/:

• According to Clarke et al. (1995), who impressionistically studied the speech of a few young Ontarians, /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ tend to lower in the direction of and, respectively: hence, bet and bit tend to sound, respectively, like bat and bet as pronounced by a speaker without the shift.
• Labov et al. (2006), through acoustic analysis of 33 subjects from all over the country, noted a backward and downward movement of /ɛ/ in apparent time in all of Canada except the Atlantic Provinces. No movement of /ɪ/ was detected.
• Boberg (2005) considers the primary movement of /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ to be retraction, at least in Montreal. He studied a diverse range of English-speaking Montrealers, and found that younger speakers had a significantly retracted /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ compared with older speakers, but did not find that the vowels were significantly lower. A small group of young people from Ontario were also studied, and there too retraction was most evident. Under this scenario, a similar group of vowels (short front) are retracting in a parallel manner, with /ɛ/ and /ʌ/ approaching each other. Therefore, with Boberg’s results, bet approaches but remains different from but, and bit sounds different, but remains distinct.
• Hagiwara (2006), through acoustic analysis, noted that /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ do not seem to be lowered in Winnipeg, although the lowering and retraction of /æ/ has caused a redistribution of backness values for the front lax vowels.
• Sadlier-Brown and Tamminga (2008) studied a few speakers from Vancouver and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and found the shift to be active in Halifax as well, although not as advanced as in Vancouver. For these speakers, the movement of /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ in apparent time was diagonal, and Halifax had /æ/ diagonal movement too; in Vancouver, however, the retraction of /æ/ was not accompanied by lowering.

Due to the Canadian Shift, the short-a and the short-o are shifted in opposite directions to that of the Northern Cities Shift, found across the border in the Inland Northern U.S., which is causing these two dialects to diverge: the Canadian short-a is very similar in quality to the Inland Northern short-o; for example, the production would be recognized as map in Canada, but mop in the Inland North.