Another set of variables displays wide discrepancies between the two regions. Some of the differences are explained in terms of settlement history and language contact; others are not so easily explained and are presented as a challenge for future research.
I am also indebted to many of my students at McGill University, and to a much larger number of English-speaking residents of Montreal, who completed, returned, and distributed questionnaires for this project. Special thanks go to Greg McSweeny and Paul Hawkins, who gave me time in their English classes at Dawson College to talk about the project and distribute questionnaires to their students. Finally, I wish to thank Howard Richler of the Montreal Gazette and Dave Bronstetter of CBC Radio 1 in Montreal for their interest in this project, which was of invaluable assistance in getting questionnaires distributed to a wide range of Montrealers.
Introduction Half a century ago, Donald E. Hamilton published a short article in the Jour- nal of the Canadian Linguistic Association, reporting on the first survey ever undertaken of the variety of English spoken in Montreal Hamilton It was based closely on the prior work of Walter S. Avis in Ontario Avis —56 , with the intent of obtaining comparative data that would demonstrate re- gional variation in Canadian English.
Hamilton analyzed responses from English-speaking Montrealers, predominantly young and well-educated, and concluded that there were indeed regional differences in Canadian English; that Montreal English was generally more American than British; and that several American variants were used with higher frequency in Montreal than in On- tario. Among these Americanisms were kerosene, suspenders, napkin, and can, as opposed to coal oil, braces, serviette, and tin Hamilton Lambert examined the so- cial psychology of speaking English and French in Quebec, a line of research followed up by Heller , but he has nothing to say about the features of Montreal English.
Notwithstanding its accomplishments, this collection of work leaves us without a general picture of contemporary Montreal English, a situation paralleled in many other parts of English-speaking Canada. A renewal of the dialect questionnaire tradition of research on Canadian English has the potential not only to bring our knowledge of the state of the language up to date, but also to contribute to our understanding of several general questions of linguistic theory.
The question of regional variation in particular has taken on a new im- portance at the beginning of the 21st century, as local varieties come under in- creasing assimilatory pressure from national, continental, or even global stan- dards, and speakers have ready access to linguistic variants other than the ones they grew up with. Many Canadians, in fact, would probably be surprised to find any measurable differences in the way English is spoken across most of Canada, excluding the Atlantic region. Given the popular expectation that di- alect differences must be disappearing in an age characterized by instant mass communication and cultural globalization, a reassessment of the nature and extent of regional variation in Canadian English at the close of the 20th century is very timely.
With these ends in mind, J. Chambers initiated an approximate repli- cation of the survey work of Avis and Scargill and Warkentyne in the Golden Horseshoe region around Toronto and the western end of Lake Ontario, which he called Dialect Topography Chambers While written dialect questionnaires cannot gain access to unmonitored speech in the manner of sociolinguistic interviews, they are a much more efficient means of collecting large amounts of compa- rable data over a wide geographic expanse.
For example, it would have been inconceivable for Scargill and Warkentyne to have conducted sociolinguistic interviews with the more than 14 respondents to their survey. Dialect question- naires and sociolinguistic interviews have complementary strengths and weak- nesses; used in tandem, they constitute a productive approach to the study of language change and variation.
An analysis of some of the data from Quebec City were published recently by Chambers and Heisler This paper presents an initial report on the results obtained in Montreal, not only as a matter of public record, making them accessible to other scholars, but also as a contribution toward future studies of regional variation and diachronic change, which may benefit from a published source on which to base comparative analyses for one such study, see Boberg As a point of departure, following Hamilton, the present analysis will focus on the most noteworthy differences between the results obtained in the Montreal and Southern Ontario regions.
This practice ensures strict comparability among the surveyed regions. The questionnaire is self-administered: It comprises 87 questions, of which twelve elicit demographic information like age, sex, occu- pation, education, residential history, and language use, and the remaining 75 focus on about 60 linguistic variables.
Of these, 29 questions deal with vocabu- lary; 28 with pronunciation five with phonemic mergers and 23 with phone- mic incidence ; eight with morphology; six with syntax; and four with general usage such as preposition selection. The method of questioning is varied, de- pending on the nature of the data being elicited. Lexical incidence of phonemes is examined with rhyming questions does x rhyme with y or z; does the first sound in a sound more like the first sound in b or c, etc. Phonological merg- ers are approached by asking whether two members of a minimal pair sound the same or different.
