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[shushesyou]

I'm curious to know how many of you can tell the diffrence between an American and Canadian accent, and how you perceive them. For instance, yesterday I was sitting in lecture and leaned over to my friends asking, "Is his voice just heavy or is he American?" Clearly "heavy" isn't exactly the technical term, but it's definitely the way I perceive

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[2naonh3_cl2]

I'm really horrible when it comes to accents. When I went to Scotland as a teenager, I had to have my friends "translate" for me. I felt terrible! :(

In the case of American v. Canadian, the only times I can tell the difference is when the person uses the word sorry or about. Canadians seem to use a longer "o." *shrugs* I've never noticed anything about speaking in a lower register.

[shushesyou]

The actual cause of the difference is this thing called the "Canadian Raising" because we tend to pronounce our vowels higher and farther back in the mouth if they're before a voiceless consonant such as p, t, or s (as opposed to b, d, or z). If I try hard enough I can hear the difference --particularly in the words "eyes" vs "ice", but what tends to be more noticeable is the fact that Americans don't vary that at all, and it comes out sounding "heavy" to me.

Anyway.

Haha, I had the same problem in Scotland the first time I went --there was a terribly nice guy in a store trying to help me and I kept asking for him to repeat himself SLOWWWWWWWWWWWWLY. The best was a time my friend was buying postcards and souvenirs in England and the clerk asked if she wanted any stamps, like four times, while my friend stared at her blankly and then asked me what a "stomp" was.

[takewing]

Funny you should mention this. A friend of a friend is from Ontario, which I didn't expect seeing as I'm living in Alabama now. (I used to live in New York so the idea of Canadians hanging around in close proximity wasn't a foreign concept to me until recently.) When she spoke, I could tell there was something different about her voice/her accent, but I wasn't sure what it was. And then she said "about" or "out" or something and five minutes later mentioned where she was from, but my suspicions were confirmed as soon as she'd said "about". Even then, though, her accent wasn't completely obvious.

I don't know about your heavy versus light theory... I've never noticed it, at least. I do notice that with Southern American accents - even the girls from down here kind of lower the pitch of their voice just slightly compared to how I've heard people speak elsewhere in the US.

[shushesyou]

Yeah, I totally get what you mean about the accent not being obvious. I think that's why I tend to perceive it as pitch as opposed to accent at first. I totally agree with you on Southern American accents, too, although I'm guessing it's also more articulatory factors than actual voice pitch being lower. It's just interesting that that's how we perceive it.

I know that the Canadian accent is largely because we pronounce vowels farther back and higher in the mouth right before voiceless consonants, but it's very slight. I had Australian friends who used to tease that I said "aboot" instead of "about", but it's not THAT big a difference, it's more like the vowel in between the two.