Pacific Northwest English

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Pacific Northwest English (also known, in the United States, as Northwest English)[1] is a variety of North American English that shares major elements with Canadian English as well as California English, and is geographically defined within the U. S. states of Washington and Oregon, sometimes including Idaho and the Canadian province of British Columbia.[2] The variety may also be spreading to central and western Montana, western Alberta, southeastern Alaska, Wyoming, and far northern California.[citation needed] The area contains a highly diverse and mobile population, which is reflected in the historical and continuing development of the variety. Current studies remain inconclusive about whether or not Pacific Northwest English is a complete dialect of its own, separate from Western American English.[3]

History[edit]

The linguistic traits that flourish throughout the Pacific Northwest attest to a culture that transcends national boundaries in the region. Historically, this hearkens back to the early years of colonial expansion by the British and Americans, when the entire region was considered to be a single, unified area. Until the Oregon Treaty of 1846, it was identified as being either Oregon Country (by the Americans) or Columbia (by the British).[4] As a result of the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush, the culture of the Pacific Northwest expanded northward into Yukon and Alaska, carried along by the thousands of people who were attracted to the gold fields in the north. Today, the English variety common to this shared culture can be heard by people from Eugene, Oregon to Fairbanks, Alaska.[5][dubious ]

Although residents of the Pacific Northwest shared many cultural traditions and norms, it was not until the latter 20th century that their variety became recognized officially as distinct. Linguists who studied English as spoken in the West before and in the period immediately after the Second World War tended to find few if any distinct patterns unique to the Western region.[6] However, several decades later, with a more settled population and continued immigration from around the globe, linguists began to notice a set of emerging characteristics of English spoken in the Pacific Northwest. However, Pacific Northwest English still remains remarkably close to the standard American accent, which shows, for example, the cot–caught merger (although this phenomenon is not universal).

Phonology[edit]

The Pacific Northwest English vowel space. Based on TELSUR data from Labov et al.; F1/F2 means for 3 speakers from Vancouver, BC; 2 speakers from Seattle, WA; and 3 speakers from Portland, OR. Note that /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ are indistinguishable.

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. Pacific Northwest English shares most of its characteristics with Canadian English, plus additionally developing characteristics related to California English. Its commonalities with each of these is designated below:

Commonalities with both Canada and California[edit]

  • The vowels in words such as Mary, marry, and merry are merged to the open-mid front unrounded vowel [ɛ]. This is also typical in most dialects of the United States.
  • Younger speakers of Pacific Northwest English also show features of the Canadian/California Shifts, which both move front vowels through a lowering of the tongue:
    • /æ/ is lowered almost toward [a]; /ɛ/ almost toward [æ]; and /ɪ/ almost toward [ɛ]. Therefore, among younger speakers, hick nearly sounds like heck, heck like hack, and hack like hock.[citation needed]
    • /ɑ/ is backed and sometimes rounded to become [ɒ]. Thus, most Pacific Northwest speakers have undergone the cot–caught merger. A notable exception occurs with some speakers born before roughly the end of WWII. Thus, to a Seattle speaker, who backs the word cot towards the sound of caught, a Chicago speaker's cat—where the vowel is sometimes fronted towards [a]—may be interpreted as cat.

Commonalities with Canada[edit]

These commonalities are shared with Canada and the North Central United States (perhaps most famously recognized as a "Minnesota accent").

  • Traditionally diphthongal vowels such as [oʊ] as in boat and [eɪ], as in bait, have qualities much closer to monophthongs in some speakers.
  • There are also conditional raising processes of open front vowels. These processes are often even more extreme than in Canada and the North Central United States.
    • Before the velar nasal [ŋ], /æ/ becomes [e]. This change makes for minimal pairs such as rang and rain, both having the same vowel [e], differing from rang [ræŋ] in other varieties of English.
    • Among some speakers in Portland and southern Oregon, /æ/ is sometimes raised and diphthongized to [eə] or [ɪə] before the non-velar nasal consonants [m] and [n]. 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 [æə].
    • /ɛ/, and, in the northern Pacific Northwest, /æ/, become [eɪ] before the voiced velar plosive /ɡ/: egg and leg are pronounced to rhyme with plague and vague, a feature shared by many northern Midwestern dialects and with the Utah accent. In addition, sometimes bag will be pronounced bayg.
  • Canadian raising: Some speakers have a tendency to slightly raise /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ 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, /aɪ/ is occasionally raised. This phenomenon is widespread and well known throughout Anglophone Canada and other parts of the northern United States.

