Foreign (a) in North American English: Variation and Change in Loan Phonology

Abstract

Previous research has shown that Canadian English displays a unique pattern of nativizing the stressed vowel of foreign words spelled with the letter <a>, like lava, pasta, and spa, known as foreign (a), with more use of /æ/ (the trap vowel) and less use of /ah/ (the palm vowel) than American English. This paper analyzes one hundred examples of foreign (a), produced by sixty-one Canadian and thirty-one American English-speakers, in order to shed more light on this pattern and its current development. Acoustic analysis is used to determine whether each participant assigns each vowel to English /æ/, /ah/, or an intermediate category between /æ/ and /ah/. It reports that the Canadian pattern, though still distinct, is converging with the American pattern, in that Canadians now use slightly more /ah/ than /æ/; that men appear to lead this change but this is because they participate less than women do in the Short Front (Canadian) Vowel Shift; that intermediate vowel assignments are comparatively rare, suggesting that a new low-central vowel phoneme is not emerging; that the Canadian tendency toward American pronunciation is not well aligned with overt attitudes toward the United States and American English; and that the national differences in foreign (a) assignment result not from structural, phonological differences between the dialects so much as from a complex set of sociocultural factors.