Language Variation and Change, 21 (2009), 355–380.

© Cambridge University Press, 2009 0954-3945/09 $16.00

doi:10.1017/S0954394509990172

The emergence of a new phoneme: Foreign (a)

in Canadian English
CHARLES BOBERG
McGill University

ABSTRACT

The nativization or phonological adaptation of words transferred from other

languages can have structural-phonological consequences for the recipient
language. In English, nativization of words in which the stressed vowel is spelled
with the letter ,a., here called “foreign (a)” words, leads to variable outcomes,
because English ,a. represents not one but three phonemes. The most common
outcomes historically have been /ey/ (as in potato), /æ/ (tobacco), and /ah/ (spa),
but vowel choice shows diachronic, social, and regional variation, including
systematic differences between major national dialects. British English uses /ah/ for
long vowels and /æ/ elsewhere, American English prefers /ah/ everywhere, whereas
Canadian English traditionally prefers /æ/. The Canadian pattern is now changing,
with younger speakers adopting American /ah/-variants. This article presents new
data on foreign (a) in Canadian English, confirming the use of /ah/ among younger
speakers, but finds that some outcomes cannot be classified as either /æ/ or /ah/.
A third, phonetically intermediate outcome is often observed. Acoustic analysis
confirms the extraphonemic status of these outcomes, which may constitute a new
low-central vowel phoneme in Canadian English.

Though it is often overlooked as a systematic variable in grammars of English and

in dialectological research, one of the richest sources of dialect differentiation in
Modern English is the treatment of foreign (a). This variable involves the
pronunciation of the large class of words transferred to English from other
languages, in which the stressed vowel is spelled, either in the source-language
orthography or in the conventional English transliteration, with the letter ,a..
Examples of foreign (a) include potato, tobacco, and spa. As these examples
suggest, the main variants of this variable are /ey/, /æ/, and /ah/, the FACE, TRAP,
and BATH vowels, respectively, of Wells’s (1982) lexical sets, or the vowels of
fate, fat, and father for those who have /æ/ in BATH. Even though major dialects
of English agree on the pronunciation of the majority of such words, including
those just cited, they diverge on the pronunciation of many others. Pronunciation
entries for drama and pasta in standard dictionaries of major national varieties

This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (Standard Research Grant # 410-02-1391, 2002–2005). I am grateful to the anonymous
reviewers of the first version of this article for many helpful suggestions that have substantially
improved its quality.

355
356 CHARLES BOBERG

of English indicate the general pattern of national divergence. In Standard

Southern British English, drama has /ah/ and pasta has /æ/; in American
English, both words have /ah/; whereas in Canadian English, both words
potentially have /æ/. As will be shown, variation of this type involves hundreds
or even thousands of words used on a daily basis all over the English-speaking
world, thereby constituting a phonolexical variable of considerable frequency
and importance. As the degree of contact between English and other languages
continues to grow over the course of the 21st century, the frequency and
importance of this variable are likely to increase rather than decrease. Foreign
(a) words are implicated not only in linguistic but in social and cultural variation
and change.
In addition to lexical and regional variation, Boberg (1997), the first major study
of foreign (a), found that it displays social variation and change over time.
Attitudinal factors underlying the social variation in American English—the
evaluation of /ah/ as the more “correct” pronunciation of the letter ,a. in a
foreign word—were explored in Boberg (1999); see also Shapiro (1997:438).
A diachronic shift toward more frequent use of /ah/ in Canadian English, evident
in apparent-time data and presumably reflecting the northward diffusion of the
American foreign (a) pattern, was reported by Boberg (2000). The diffusion
appeared to be establishing a Canadian echo of the American pattern of lexical
variation in the distribution of the two vowels. In general, Americans and
Canadians agreed on which words were most likely to have /æ/ or /ah/, but the
overall frequency of /ah/ in Canada was much lower.
This article returns to the special consideration of Canadian English, in
particular to the issue of tokens of foreign (a) that cannot be confidently
classified as instances of either of the main variants, /æ/ or /ah/. It presents a
new set of data on Canadian and American nativization of foreign (a), in which
recorded spoken productions are subjected to acoustic phonetic analysis. This
analysis confirms the general trends of the earlier self-report data (Boberg,
2000), but also reveals a surprisingly high frequency of extraphonemic
productions that appear to be intermediate between /æ/ and /ah/. The acoustic
data also illuminate the reason for both extraphonemic productions and the
traditional Canadian preference for /æ/: a hole in the low-central region of the
Canadian English vowel space where other dialects have /ah/. In Canadian
English, /ah/ is merged with /o/ and /oh/, LOT and THOUGHT, in the low-back
corner of the vowel space, rather than occupying the low-central region, as in
other dialects. Yet many Canadian foreign (a) productions occupy this low-
central region, rather than the fields of dispersion of /æ/ or /ah/, on either side. It
is suggested that one possible result of extensive extraphonemic treatment of
foreign (a) is the integration of a new, low-central vowel phoneme in Canadian
English, halfway between /æ/ and /ah/. These data present striking
counterevidence to the expectation that adaptation of foreign phones will follow
a phoneme-matching model, or assignment of each foreign phone to the most
suitable native phoneme (Hock, 1986:390). Evidently, many speakers of
Canadian English are not bound in this way by the strictures of their native
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 357

phonemic systems, though their tendency to violate these strictures shows both
variation and change.

PHONOLOGICAL TREATMENT OF LOAN WORDS

Canadian English treatment of foreign (a) words presents a case study in one of the
most pervasive effects of language contact: the incorporation of words from other
languages into the lexicon and the pronunciation of these words using their original
foreign sounds, native phonemes, or a mixture of both. Such “lexical transfer,” or
“borrowing” of “loan words,” is well documented in every general account of
language change (e.g., Anttila, 1989:154–178; Baugh, 1935:205–214, 262–281;
Hock, 1986:380–425; Thomason & Kaufman, 1988:77–78). It can occur in
close contact, through bilingualism, as between French and English in medieval
England or modern-day Montreal, or in distant contact, through travel, cultural
contact, and trade, as between English and many languages around the world
over the last millennium.
English has been massively affected by both types of contact: through intimate
contact and extensive bilingualism in its relations with North Germanic dialects
during the Viking age (Baugh, 1935:110–126) and with French following the
Norman Conquest (205–226); through less pervasive but influential contact with
Dutch in late medieval trade relations (231–232); through moderately close contact
at higher social levels with Latin and Greek from the Middle Ages through to the
Early Modern period (227–231, 262–281); and through distant, cultural contact
with a wide range of languages spoken around the globe in the Modern period
(373–374). Over the last thousand years, this history of contact, together with a
comparative willingness on the part of English-speakers to accept foreign words
rather than try to do away with them, has created what has been claimed to be the
largest vocabulary of any language in the world (McCrum, Cran, & MacNeil, 1986:1).
Because in most cases of lexical transfer the languages involved differ in
phonological and phonetic terms (phonemic inventory, phonotactic constraints,
phonetic realization of phonemes, etc.), transfer is usually accompanied by a
process of adaptation (Hock, 1986:390; Van Coetsem, 1988:10), or nativization
(Hock, 1986:390). In nativization, each source-language segment is identified
with a phonetically similar or orthographically equivalent recipient-language
phoneme, depending whether the foreign word is heard or read. Modern cases of
distant contact often involve written language, so that orthographic and
transliteration conventions can play an important role in the input to nativization.
More rarely, transfer involves adoption (Hock, 1986:408) or imitation (Van
Coetsem, 1988:10), whereby a foreign phone is reproduced in the recipient
language in something like its original form, without being identified with a
native phoneme (i.e., extraphonemically). This usually results either from a lack
of phonetically appropriate native substitutes or from the high social prestige of
the source language, as when English speakers imitate the nasal vowel and
uvular /r/ of a French word like genre, or the voiceless velar fricative of the
358 CHARLES BOBERG

