[LINK] "Canadian accent is shifting, changing how we pronounce words"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Tara Deschamps reports on the slow mutation of Canadian English in pace with California's dialect.

People living in Toronto and California might live on opposite ends of the continent, but they have at least one thing in common.

They both like to get down … with their vowels.

New research says the Canadian accent is going through a subtle shift, making “laugh” sound like “loff,” “red dress” sound like “rad drass” and “milk” sound like “melk.”

It’s all part of a change quietly seeping into our language to make us pronounce vowels lower than usual, say sociolinguists from Memorial University of Newfoundland.

A similar shift, at times borrowing some qualities from the Valley Girl cadence, is simultaneously happening to Californians, but researcher Paul De Decker says, “It is not making us sound more like them. We are just both on the same path at the same time.”