Pacific Northwest English - Phonology

Phonology

As a variety of North American English, Pacific Northwest English is similar to most other forms of North American speech in being a rhotic accent, which is historically a significant marker in differentiating English varieties. It is found in the range of British Columbia, Alberta, Washington, Oregon, northern California, Idaho and western Montana.

• The vowels in words such as Mary, marry, and merry are merged to the open-mid front unrounded vowel .
• Most speakers do not distinguish between the open-mid back rounded vowel and open back unrounded vowel, characteristic of the cot–caught merger. A notable exception occurs with some speakers born before roughly the end of WWII.
• Traditionally diphthongal vowels such as as in boat and, as in bait, have acquired qualities much closer to monophthongs in some speakers.
• /ɛ/ can sometimes become 'short I' /ɪ/, so that elk sounds more like ilk. However, this process is more or less limited to speakers in eastern Washington and Oregon, and western Idaho, who either perceive or produce the pairs /ɛn/ and /ɪn/ close to each other, resulting in a merger between pen and pin.
• The Pacific Northwest also has some of the features of the Canadian and California vowel shifts, which both move vowels in roughly the opposite direction to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift of the U.S. Great Lakes.
  • /æ/ is lowered in the direction of .
  • /ɑ/ is backed and sometimes rounded to become . Thus, to a Seattleite, a speaker from Chicago—where the vowel is sometimes fronted towards —may say "cot" more like "cat".
• There are also conditional raising processes of open front vowels.
  • Before the velar nasal, /æ/ becomes . This change makes for minimal pairs such as rang and rain, both having the same vowel, differing from rang in other varieties of English.
  • Among some speakers in Portland and southern Oregon, /æ/ is sometimes raised and diphthongized to or before the non-velar nasal consonants and . This feature is rarer further north, where /æ/ tends to remain the same before non-velar nasal consonants, except for occasional schwa-like qualities (co-articulation of tongue and palate), resulting in .
  • /ɛ/, and, in the northern Pacific Northwest, /æ/, become before the voiced velar plosive /ɡ/: egg and leg are pronounced as ayg and layg, a feature shared by many northern Midwestern dialects and with the Utah accent. In addition, sometimes bag will be pronounced bayg.
• The close central rounded vowel or close back unrounded vowel for /u/, is found in Portland, and some areas of Southern Oregon, but is generally not found further north, where the vowel remains the close back rounded .
• Some speakers have a tendency to slightly raise /ai/ and /aw/ before voiceless obstruents. It is strongest in rural areas in British Columbia and Washington, and in older and middle-aged speakers in Vancouver and Seattle. In other areas, /ai/ is occasionally raised. This phenomenon is known as Canadian raising and is widespread and well known throughout Anglophone Canada and other parts of the northern United States.
• Consonant phonology is more conservative, as with other varieties of English. The most notable divergence from standard speech is a fairly widespread pronunciation of the "str" consonant cluster as, "shtr".