German name Bach. Occasionally, repeated imitation leads to integration (Van

Coetsem, 1988:10), whereby the foreign phone becomes a new recipient-
language phoneme. Perhaps the most frequently cited example of integration is
the development from French words of the English voiced palato-alveolar
fricative, /Ʒ /, first through palatalization of /z/ in medieval, Anglo-French words
such as confusion, measure, and usual, then more directly in more recent lexical
transfers such as beige, genre, mirage, and rouge. Another English phoneme
with its origins in French loanwords is /oy/, the development of Anglo-French
words such as espuiller (spoil), joie ( joy), real (royal), and veiage (voyage).
This article presents data on both nativization and imitation of foreign (a) in
Canadian English, the latter raising the possibility of the integration of a new
low-central vowel phoneme, albeit one occurring only in foreign vocabulary.

FOREIGN (A) LOAN WORDS IN ENGLISH

In keeping with the complex relationship between sound and spelling in English,
the letter ,a. corresponds to not one but three vowel phonemes in English
orthography:

the “short” ,a. of fat;

the “long” ,a. of fate;
the “broad” ,a. of father.

These phonemes are rendered as /æ/, /ey/, and /ah/, respectively, in the broad
transcriptional practice of the most influential body of work on variation and
change in modern North American English, a practice established by Trager &
Smith (1951) that was adopted by Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner (1972) and in all of
Labov’s subsequent work, culminating in the Atlas of North American English
(Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006). In the British variationist tradition, /æ/, /ey/, and
/ah/ are represented as the TRAP, FACE, and BATH vowels, respectively, of Wells’s
(1982) lexical sets. This article will follow the American practice of Labov.
No matter how it is transcribed, the multiple phonographemic relationship
between the letter ,a. and the English vowel system has made the nativization
of foreign words spelled with ,a. a variable process, with outcomes
dependent on a complex interplay of regional, social, lexical, and diachronic
constraints, first studied in detail by Boberg (1997).1 Adopting the parentheses
traditionally reserved for the identification of variables in sociolinguistics, this
variable process will be labeled foreign (a) nativization, with the English
phonemes /æ/, /ey/, and /ah/ as its main historical variants. The third of these,
while straightforward in standard Southern British English, shows regionally
variable phonemic relations with other back vowels in North America. The /ah/
vowel is merged with “short” ,o. or /o/ (the LOT vowel) in most North
American English dialects outside Eastern New England, so that father and
bother rhyme and balm and bomb are homophones. For most North American
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 359

English, then, the nonfront target for foreign (a) phoneme-matching might be
labeled /ah-o/, rather than simply /ah/. In a subset of these dialects, including the
standard variety of Canadian English studied here, there is a second merger of
both /ah/ and /o/ with /oh/ (the THOUGHT vowel), so that /ah/ can be understood
to represent not one historical word class but three, all of which occupy the low-
back corner of the vowel space. A fourth, extraphonemic outcome in Canadian
English will also be considered here, with a phonetic quality intermediate
between low-front /æ/ and low-back /ah/, in the low-central region of the vowel
space. Being extraphonemic, this will be represented with the square brackets
conventionally reserved for narrow, phonetic transcription, as [a].
Of the three main nativization outcomes, Boberg (1997) found that only two are
generally attested as productive processes today. The first foreign (a) words,
transferred from Latin or French into Old or Middle English, went through the
regular developments of short and long ,a. in Middle and Early Modern
English, in particular the Great English Vowel Shift. Thus, early foreign (a) treated
as a short vowel is now /æ/ (e.g., cap, tobacco, track), and when treated as a long
vowel, it is now /ey/ (cave, face, potato). Foreign (a) words transferred to Modern
English, however, are generally identified with either /æ/ or /ah/, not /ey/. Thus,
paste, borrowed from Middle French in the 14th century, became /peyst/, but
pasta, borrowed from Italian in the 19th century, can have either /ah/ or /æ/ but
not /ey/. Similarly, tornado, borrowed from Spanish in the 16th century, has /ey/,
but enchilada, borrowed in the 19th century and popularized in the 20th, has /ah/
rather than /ey/. A third illustration is the contrast between marmalade, borrowed
from Portuguese in the 17th century and now pronounced with anglicized word-
initial stress and a final vowel /ey/, and tapenade, a much newer gourmet import
of the late 20th century, from Occitan via French, which still has its final stress
and a final vowel /ah/; to pronounce it on the model of marmalade would be
gauche. Moreover, some originally short foreign (a) words ( pass, vast), which
remain /æ/ in North American English today, were lengthened in Southern British
English along with native words featuring ,a. before voiceless fricatives, but
too late to undergo the Great English Vowel Shift, so that these now have /ah/ in
Southern British English but /æ/ in North America.2
Foreign (a) nativization is not a minor matter affecting a small, marginal class of
words. On the contrary, based on a random sample of Merriam-Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition), Boberg (1997:4) estimated the size of the
English foreign (a) vocabulary at approximately 10,000 words. A large
proportion of these are older loans that came overwhelmingly from French or
Latin, including words that have completely lost their foreign identity, such as
cap or face. The stock of newer foreign (a) words comes increasingly from
languages all over the world: Arabic (hijab, Ramadan, safari); German (angst,
dachshund, ersatz); Hindi/Urdu/Sanskrit (khaki, nirvana, veranda); Italian (lava,
paparazzi, regatta); Japanese (kamikaze, karate, tsunami); Russian (apparatchik,
glasnost, samovar); Spanish (aficionado, macho, plaza); and many others. They
naturally include thousands of proper nouns, such as non-English personal
names (Hans, Pablo, Vladimir); famous people (Gandhi, Kafka, Picasso, or the
360 CHARLES BOBERG

current American president, Barack Obama); commercial brand names (Armani,

Saab, Yamaha); overseas geographic features (Ganges, Pampas, Sahara); and
names of foreign cities, regions, or countries (Dhaka, Gaza, Slovakia). However,
they also include many common nouns. Whereas some of these retain a foreign
character, such as exotic flora and fauna (koala, taro, yak), many others are no
longer explicitly associated with the non-English-speaking world and can now
be thought of as part of the English vocabulary. These include abstract concepts
(coup de grâce, éclat, élan); concrete objects (anorak, carafe, vase); words used
in the arts (drama, gouache, sonata) or entertainment (anime, maracas, samba);
new lifestyle trends (Pilates, shiatsu, spa); and the ever-growing category of
originally foreign food items, many of which now feature in the regular diet of at
least some English-speakers.3 A sample of foreign (a) food words borrowed
since 1500, with Merriam-Webster’s dates of first attestation, appears in Table 1.
The large number of words even in the single, fairly narrow semantic domain of
Table 1 gives some sense of the overall size of the lexical set defined by foreign
(a). Whereas some of these food items appeal mostly to gourmets or particular
ethnic groups (caviar, foie gras, gravlax, latkes, matzo), others have become a
central part of popular North American cuisine, eaten regularly by millions of
ordinary people (lasagna, nachos, pasta, salsa, tacos and, increasingly, falafel,
latte, and teriyaki). In Britain, where Mexican food is less common, South Asian
food takes its place in the popular diet: basmati rice, chapati, kebabs, masala, and
naan are standard “take-away” items. Though most people, if they thought about it,
would still identify taco and chapati as foreign words, many of the words in
Table 1 have been so thoroughly integrated into the English vocabulary that they
would not be thought of as foreign by anyone other than a linguist. This is true of
fruits and vegetables first imported in the Early Modern period (apricots, bananas,
potatoes) but also of hamburger, a more recent German import that now seems
quintessentially American. Not surprisingly, the group of older and better integrated
words comprises all of the instances of the older nativization outcome /ey/: apricot,
champagne, potato, tomato. Even these tend to be variable. Apricot can have /æ/
and tomato, famously, has /ah/ in Southern British English, an instance of foreign
(a) variation immortalized in song by Ira Gershwin (“Let’s Call the Whole Thing
Off”). The newest loans—falafel, focaccia, kalamata, nachos, ramen, teriyaki—all
have /ah/ in American English, whereas their variants in other dialects have /æ/
rather than /ey/. This suggests that ,a. = /ey/ is a closed category, a historical
creation of the Great Vowel Shift. Against these newer loans we can compare
food words borrowed before 1500—basil, cabbage, cake, grape, mackerel,
paste, saffron, sage, salmon, etc.—which all have /æ/ or /ey/ rather than /ah/.4

