The Week:
if you wanted to improve your Canadian accent, you would do better to just use your Californian accent. In some important ways it is closer to the real Canadian accent and vice versa than other American accents are.
Canada actually has many regional differences in accents. The most extraordinary ones are of the people native to Newfoundland but mine and Jim Dalrymple’s home province of Nova Scotia has some very distinctive accents too.
Try someone from the Hudson’s Bay area if you want to hear the Mckenzie brothers in action, eh?
You can immediately tell the difference as a Canadian will end with “eh” or “sorry”
There was a huge brain drain from Canada to California in the early 60s and that may have affected the local Californian accent.
People from the Ottawa Valley have a very distinct accent and those from Southern Ontario (especially County Middlesex) often get taken for Irishmen by … Irishmen.
A good way of distinguishing a Canadian accent from an American is to listen to the words ‘house’ and ‘about’.
Even that’s regional, though, and will sometimes vary. Still, I think it’s the best single approach.
We had lunch at a tavern in Peterborough, ON this last summer. I wish I had recorded the conversations around me. They contained epic levels of Ontario accents. When the guy said “I left the hoos [xlation: house] to check oot [xlation: out] the booot [xlation: boat]”, both my son and I smiled because Canadian life doesn’t get any better than that. We finished our poutine, a food that they figured out how to add two additional syllables to, and left happy.
I lived in Toronto, Ontario, Canada for 15 years and then San Francisco, California, USA for 15 years, even though I’m not originally from either city or either country, so I hear the accents in both places. I can tell you: this article is 100% wrong.
There is no such thing as a “Canadian accent” — there are various accents in various parts of Canada, and they do not stop at the border, they overlap the US. Which US American accent is closest to each Canadian accent? The accent of the US Americans who are physically and geographically closest to each Canadian accent. In other words, Yukon and Alaska will be similar, or Manitoba and Minnesota will be similar, or the Canadian maritime provinces will be similar to the US New England states.
If you want to hear accents that are similar to Californians, go to Oregon or Nevada. Duh.
Also, there is not one Californian accent either. Northern and southern California are culturally distinct and the accents are different.
My accent has adapted to San Francisco a lot (after adapting to Toronto earlier) but there are fewer words used in the United States than in Canada, so there are words that I basically don’t use in the United States, and when I say them in San Francisco, even after all these years, they come out sounding like they would in Toronto, and my friends in San Francisco notice. They do not hear those words and think that is a Californian accent. And there are specific words that have stayed the way I said them in Toronto, like “pasta,” which in Toronto is said, “pass-ta” and in San Francisco is said, “pah-sta.” When I say “pass-ta” in San Francisco people ask me where I’m from.
The thing with accents is they are very hard to analyze because depending on where you are from, you may hear different accents very differently from the native speakers and other observers who have different accents from you. But it’s definitely not difficult to tell the difference between a Canadian and a Californian. Maybe someone from southern BC and northern California might be similar, but that’s only a very small fraction of the roughly 70 million Canadians+Californians.
The best way to tell a Canadian from a Californian is the Canadians will be much healthier and the Californians much sicker. Like, visibly healthier and sicker. The Canadians won’t have untreated skin conditions or signs of untreated diabetes and a much smaller percentage of them will be overweight or obese because they have all been going to the doctor for regular preventative checkups for their entire lives. The Californians have been going in and out of private health care that has dramatically worse outcomes, and only go to the doctor when they are sick, which is too late. When I get on a plane to Toronto, I can already see that many of the people around me are Canadians, and when I land in Toronto the healthiness of the random people around me is an overwhelming contrast to what I’m used to in the US.
I used to live on the border and even watched Canadian TV, so I’m used to hearing Canadians, and there’s more than one accent. I knew a woman from Ontario, forget exactly where, (London?) who (to me) actually sounded British!
LOL To be fair, she might actually have been British. There are a lot of expats in Canada.
Sorry is not an accent