Commonalities with California[edit]

  • California Shift: The Canadian/California Shift developing in Pacific Northwest English also includes these additional features only reminiscent of California English, but not Canadian English (especially among working-class young-adult females):[7]
    • The close central rounded vowel [ʉ] or close back unrounded vowel [ɯ] 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 [u].[dubious ]
    • In speakers born around the 1960s-70s and later, there is a tendency to move the tongue forward in the first element of the diphthong //. This is reminiscent also of Midland, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern U.S. English.[8] This fronting does not appear before /m/ and /n/, for example, in the word home.[9]

Miscellaneous characteristics[edit]

  • Some (but certainly not all) speakers perceive or produce the pairs /ɛn/ and /ɪn/ close to each other,[10] for example, resulting in a merger between pen and pin, most notably in Eugene, Oregon and Spokane, Washington.[11]
  • 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 [ʃtɹ], "shtr".[citation needed]

Words and phrases[edit]

Pacific Northwest English and British Columbian English have several words still in current use which are loanwords from the Chinook Jargon. There are also several terms of English origin that originated or are distinct to the region.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Riebold, John M. (2014). "Language Change Isn’t Only Skin Deep: Inter-Ethnic Contact and the Spread of Innovation in the Northwest." Cascadia Workshop in Sociolinguistics 1 at University of Victoria. University of Washington. p. 7.
  2. ^ Riebold, John M. (2012). "Please Merge Ahead: The Vowel Space of Pacific Northwestern English." Northwest Linguistics Conference 28. University of Washington. Seattle, WA. p. 2.
  3. ^ Ward (2003:87): "lexical studies have suggested that the Northwest in particular forms a unique dialect area (Reed 1957, Carver 1987, Wolfram and Shilling-Estes 1998). Yet the phonological studies that could in many ways reinforce what the lexical studies propose have so far been less confident in their predictions."
  4. ^ Meinig, D.W. (1995) [1968]. The Great Columbia Plain (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classic ed.). University of Washington Press. p. 104. ISBN 0-295-97485-0. 
  5. ^ Lang, George (2008). Making Wawa: The Genesis of Chinook Jargon. Vancouver: UBC Press. pp. especially 127–128. ISBN 978-0-7748-1526-0. 
  6. ^ Wolfram and Ward 2006, pg. 140
  7. ^ Ward (2003:93)
  8. ^ Conn, Jeff (2002). "An investigation into the western dialect of Portland Oregon." Paper presented at NWAV31. San Diego, CA.
  9. ^ Ward (2003:44)
  10. ^ Labov, Ash, Boberg 2006
  11. ^ Labov et al. 2006. p. 68.
  12. ^ Reid Champagne (February 8, 2013), "Solar neighborhood projects shine in ‘sunbreak’ Seattle", The Seattle Times, retrieved 2013-05-29, [I]n this part of the world...sunshine is more frequently reported as “sunbreaks.” 
  13. ^ a b c A brief history of words unique to the Pacific Northwest, KUOW-FM, December 23, 2014 
  14. ^ American Varieties: Pacific Northwest, PBS

References[edit]

  • Boberg, C: "Geolinguistic Diffusion and the U.S.-Canada Border: Language Variation and Change", Language Variation and Change, 12(1):15.
  • Wolfram, W. and Ward, B., eds: "American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast", pages 140, 234-236. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
  • Labov, W., Ash, S., and Boberg, C: "The Phonological Atlas of North American English", page 68. Mouton de Gruyter, 2006.
  • Ward, Michael (2003), Portland Dialect Study: The Fronting of /ow, u, uw/ in Portland, Oregon (PDF), Portland State University 

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]