NATIONAL PATTERNS OF NATIVIZATION: BRITISH,

AMERICAN, CANADIAN

In addition to diachronic shifts in the likelihood of nativization outcomes, foreign

(a) nativization exhibits regional variation in the outcomes associated with
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 361

TABLE 1. A selection of food terms with foreign (a) borrowed since 1500, with date of first
attestation in English from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.)

albacore (1579) falafel (1949) papaya (1598)

alfalfa (1845) fava bean (1928) parmigiana (1892)
amontillado (1825) flan (1846) pasta (1847)
apricot (1580) focaccia (1969) pastrami (1925)
asiago (1938) foie gras (1818) pecan (1712)
asparagus (1545) frankfurter (1887) piña colada (1922)
asti spumante (1908) frittata (1931) potato (1565)
au gratin (1806) garbanzo (1759) raki (1675)
avocado (1697) gazpacho (1775) ramen (1972)
baklava (1653) gelato (1929) romano (1908)
banana (1597) grappa (1983) safflower (1660)
basmati (1845) gravlax (1848) sake (1682)
bratwurst (1854) guava (1604) salami (1850)
caffè latte (1927) hamburger (1884) salsa (1962)
calamari (1961) kalamata (1979) satay (n.d.)
camembert (1877) kasha (1808) scampi (1925)
cantaloupe (1739) kebab (1673) shiitake (1877)
caramel (1653) kielbasa (1939) shiraz (1927)
casaba (1889) kohlrabi (1807) souvlaki (1942)
cashew (1598) lager (1852) sukiyaki (1919)
cassava (1555) lasagna (1846) sultana (1585)
caviar (1560) latke (1927) syrah (1974)
champagne (1664) macchiato (n.d.) taco (1914)
chapati (1810) mahi mahi (1905) tamale (1854)
chianti (1833) mango (1582) tapas (1939)
ciabatta (n.d.) masala (1780) tapenade (1952)
cilantro (1903) matzo (1650) teriyaki (1962)
dal (1673) moussaka (1862) tilapia (1849)
empanada (1922) naan (1839) tomato (1604)
enchilada (1887) nachos (1949) tostada (1935)

particular words. To a large extent, this regional variation shows regular patterns
that are aligned with the major national varieties of English (Boberg, 1997).
With three principal outcomes—/æ/, /ah/, and variation between /æ/ and /ah/—in
two national dialects, there are nine possibilities in a comparison of British and
American nativization patterns. All of these are attested, as shown in Table 2.
Closer inspection reveals the nativization of foreign (a) to be somewhat less
chaotic than is initially implied by Table 2. Boberg (1997:58–60) found that,
even in words borrowed after 1700, an approximate date for the start of the
Present-day English period but also for the split of British and American
English, the two national varieties agree on 72% of nativizations. Moreover,
even the disagreements show a pattern. British English shows a greater tendency
to nativize with /æ/, whereas American English, though displaying more
variability than British English, generally prefers /ah/. The most common
disagreements therefore involve British /æ/ vs. American /ah/ (the pasta type), or
British /æ/ vs. American variation between /æ/ and /ah/ (the mantra type).
Together, these account for 21% of recent loans (Boberg, 1997:60), or three
quarters of the disagreements. Additional examples of these patterns from the
362 CHARLES BOBERG

TABLE 2. British vs. American nativization of foreign (a)

British Pattern:
American Pattern: /æ/ /ah/ Variable

alfalfa banana banal

/æ/ anorak mascara Basque
organza morale giraffe

macho adagio jihad

/ah/ pasta bra lasagna
Scarlatti llama taco

angst finale glasnost

Variable fiasco plaza Iraqi
mantra Slavic pistachio

food words in Table 1 include asti, bratwurst, focaccia, gravlax, kebab (often
actually spelled [shish] kabob in North America, emphasizing its association
with /ah-o/), lasagna (often the Italian plural lasagne in Britain), matzo, salsa,
scampi, tapas, and tilapia (also /ey/ in Britain).
The predominance of these patterns suggests that British English has /æ/ as the
default nativization of foreign (a), using /ah/ only where syllabification puts the
foreign (a) in stressed position without a consonantal coda, thereby requiring a
long vowel. By contrast, American English appears to have /ah/ as a default
nativization, based perhaps on the model of Spanish. As /ah/ is merged with /o/ for
most Americans (unlike in British English), it can be used as either a short or a
long vowel, making syllabification less important in the American nativization
process. Moreover, as Shapiro (1997:438) also suggests, /ah/ has the added
advantage of sounding more foreign to Americans than /æ/, which is considerably
fronted and even raised compared with its typical value in British English, thereby
making it less phonetically appropriate as a rendering of foreign (a). This
consideration—preserving the foreign character of the word—appears to be less
important to British English speakers, who further demonstrate their greater
tendency to nativize in their use of Germanic initial stress in loans from French,
where Americans preserve French stress (ballet, cachet, frontier, garage, pâté,
souvenir, etc.) Nevertheless, despite the general patterns, a great deal of variability
remains, both within and among dialects. A few words can even have all three of
the historical outcomes in at least some dialects. For example, Amish, data, and
gala alternate among /æ/, /ey/, and /ah/, depending on the place and the speaker.
In Canadian English, Boberg (2000:17) showed yet a third national pattern,
previously noted by Avis (1973:65) but not in several other studies of English in
Canada, such as the major sociolinguistic surveys of Vancouver (Gregg,
2004:50–64) and of Ottawa (Woods, 1999:32–37). Canadians use much more
/æ/ and less /ah/ in foreign (a) nativization than either British or American
English speakers. Not only do older Canadians align themselves largely with
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 363

British use of /æ/ in words where Americans prefer /ah/, such as macho and pasta,
but they often use /æ/ even where both British and American speakers agree on /ah/,
as in llama or saga. Indeed, traditional Canadian English resorts to /ah/ only where
/æ/ cannot be licensed phonologically, that is, in stressed, word-final position (bra,
éclat, spa), though this could just as well be analyzed as the use of /oh/ (THOUGHT)
rather than /ah/, because these vowels are merged in Canada (spa rhymes with
paw). This unique pattern likely results from a legacy of British default /æ/
without the Southern British option of /ah/ for long vowels, because the British
“broad-a”/BATH class ( pass, cast, staff, path, dance, etc.) has /æ/ in Canada,
making /ah/ an extremely marginal word class in Canadian English. Moreover,
the American strategy of using /ah/ is not easily applied in Canada because
Canadian English /ah/, merged with /o/ and /oh/, is phonetically too far back to
sound appropriate as a rendering of the low-central vowel associated with
foreign languages.
However, while establishing the greater Canadian preference for /æ/, Boberg
(2000:18) also found that American-style /ah/ nativizations were becoming more
common in Canada. They rose from an average of 2.7 /ah/ nativizations out of
15 tokens of foreign (a) for speakers over 60 (18%) to 3.2 out of 15 for speakers
aged 40–59 years (21%) to 4.3 out of 15 for speakers under 40 years old (29%).
This represents an increase of 60% of the oldest group’s frequency over two
generations. In order to confirm this trend, a set of 20 tokens of foreign (a) was
included on a word list designed to study variation and change in the vowels of
Canadian English and was subjected to acoustic phonetic analysis in the present
study. This yielded a large set of new data, which are reported in this article. The
following sections describe the method and results of this study.