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Lexical variants and morpho-syntactic variables are gen- erally handled by asking the respondent to choose from a list of answers, or to write an answer in a blank. Information on the format of individual questions is provided in the appendix. During , over 1 questionnaires were distributed to residents of Montreal by the author, who was the Montreal Regional Director for the Di- alect Topography Project. The students dis- tributed questionnaires to families and friends, as well as filling them out them- selves.
This selection yielded a sam- ple that had adequate representation from all subgroups generated by a cross- tabulation of age and sex.
However, a slight bias toward people in their twenties, and a stronger bias toward women, who account for two thirds of the sample, can both be observed in Table 1. In terms of education, the sample is biased toward university-educated re- spondents, as seen in Table 2, which shows the highest education level attained by respondents over 29 years old ultimate education level is harder to estab- lish for subjects under Over two thirds of this sub-sample has a univer- sity degree, which is considerably higher than the incidence of post-secondary education in the general population.
Dawson College, in central Montreal. In Dialect Topography terms, this is the set of respondents whose Regionality Index score was 3 or less. See Chambers for a discussion of the measurement of residential history in the Dialect Topography project. Scargill and Warkentyne give no information on the ed- ucation level of participants in their Survey of Canadian English, but they do report separate data for males and females.
While a sample that was more representative of men and less educated people would be preferable in many ways, it would in fact be less useful in terms of comparative analysis. The complete set of data for Montreal is given in the appendix, with ques- tion numbers referring to the original order of items in the questionnaire. For this reason, percentages for each question discussed in Sec- tion 3 do not usually add up to Moreover, the actual frequency of many variants may be marginally higher than what is reported here, when multi- ple responses are taken into account see the appendix for more informa- tion on data analysis.
They have not been simplified in the same way: The following section will examine the nature of these large differences. SO — Southern Ontario. Montreal, by contrast, experienced no comparable influx of Loyal- ists; its English-speaking population was built up mostly by direct immigration from Great Britain and Ireland. The Dialect Topography data do not indicate a consistent difference of the type identified by Hamilton.
The comparative frequencies of the variants shown in Table 3 are within ten percentage points of each other and do not show a regular pattern of greater British or American influence in either region.
The methods of Dialect Topography in the Golden Horseshoe
In fact, Montreal has slightly higher frequencies of the American variant in exactly half of the vari- ables and slightly lower frequencies in the other half. The more remarkable aspect of these data is that they generally show a slight increase in the frequency of American variants over time, when compared with earlier data from Scargill and Warken- tyne Table 4 contrasts Dialect Topography data for Montreal from with the Survey of Canadian English data for Quebec from , a difference of approximately one generation.
DT Q freq.
An apparent-time analysis of the Dialect To- pography data, however, shows this to be an illusion: This contin- ues a trend that can be observed in the earlier data: Even when we turn to more robust differences between Montreal and Southern Ontario, we find no evidence of a consistent pattern of British or American influence. Rather, Montreal is more American on some measures, but less American on others. For example, Southern Ontario shows higher re- tention of two British terms that have largely given way to American replace- ments in Montreal.
Bath is generally used in Britain, but rarely in the United States, where bathe predominates. This pattern of influence is reversed for words that feature the loss of a palatal glide after coronal consonants. The Dialect Topography questionnaire examines this process in three words: In North America, glide retention is still common in the secondary stress environment of avenue, but quite rare in primary stress envrionments like news and student.
In standard British English, by contrast, glide retention is the norm in all of these words. The survey results show that Canadians are more or less in league with Americans in glide loss, but the data in Table 5 reveal that Southern Ontario is consistently ahead of Montreal, which is still fairly conservative in this respect. The modern Midland dialect region extends from southern New Jersey and Penn- sylvania along the northern side of the Ohio River through the middle of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to parts of Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas, where it begins to merge with neighboring regions as a result of mixed settle- ment patterns.
