3.10 Transcribing Vowels in Canadian English
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Canadian English and American English have a lot in common, but some of the more noticeable differences between them are in how vowels get pronounced. US textbooks often classify this symbol that looks like a lower-case [a] as a low back vowel, but you probably noticed in an earlier section that this book puts [a] in the low front position and lists this character, known as the script [ɑ], in the low back position. What’s the difference between them? To figure this out, let’s look at a pair of words.
How do you pronounce these two words?
I’m a fairly typical speaker of middle-class, middle-aged Canadian English, and for me, these two words are homophones: they sound exactly the same, whether I’m saying, “I caught the ball” or “I slept on a cot“. Caught/cot. So my dialect has what Linguistics calls the “caught/cot merger””. This is pretty typical of Canadian English, but not of many other varieties of English.
In many varieties of US English, the past tense of the verb catch is pronounced with the low-back [ɑ] like mine, but the noun uses the low front [a], [kʰat]. I like to think of this low front vowel as the Chicago White Sox vowel, because it’s very typical of Chicago English, where the south-side baseball team is known as the [saks].
And in many of the varieties of English spoken in the UK, the past tense of catch has a mid-back rounded vowel, [kʰɔt], while the noun version has the low back vowel [kʰɑt].
Since this book concentrates on Canadian English, I’m going to suggest the following convention. When transcribing Canadian English, use the low back vowel that we represent with the script a [ɑ] for the simple vowel in words like father, box, and log.
The low-front [a] doesn’t usually appear in Canadian English as a simple vowel. It shows up in the major diphthongs, [aɪ] like in fly, and [aʊ] as in brown, and it turns up before an [ɹ] as in car or farther.
And this mid-back rounded vowel also doesn’t show up as a simple vowel in Canadian English. It appears in the diphthong [ɔɪ] like in coin, and before [ɹ] like fork or short.
Note that this convention that I’m suggesting does over-simplify the variation that exists in the real world, but that’s ok at this introductory level.
With the low vowels taken care of, let’s talk about the mid and central vowels. Think about these two words, funny and phonetics. They start with almost the same syllable, don’t they? But there’s one important difference. In funny, the stress is on the first syllable, while in phonetics, the second syllable is stressed. This has consequences for the vowel in the nucleus of each syllable.
Remember that we talked about syllable stress in an earlier section. Stressed syllables are more prominent than unstressed syllables. They’re louder, longer, and higher in pitch. So stressed syllables get pronounced with full vowels. In the word funny, the first syllable has this mid-back unrounded vowel that we re