FOREIGN (A) LOAN WORDS IN THE PHONETICS

OF CANADIAN ENGLISH PROJECT

In 1999, a project called the Phonetics of Canadian English (PCE) was undertaken
by the author at McGill University. Its purpose was to collect and analyze data on
regional and gender variation in the production of the vowels of Canadian English
within a socially uniform group of university students from across the country. The
project involved tape-recorded sociolinguistic interviews conducted by McGill
undergraduate students with their peers. The interviewers were students of
Linguistics, but the participants were not. Several different interviewers were
used and no attempt was made to match interviewers and participants in terms of
regional origin, sex, or other factors, though some interviewers recruited
personal friends as participants. The interviews included the elicitation of
demographic information on each participant, the reading of a word list, a period
of unscripted conversation, and a written opinion survey. The word list
contained 180 items, most of which were chosen to represent all of the vowel
phonemes of English, with several tokens of each vowel and its most important
allophones; an analysis of regional variation in these data is presented in Boberg
364 CHARLES BOBERG

(2008). In addition to these items there were 20 tokens of foreign (a) interspersed
throughout the list, so that the identity of the words as part of a set featuring foreign
(a) was not discernible.
This article reports on acoustic analysis of these 20 word list tokens from each of
58 Canadian and 22 American English speakers from dialect regions across North
America. The number of speakers from each dialect region is given in Table 3.
Considering the wider variety of American vowel systems identified by Labov,
Ash, & Boberg (2006), the regional origin of speakers within the United States
might be hypothesized to have a more important influence on nativization
patterns than in Canada (in fact, an example of this influence is described in
note 5). However, given the small sample of American speakers recruited for
this study and the focus of this article on Canadian English, an analysis of this
factor will not be attempted here.
The 20 tokens of foreign (a) included on the word list are shown in Table 4, with
their dates of first attestation in English, their source languages, and their
pronunciations as given in major national dictionaries of English. The dates,
source languages, and American pronunciations are taken from Merriam-
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition; the British pronunciations from
the Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary, 3rd edition; and the Canadian
pronunciations from the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 1st edition. The word list
tokens were chosen to represent a wide range of dates, source languages,
semantic fields, and phonological factors while excluding words that are
unusual, obscure, or difficult to pronounce. Whereas Pakistani and panorama
contain two tokens of foreign (a), only the vowel in the primary-stress syllable is
analyzed here.

METHOD OF ANALYSIS

All 1700 tokens of foreign (a) from the word list were analyzed acoustically, using
both spectrograms and linear predictive coding formant trajectories produced by
Kay Elemetrics Corp.’s CSL program. Procedures were identical with those for
the larger acoustic analysis reported in Boberg (2008) and very similar to those
used by Labov, Ash, & Boberg (2006). Synchronous, nuclear measurements of
F1 and F2 were taken at the maximal value of F1 or in the middle of a steady-
state identified auditorily with the nucleus. The resulting data were normalized
according to the procedure developed by Nearey (1978). The scaling factors for
each speaker were computed from the larger acoustic analysis reported in Boberg
(2008) rather than from the foreign (a) measurements themselves, so that the
normalization could rely on the entire vowel space rather than on the smaller
space occupied by foreign (a). The foreign (a) data were therefore directly
comparable with mean formant data on the surrounding native vowels for each
speaker, particularly the two normal targets of foreign (a) assignment, /æ/ in the
low-front quadrant and /ah-o/ in the low-back quadrant (for the mean positions
of these vowels in Canadian English, see Boberg [2008:136]). The mean
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 365

TABLE 3. Regional origin of PCE participants

Canadian Region n U.S. Region n

British Columbia 9 Midland and West 4

Prairies/NW Ontario 10 Inland North/Great Lakes 5
Southern Ontario 6 South 4
Greater Toronto 6 Mid-Atlantic 5
Eastern Ontario 6 New England 4
Quebec 9
Maritimes 9
Newfoundland 3
Total 58 22

positions of these vowels for each speaker were established using data from the
same word list that contained the foreign (a) tokens: six tokens of /æ/ (bad, sack,
sad, sat, tally, and tap), four of /ah/ ( father, spa, calm, and palm) and seven of
/o/ (bother, cot, sock, sod, top, collar, and Don).
In order to measure the phonemic status of each foreign (a) production, the F2
space between each speaker’s mean positions of /æ/ and /ah-o/ was divided into
thirds. The third nearest /æ/, with the highest F2 values, was assigned to the
back portion of the field of dispersion of that vowel, so that tokens falling within
this highest third would be classified as variably retracted tokens of /æ/.
Similarly, the third nearest the mean position of /ah-o/, with the lowest F2
values, was assigned to the front portion of the field of dispersion of that vowel,
so that tokens falling within this lowest third would be classified as variably
fronted tokens of /ah-o/.5 Only tokens falling within the middle third of the F2
distance between the means of /æ/ and /ah-o/, representing an intermediate low-
central space, were classified as extraphonemic, as their phonemic identity could
not be clearly established. A script using the IF function of Excel was used to
make these assignments automatically in the spreadsheet containing the formant
data.
To some extent, dividing the F2 range into thirds was an arbitrary analytical
decision. Taking the central half of the space would have produced more
extraphonemic tokens, whereas taking the central fifth would have produced
fewer. The central third appeared to be the best compromise between being too
strict and too liberal in judgments about extraphonemic status, and accorded well
with the author’s experience in examining the distributions of individual vowel
tokens around their means in the low vowel space. Whereas in some dialects the
most advanced tokens of /ah-o/ can be quite close to the most retracted tokens of
/æ/, there is generally a gap between the fields of dispersion of these vowels
approximately equivalent to the radius of each dispersion. This is certainly true
of Canadian English. Tokens in the central third of the /æ/–/o/ range would
indeed be atypical representatives of either /æ/ or /ah-o/. It was also decided that
using the means of neighboring vowels would be a more reliable procedure than
using the innermost individual tokens of those vowels as representatives of the
366 CHARLES BOBERG

TABLE 4. Twenty foreign (a) words included in the Phonetics of Canadian English word list,
with date of first attestation in English, source language, and pronunciation entries from
British, American, and Canadian dictionaries