For an analysis of this trend in Southern Ontario, see Chambers a: The North was a narrow strip of territory along the Great Lakes, and the South was essentially the coastal South, below the Appalachian Mountains. Two of these were examined in the Dialect Topography survey. One feature is the ellipsis of verbs in phrases like those in 1 below, a pat- tern studied by Murray, Frazer, and Simon The possible ellipses are shown with parentheses. That shirt needs to be ironed. The floor needs to be cleaned.
I told the driver I want to get off at the next stop. The cat wants to go out. Sentence 1d was included as Q40 in the survey. Participants were asked to in- dicate which version of the sentence they would say, with or without the ellip- sis. While both frequencies may have been affected by the formal nature of the elicitation, they nevertheless give a reliable indication of the regional difference that concerns us, since the same method was used in each place.
John smokes a lot anymore. I used to watch baseball, but anymore I watch football. Anymore, I have to leave the house at seven just to get to work on time. Standard English requires anymore to be used with a negative not.
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This view emerges from recent research on the phonetics of American English Labov, Ash, and Boberg fc. Once the identifica- tion with nowadays has been made, anymore can be used in positive sentences, and can even be moved to the beginning of the phrase as in b and c above, though phrase-initial positive anymore only occurs in a subset of the varieties that permit the phrase-final variant.
To most speakers outside the Midland re- gion, both variants are totally ungrammatical: The Dialect Topography survey asked only about the more generally ac- ceptable phrase-final variant.
Boberg () EWW paper on Dialect Topography of Montreal | Charles Boberg - theranchhands.com
It was investigated in several ways: As might be expected from a formal elicitation exercise, the last of these approaches garnered the lowest level of ac- ceptance: Recognition of positive anymore was much lower in Montreal: While acceptance of positive anymore is by no means universal in South- ern Ontario, and may be declining as a relic feature of Loyalist speech, it is still common enough to provide a striking contrast with Montreal, where Loyalist influence is virtually absent.
While the Dialect Topography survey was not designed to investigate gal- licisms in Quebec English, it nevertheless uncovered a number of differences between Montreal and Southern Ontario in which the influence of French may play some part for a similar analysis of patterns in Quebec City English, see Chambers and Heisler For instance, Q2 asks about words for a piece of furniture that seats three people in the living room. Both regions show a steady decline of the traditional Canadian word for this — chesterfield — and a corresponding increase in the most popular American term, couch. Curiously, Scargill and Warkentyne The apparent-time anal- ysis presented in Figure 1 portrays the dramatic character of this shift: For apparent-time analyses of this change in Southern Ontario and Quebec City, re- spectively, see Chambers , a: Age differences in preference for the terms couch, sofa, and chesterfield, for respondents born and raised in Montreal single responses only.
A similarly cautious approach might be taken to explaining a few other pat- terns in Montreal English. More doubtful is the attribution of the Montreal preference for using supper to denote the main evening meal Q There is a remarkable diversity of words for this concept in North American English: While the term soft drink is known throughout North America, it is the preferred generic term for carbonated beverages only in Montreal and Quebec City.
Between them, these terms might be thought to have provided the two elements of English soft drink. However, this explanation does not get around the difficulty that the term soft drink is known in varieties of English that are not in contact with French. Moreover, it is by no means clear that the loan translation was not in the opposite direction, from English into French.
A less ambiguous instance of French influence occurs among the words used to denote a covered platform with a railing in front of the house, on which one might sit Q12b. Balcony has a ready French equivalent in balcon, which is not as restricted to upper-storey projec- tions as in English. Perhaps the most complex case of attribution to French influence concerns the Montreal preference for using the word bureau to denote an item of furni- ture containing a set of drawers in which to keep socks and underwear Q3.
In an effort to explain a similarly high frequency of bureau in Quebec City English, Chambers and Heisler This use of bureau is still common in parts of the United States and likely spread to parts of Canada from south of the border. Its use in Quebec English is therefore due not to the influence of Canadian French, but to the semantic modification of an older loanword from European French. In fact, as with soft drink, the in- fluence may have worked the other way: One of the words examined by the Dialect Topography survey falls into the foreign a category: This is consistent with the finding of Boberg Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences.
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