Word Date Source BrE AmE CanE

avocado 1697 Span. , Nahuatl ah ah ah

Colorado 1876 Spanish ah æ, ah æ
drama 1515 Latin , Greek ah ah, æ æ, ah
façade 1681 French , Italian ah ah ah
Iraq 1920? Arabic ah, æ ah, æ æ, ah
lager 1852 German ah ah ah
lasagna 1846 Italian æ, ah ah ah
lava 1759 Italian ah ah, æ æ
llama 1600 Sp. , Quechua ah ah æ
macho 1928 Spanish æ ah ah, æ
mafia 1875 Italian æ ah, æ ah, æ
pajamas 1883 Hindi , Persian ah ah, æ æ, ah
(Paki)stani 1947 Urdu ah æ, ah æ
(pano)rama 1796 Greek ah æ, ah æ
pasta 1847 Italian æ ah, also æ æ, ah
Picasso c. 1907 Spanish/Catalan æ ah, æ ah, æ
plaza 1683 Spanish ah æ, ah æ
Slavic 1813 Latin ah ah, æ æ
soprano 1730 Italian ah æ, ah æ
taco 1914 Spanish ah ah ah, æ

inner boundaries of their fields of dispersion, because measurements of individual

tokens are subject to many sources of potential error. Making phonemic
classifications by means of an automated routine such as that described here may
expose the analysis to some risk of misclassification, but it was felt that this risk
was smaller than the risks associated with making subjective judgments about
vowel quality in an auditory-impressionistic analysis, given the nature of the data
reported herein.

RESULTS

The results of the acoustic analysis described previously are presented in Table 5,
which shows the frequency of productions classified as /æ/, /ah-o/, and intermediate
for each word for both the Canadian and American groups of participants.
In general, Table 5 agrees with the main finding of Boberg (2000). Canadian use
of /ah-o/ is substantially lower than American use but follows a broadly similar
lexical pattern. As shown more clearly in the graph in Figure 1, the relative
proportions of front and back nativizations for Canadian and American
participants are reversed. Not only do Americans use twice as much /ah-o/ as
Canadians, but they use three times more /ah-o/ than /æ/, whereas Canadians use
substantially more /æ/ than /ah-o/. The clear national difference stands up easily
to statistical tests: a chi-squared test of the national proportions of /æ/ and /ah-o/
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 367

TABLE 5. American and Canadian percentages of /æ/, /ah-o/, and intermediate productions
by word (no-data cases excluded)

Canadians (n = 55) Americans (n = 22)

Word /æ/ /ah-o/ Intermed. /æ/ /ah-o/ Intermed.

avocado 33% 33% 35% 0% 86% 14%

Colorado 47% 22% 31% 9% 64% 27%
drama 47% 36% 16% 5% 95% 0%
façade 2% 56% 41% 5% 86% 9%
Iraq 81% 11% 7% 73% 18% 9%
lager 16% 76% 8% 9% 91% 0%
lasagna 4% 62% 35% 9% 82% 9%
lava 41% 19% 41% 0% 91% 9%
llama 34% 49% 17% 0% 95% 5%
macho 4% 84% 13% 0% 91% 9%
mafia 11% 82% 7% 0% 91% 9%
pajamas 95% 2% 4% 41% 41% 18%
Pakistani 95% 2% 4% 95% 0% 5%
panorama 82% 4% 15% 73% 5% 23%
pasta 67% 13% 20% 0% 91% 9%
Picasso 40% 33% 27% 5% 77% 18%
plaza 38% 18% 44% 5% 86% 9%
Slavic 41% 24% 35% 9% 91% 0%
soprano 78% 11% 11% 77% 14% 9%
taco 25% 49% 25% 0% 73% 27%

Total 45% 34% 22% 21% 69% 11%

Note: Results of acoustic analysis, with F2 distance between means of native /æ/ and native /ah/ divided
in thirds. Intermediate tokens occupy middle third.

produces a value of 124.1 @ 1 df; p , .005. Alternatively, a t test of the difference

between the mean /ah-o/ proportions of Canadian and American participants shows
p = .000. That said, the nativization patterns are not unrelated. Far from it. A
Pearson correlation test of the 20 pairs of /ah-o/ frequencies returns an r statistic
of .63, indicating a strong correlation. Though Canadians use much less /ah-o/
than Americans, when they do use it they tend to favor it in the same words.
Turning to individual words, there is binational agreement that Iraq, Pakistani,
panorama, and soprano have /æ/ (only a minority of the Americans pronounced
Iraq to rhyme with rock), whereas lager, lasagna, macho, and mafia have /ah/, a
pattern with which the dictionaries substantially concur. This pattern is more
easily discerned in Table 6, which reranks the words of Table 5 according to
their frequency of /ah-o/ in the American data. The remaining 12 words do show
important national discrepancies, indicated in the third column of Table 6, which
gives the absolute difference in percentage between the American and Canadian
frequencies of /ah-o/ for each word. In every case, the major discrepancies
involve a much lower frequency of /ah-o/ in Canada. The most extreme
examples are avocado, drama, lava, pasta, plaza, and Slavic, where the spread
between American majority usage of /a-oh/ and Canadian minority usage is
greater than 50%. Use of /æ/ in these words continues to be a clear indicator of
368 CHARLES BOBERG

FIGURE 1. Canadian and American proportions of /æ/, /ah-o/, and intermediate productions in
the total set of data from 20 foreign (a) words.

Canadian English linguistic identity, even among the sample of young participants
examined here.
It is also evident from Tables 5 and 6 that foreign (a) nativization is much more
variable in Canadian than in American English, insofar as the set of 20 words
examined here is representative of the foreign (a) vocabulary as a whole.6
Although at least the sample of Americans analyzed here appears to be relatively
unanimous in its treatment of particular words, the equivalent sample of
Canadians shows a much greater degree of variation. Ten words produced
frequencies of /ah-o/ between 20% and 80% for Canadians, compared with only
four for the Americans. The unanimity of American productions for the first 12
words in Table 6—with frequencies of /ah-o/ consistently over 80%—is
unmatched in the Canadian data. This suggests that the American nativization
pattern is fairly well established, whereas the Canadian one is currently subject
to change.
Even though changes in progress are often constrained by a range of social and
linguistic factors, correlations between Canadian nativization outcomes and date of
attestation, source language, speaker region, or speaker sex could not be established
in these data. A t test of male vs. female proportions of each outcome in the
Canadian data, for which the means were never more than 4% apart, showed no
significant differences aligned with speaker sex. The effect of region on
proportions of the three outcomes in Table 5 was tested with a multivariate
analysis of variance in SPSS, which showed no overall effect (F = 1.704 @ 8 df;
p = .107). Nevertheless, tests of between-subjects effects showed that there was a
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 369

TABLE 6. Words ranked by frequency of /ah-o/ in American data, with absolute difference
between American and Canadian frequencies

Word Am. % /ah/ Can. % /ah/ Nat. diff.

llama 95% 49% 46%

drama 95% 36% 59%
macho 91% 84% 7%
mafia 91% 82% 9%
lager 91% 76% 15%
Slavic 91% 24% 67%
lava 91% 19% 72%
pasta 91% 13% 78%
façade 86% 56% 30%
avocado 86% 33% 54%
plaza 86% 18% 68%
lasagna 82% 62% 20%
Picasso 77% 33% 45%
taco 73% 49% 24%
Colorado 64% 22% 42%
pajamas 41% 2% 39%
Iraq 18% 11% 7%
soprano 14% 11% 3%
panorama 5% 4% 1%
Pakistani 0% 2% 2%

significant effect on the proportion of /ah-o/ (F = 2.945 @ 4 df; p = .029). The only
regional distinction that showed this effect at a significant level, however, was that
between Quebec and Ontario ( p = .023). The probability of /ah-o/ nativizations is
significantly higher in Ontario (41%) than in Quebec (28%). The regional means
are shown in the graph in Figure 2. For this analysis, Newfoundland was omitted
and the three Ontario regions of Table 3 were combined into one, in order to
avoid regions that had too few participants for effective analysis. The graph
indicates that Ontario is the only region where the frequencies of /ah-o/ and /æ/
are approximately equal; in the other regions, the general Canadian pattern of
preference for /æ/ prevails, particularly in Quebec.
Though most of the PCE participants’ foreign (a) productions were clearly
identified with either /æ/ or /ah-o/ by the algorithm described previously, a
substantial number of the Canadian productions were not. This proportion,
labeled intermediate, is shown as the third column of each national set of data in
Table 5, and as the third pair of bars in Figure 1. It is twice as high for the
Canadian group (22%) as for the American (11%). In fact, for the Americans,
extraphonemic productions appear to be a fairly rare phenomenon, whereas for
the Canadians, they comprise a substantial proportion of the data and represent a
more general pattern. The 20 words are reranked in Table 7 according to their
frequency of intermediate productions in the Canadian data. The American
proportion rises to 20% or more in only three words: Colorado, panorama, and
taco. The Canadian proportion reaches this level in 10 words, half of the set
examined here, and is over 30% in 7 of them, a level never reached in the
370 CHARLES BOBERG

FIGURE 2.Proportions of /æ/, /ah-o/, and intermediate productions by Canadian region. BC =

British Columbia; PR = Prairies and Northwestern Ontario; ON = Ontario; QC = Quebec;
MT = Maritimes.

American data. Nearly half of the Canadian productions of plaza, for instance, were
identified with neither /æ/ nor /ah-o/, compared with only 9% of the American
productions. In addition to lexical variation, the frequency of extraphonemic
productions shows interspeaker variation, ranging from 0% to 56%. Of the
12 participants with the highest individual proportions of intermediate
productions—those with over a third—11 are Canadian. The only American
in this group is a westerner from Colorado (PCE MWM83), a region that shares
the low-back merger with Canada and might therefore be expected to show a
similar pattern.
In order to examine the extraphonemic treatment of foreign (a) in greater detail,
individual vowel charts for three of the Canadian participants with high proportions
of intermediate productions are presented in Figures 3–6. These indicate more
concretely the location of intermediate tokens in the interstitial region between
/æ/ and /ah-o/. In the charts, nonforeign vowel means are shown as open
diamonds, whereas foreign (a) tokens are shown as solid squares.
Figure 3 shows the productions of a man from Ottawa, born in 1978. The three
low-back vowels, /o/, /oh/, and /ah/ (cot, caught, and father, respectively), are
solidly merged in lower-mid-back position, whereas /ʌ/ (cut) is halfway between
the low-back merger and a low, slightly front-of-center /æ/ (cat). As is typical of
Ontario English, there is a wide separation between the main distribution of /æ/
and its prenasal allophone, which is raised to lower-mid-front position. The
foreign (a) tokens divide into three sets. One set, comprising pajamas, Pakistani,
Picasso, and soprano, is clearly identified with /æ/. A second, comprising lager
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 371

TABLE 7. Words ranked by frequency of intermediate (extraphonemic) productions in

Canadian data

Word Can. % Intermed. Am. % Intermed.

plaza 44% 9%
facade 41% 9%
lava 41% 9%
Slavic 35% 0%
avocado 35% 14%
lasagna 35% 9%
Colorado 31% 27%
Picasso 27% 18%
taco 25% 27%
pasta 20% 9%
llama 17% 5%
drama 16% 0%
panorama 15% 23%
macho 13% 9%
soprano 11% 9%
lager 8% 0%
Iraq 7% 9%
mafia 7% 9%
pajamas 4% 18%
Pakistani 4% 5%

and Colorado, is just as clearly identified with the low-back phoneme. The
remaining tokens—the largest set—occupy a region exactly intermediate
between /æ/ and /ah-o-oh/ and cannot be confidently identified with either
phoneme, though some are close enough to /ʌ/ to suggest that this may be a
third alternative for phonemic identification for some words.
Figure 4 shows the productions of a man from Weyburn, Saskatchewan, born in
1980. As with the previous speaker, the three low-back vowels are solidly merged
in lower-mid-back position, but /ʌ/ remains in mid position well above the line
between /o,oh,ah/ and /æ/, and the main distribution of /æ/ is less centralized,
situated clearly in the lower-front quadrant. The foreign (a) tokens divide again
into three sets. The /æ/ set for this speaker includes pajamas and Pakistani,
which show the prenasal raising typical of native words, and Iraq and soprano,
the former with a prototypical /æ/ that would be identical with that of rack.
The low-back set includes two phonetically similar words, macho and mafia,
which differ only in height. The remaining tokens—again the largest group—
occupy an intermediate region, in this case just as far from /ʌ/ as from /æ/ and
/o,oh,ah/.
Figure 5 shows the productions of a man from Peterborough, Ontario, born in
1977. The distribution of his low vowel phonemes is very similar to that of the
Weyburn man in the previous figure, though with /ʌ/ somewhat lower and
fronter and the low-back vowels less lowered; nevertheless, /ʌ/ remains above
the low-back perimeter of the vowel space. The foreign (a) tokens are less
clearly divided into three sets than in the last two examples, though there is a
372 CHARLES BOBERG

FIGURE 3. Foreign (a) tokens and low vowel means for PCE EOM78.

closer and more consistent identification of the prenasal tokens with prenasal /æN/,
only drama and llama being excluded from this group. The latter is fairly clearly
identified with the low-back vowel instead, as in American English, a set that
appears to include Slavic and mafia as well, though the last of these is much
lower than the main low-back vowel distribution. The /æ/ set for this speaker
includes Colorado, Iraq, and Picasso. The remaining tokens are intermediate,
though pasta is close enough to /ʌ/ to look like /′pʌstə/, perhaps showing
phonetic shortening before a voiceless obstruent cluster, with associated raising
of the vowel.
So far, in order to reduce clutter in the vowel charts, individual tokens of foreign
(a) have been compared with mean positions of native vowels, without displaying
the fields of dispersion of individual tokens that make up those means. Clear
identification of tokens as extraphonemic requires a demonstration that they do
not fall within the field of dispersion of a neighboring phoneme. Although this
was handled somewhat abstractly in the preceding analysis by restricting
intermediate classifications to the central third of the low vowel space, Figure 6
gives a concrete demonstration of this. It shows once again the foreign (a)
productions of the Weyburn man from Figure 4, but with individual tokens
rather than means of the surrounding native vowel phonemes. As before, foreign
(a) tokens are shown as solid squares, but the other symbols in this chart
represent individual tokens of native vowels, as indicated in the legend below
the chart.
Figure 6 makes it clear that much of the foreign (a) production of this speaker is
truly extraphonemic. The tokens identified as extraphonemic in the discussion of
Figure 4 clearly fall outside the normal field of dispersion of the surrounding
phonemes. The central foreign (a) distribution shows an almost perfect
separation from tokens of /æ/, /ʌ/, and /o,oh,ah/, with virtually no overlap.
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 373

FIGURE 4. Foreign (a) tokens and low vowel means for PCE PRM80.

FIGURE 5. Foreign (a) tokens and low vowel means for PCE SOM77.

DISCUSSION

Figure 6, together with the data in Table 5 and Figure 1, provides direct
counterevidence to the hypothesis that treatment of foreign phones normally
follows a pattern of nativization through phoneme-matching. Whereas most
Canadian foreign (a) productions can be classified as instances of a native
phoneme, a substantial number—a fifth of the productions reported here—
cannot. Instead, some Canadian foreign (a) productions appear to be clear
instances of imitation rather than nativization. This pattern results from a number
of linguistic, historical, and cultural forces.
374 CHARLES BOBERG

FIGURE 6. Low vowels and foreign (a) tokens of PCE PRM80.

Canadian English begins with a vowel system ill-adapted for the handling of
foreign low-central vowels. Where other dialects have a low-central /ah/ that is a
natural match for foreign [a], traditional varieties of Canadian English have an
empty space in their vowel systems between low-front /æ/ and low-back /ah/, a
state of affairs brought about by the merger of /o/ and /oh/. Rather than
descending and advancing into low-central space, /o/ has joined /oh/ in the low-
back region. The merger of /o/ and /ah/ has taken place in Canadian English as
in other North American varieties, but this merger, too, is in the low-back
region, effectively removing /ah/ from the phonetic range corresponding to
foreign [a].
As a new set of foreign (a) words began to enter the language in the 19th century,
it appears that a basically British pattern of foreign (a) lexical assignment was then
superposed onto this Canadian system through institutional channels such as
schools, dictionaries, and, eventually, broadcasters (with the advent of radio),
and possibly also as a result of the arrival of millions of immigrants directly
from Britain during the century following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Even
though these institutional and immigrant influences appear to have had little
effect on the basic phonological and phonetic patterns established by initial
American Loyalist settlement, the less systematic domain of the lexical
incidence of phonemes was comparatively open to such influence (variable
British phonemic incidence in Canadian English has been well-documented by
Avis [1956] and Scargill & Warkentyne [1972], among others). There was one
crucial difference, however, in how the British pattern was applied in Canada.
British instances of /ah/ were converted to /æ/ on the model of native words.
If British /ah/ in bath, staff, and dance corresponded to Canadian /æ/, so,
logically, did British /ah/ in lava, llama, or plaza. Indeed, this would account for
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 375

the minority pronunciation of tomato with /æ/ in Canada, beside the more common
/ey/ associated with American English. It represents a choice of the British over the
American variant without recourse to British /ah/. This adaptation of the British
system produced a nativization pattern in which virtually all foreign (a) words
had /æ/. Only where /æ/ was impossible, in bra and spa, was /ah/ used, and then
it was equivalent to /oh/ in raw and paw.7
Meanwhile, across the border, Americans were matching the new words to their
low-central /ah/, merged outside New England with /o/, without an equivalent
British influence on lexical assignment. In the choice between a low-back /oh/, a
low-central /ah-o/, and a low-front-to-lower-mid-front /æ/, /ah-o/ was the natural
match for foreign [a]. The growing influence of Spanish after the Second World
War, both through immigration and as a subject widely taught in school, making
it the only foreign language many Americans have any knowledge of, probably
reinforced this pattern. Spanish has a categorical relation between ,a. and /a/,
with the sound of Spanish /a/ being closest to the /ah-o/ of most American
English speakers. This relation can be seen in respellings of foreign (a) words
with ,o., as in the example of kebab . kabob cited earlier, or in German
Knackwurst becoming American knockwurst.
By the late 20th century, the main influence on Canadian English had switched
from Britain to the United States. While cultural relations between an increasingly
non-British Canada and its former colonial parent grew ever more distant, relations
with the United States were continually strengthened along a north-south axis by
patterns of travel and communication. Following the Second World War, spoken
American English was carried by radio, television, and film into virtually every
Canadian household and many Canadians had sufficient disposable income to
allow frequent travel to the United States; some even worked in industries
alongside Americans in a branch-plant economy that saw American companies
open production facilities in Canada.
Amid this stream of American English came tokens of American foreign (a)
nativization. These began to influence Canadian treatment of foreign (a), as
shown by Boberg (2000). Canadian use of /ah/ in some foreign (a) words has
begun to rise, even in cases like macho, where it is not supported by British
usage. In fact, lexical assignment of words such as mafia, taco, or Vietnam was
far more likely to be influenced by American than by British usage for purely
cultural reasons. These are words largely associated with the American cultural
context. The incoming American pronunciations sounded neither like Canadian
/æ/ nor like Canadian /ah-o-oh/. In an effort to accommodate them, some
Canadians, such as those whose speech produced Figures 3–6, gave up trying to
assign foreign (a) tokens to a native phoneme. They simply used a new, low-
central vowel in imitation of what they heard in the American (or in some cases
foreign) input. For instance, Canadian use of /ah/ in drama has more than
doubled from the 17% reported by Avis (1956:52) in his mid-century survey of
Ontario English to the 36 percent reported here in Table 5, but Table 5 also
shows that drama is sometimes pronounced with an intermediate vowel
somewhere between /æ/ and /ah/, indicating that, whereas /æ/ may no longer be
376 CHARLES BOBERG

as heavily favored as it once was, some speakers are not comfortable saying
draw-ma either.
On a first analysis, it may seem inevitable that increasingly frequent imitation of
foreign (a) as [a] will lead to the integration of these tokens as a new low-central
vowel, which we might label /ah2/ or /ahf / (with f for foreign), intermediate
between native /æ/ and /ah-o/. This would imply a two-way phonemic contrast
among the vowels of laggard, lager, and logger; of rack, Iraq(i), and rock(y); of
stab, Saab, and sob; of sad, façade, and sod; or of dally, Dalí, and dolly.
Whether this contrast is regularly attested is a question that will be left for future
research. The evidence presented here can address it only indirectly. Earlier
accounts of Canadian English suggest that the two-way contrast has at least
some historical precedent, meaning that imitation of foreign (a) may contribute
not so much to the emergence of a new phoneme as to the demarginalization of
an old one. Gregg (1957:22) suggested that the vowel of balm, father, amen, and
almond varies between a separate, low-central quality and the vowel of bomb,
bother, and such, in Vancouver English, whereas Avis (1973:64) reported a
distinction between balm and bomb in his own speech but says it is “by no
means common” in “General Canadian.”
The maintenance of the contrast between /æ/ and a new or demarginalized /ahf /
is clearly subject to another, much better-documented development in
contemporary Canadian English: the Canadian Shift. This chain shift, first
conceived by Clarke, Elms, & Youssef (1995), analyzed acoustically by Boberg
(2005) and used by Labov, Ash, & Boberg (2006:219–224) to distinguish
Canadian English in a continental context, involves, among other elements, the
retraction of /æ/ from low-front to low-central position.8 If /æ/ continues to
retract, the choice between extraphonemic [a] and native /æ/ may become moot.
Treatment of pasta or façade with low-central [a] will be phonetically and
therefore phonemically identical with production of native tokens of /æ/ such as
past or sad. The lower vowel system would then revert to a one-way contrast
between low-central /æ/ and low-back /ah-o-oh/, with foreign (a) words such as
pasta assigned to the former and those such as macho to the latter. Nevertheless,
the data presented indicate that this has not yet happened. Even retracted tokens
of /æ/ produced by the three speakers examined here are more advanced than
many tokens of foreign (a). This state of affairs may indicate yet another
possibility: that the presence of a new /ahf / in low-central position will prevent a
further development of the Canadian Shift, perhaps even reversing it, as
speakers seek to differentiate /ahf / from /æ/.

CONCLUSIONS

The issue of foreign (a) nativization in Canadian English will likely intensify in the
future, rather than fade away, as the exposure of English speakers to foreign
languages and the objects and concepts they designate increases in an
increasingly global world. Either a new phoneme, /ahf /, will become firmly
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 377

established, though with the theoretically problematic specification of its lexical

membership as exclusively foreign, or the protophoneme /ahf / will merge with
an increasingly retracted native /æ/, resolving the issue in a different way. Either
of these outcomes will serve to further distinguish Canadian from neighboring
varieties of American English, which will maintain a different set of lexical-
phonemic relations in the lower portion of the vowel space. Canadian public
awareness of this difference will in part determine its future. Canadians wishing
to distinguish themselves culturally or linguistically from Americans may
intensify their use of /æ-ahf / in foreign words, rather than accept new
assignments to /ah-o-oh/ that conform to an American model. The same issue
may arise in Britain, which has also, since World War II, been subject to
increasing exposure to American English. As pasta solidifies its position as a
new dietary staple of the English-speaking world, will it be called or /′pah.stə/
everywhere, under American influence, or will /′pæs.tə/ survive in Britain and
Canada? Whatever the answer, foreign (a) nativization is an excellent example
of the close interaction of social and linguistic change, and of the value of
examining language in its social context, a context in which developments in
global culture can have a direct impact on the phonological structure of varieties
of English.
The range of issues arising from variation in the nativization of foreign (a)
extends well beyond those examined here. One of them concerns the treatment
of foreign (a) in dialects other than Canadian English and the standard varieties
of American and British English discussed previously. The nativization patterns
found in Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa, for instance, might be
assumed to resemble that of Southern British English, but this has yet to be
investigated. There are also many other dialects of British and North American
English that could be examined in this respect, particularly those that resemble
Canadian English in the structural properties of their low vowel systems.
Western Pennsylvania and parts of the American West, for example, also have
low-back mergers in low-back position, making /ah-o/ less phonetically
appropriate as a match for foreign (a) than in other dialects. Do extraphonemic
outcomes arise in those dialects as well? Are there dialect differences in
nativization patterns within North American English that do not align with
structural phonological differences? On the British side, the split of Middle
English /a/ into short and long classes, modern /æ/ and /ah/, occurred only in
southern dialects, leaving northern dialects with a highly constricted /ah/ class
similar to that of Canadian English. Do northern British dialects show a
similarly divergent nativization pattern?
A further issue that arises is the phonetic, phonological, and orthographic factors
that condition nativization outcomes in particular dialects. The 20 words examined
here are far too small a sample to provide reliable evidence of such factors, but an
examination of hundreds or thousands of foreign (a) words might identify
systematic factors in particular dialects that help to illuminate the mechanisms of
nativization and lexical assignment. Finally, to what extent has foreign (a)
nativization developed sociosymbolic value in various dialects of English? The
378 CHARLES BOBERG

relatively small sample here revealed no robust sociolinguistic correlations, but a

larger sample of speakers might show that vowel choice is correlated with social,
stylistic, or attitudinal factors within certain speech communities. The results of
research along any of these lines will broaden and deepen our understanding of
the effects of language contact, the nature of linguistic variation, and the
mechanism of language change.

NOTES
1. Most general descriptions of American, British, and Canadian English pronunciation have nothing
to say about the treatment of foreign (a), or cite only a few examples without a more systematic
discussion. For example, in the introduction to their influential Pronouncing Dictionary of American
English, Kenyon & Knott (1944) observed that “certain foreign sounds will, if the words become
general, inevitably shift to native English sounds—as French a is sure to become either English æ
or ɑ” (xlviii), but their discussion of variants of the low front and central vowels (xl–xli) ignores the
foreign (a) vocabulary, whereas that of “anglicizing” (xlvi–xlviii) mentions only the examples of
Nazi and garage. Similarly brief references to foreign (a) variation can be found in Krapp (1919:61–
62), Mencken (1937:334–339), and Thomas (1958:116). In their comparison of Standard British and
American English, Gramley & Pätzold (1992:342) identified British /æ/ against American /ah/ as one
of their “divergent patterns of phoneme use in whole sets of words,” but their examples are restricted
to country names (Nicaragua, Rwanda, Vietnam, etc.); Avis’s examples of “the widespread use of
/æ/ in Canadian English are similarly limited to Vietnam and Yugoslavia, along with garage
(1973:65). Wells’s book (1982:122, 142–144) contained a more extensive list of examples and an
identification of the main British-American differences (see also Trudgill and Hannah [1985:34, 41],
who also note Canadian /æ/ in pasta), whereas Shapiro (1997) cited numerous examples to argue that
the use of /ah/ in American English is increasing as a function of its apparent “authenticity” as a
rendering of foreign words. Lindsey (1990) provided the first truly substantial treatment of the
variable, relating it to systematic phonological differences between British and American English, an
issue also addressed by Boberg (1997). In fact, Lindsey showed national differences in foreign (a)
nativization to be only one of several similar variables involving other vowels, in which British
English retains a quantity-based pattern involving alternation between tense and lax, or long and
short, vowels, whereas American English prefers the foreign-sounding quality of tense vowels. For
example, analogous to British /æ/ against American /ah/ we also find British /o/ (LOT) against
American /ow/ (GOAT) in mocha, Prokofiev, and place names with Costa (Brava, del Sol, Rica, etc.).
2. Words in the pass, vast set have tense /æh/ rather than lax /æ/ in Mid-Atlantic dialects (New York
City, Philadelphia, etc.), where original short /a/ split into tense and lax classes in a development similar
to that of Southern British English.
3. Chambers (2006:393) noted the contribution of foreign foods to the modern Canadian English
vocabulary, including a number of foreign (a) words, but his discussion of phonological nativization
does not extend to foreign (a).
4. One exception to the relatively recent origin of /ah/ words is almond, a medieval borrowing that,
unlike orthographically similar salmon, has /ah/ in most dialects, though it can also have /æ/ for some
speakers, with pronunciation of its /-l-/ also varying.
5. For the one New England speaker (PCE NEM83) who showed a clear distinction between /o/ in low-
back position (merged with /oh/) and /ah/ in low-central position, the traditional New England system,
the mean of /ah/ rather than of /o/ was taken as the minimal value for the F2 range. Many of this speaker’s
non-/æ/ nativizations were identifiable with /ah/ rather than /o-oh/.
6. At least one of the words showing substantial variation in the American data, Colorado, may be a
regional variable in the United States, along with the similar state name Nevada. The limited American
sample analyzed here suggests that westerners, including the single informant from Colorado, prefer /æ/
in Colorado whereas others prefer /ah-o/. These are only two of many foreign (a) place names in North
America, deriving mostly from Spanish, Greco-Latin, or various Aboriginal languages. Chicago is one
prominent example with /ah/ (alternating with /oh/), but most of these, owing to their strongly local
identity, have /æ/. Typical examples are Alabama, Alaska, Albuquerque, Atlanta, Canada,
Cincinnati, El Paso, Indiana, Kansas, Labrador, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Montana,
Nebraska, Orlando, Saskatchewan, Seattle, and Tampa. Close identification with Western American
culture also seems a likely explanation for the occurrence of /æ/ in a set of words derived from
Spanish, which might otherwise have /ah/ today: canyon, corral, lasso, ranch, etc.
FOREIGN (A) IN CANADIAN ENGLISH 379

7. Another phonological environment that usually produces /ah/ even in Canadian English is vowels
following /w/, as in Botswana, Guam, guava, iguana, Rwanda, or wapiti. These follow the development
of native ,a. after ,w., as in swallow, swan, wallet, watch, etc.
8. Retraction of /æ/ was actually first reported by Esling & Warkentyne (1993), in Vancouver English.

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