Charles Boberg
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 150863 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Charles Boberg |
| NOMBRES | Charles |
| APELLIDO | Boberg |
| FIRMA | BOBERG C |
| AFILIACIONES | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0961-6138 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 26 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 185 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1997 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Current changes underway in Canadian English
This paper presents an apparent-time analysis of current changes underway in Canadian English, based on the New Survey of Canadian English , a questionnaire comprising 85 linguistic variables answered by nearly 14,000 native speakers of English in every region of Canada in 2023–2024. Responses are divided into three age groups: 55 and older, 30–54 and under 30 years old. Questions and individual variants are ranked by how much inter-group differe…
A New Survey of Canadian English
The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Survey of Canadian English presents a unique opportunity to examine change in Canadian English over five decades of real time. A partial replication of the original survey was therefore conducted in 2023-24, gathering a similar number of responses (approximately 14,000) from every province of Canada. The new survey reprised 45 of the old survey’s questions, including variables of pronunciation, g…
Veteran Vowels
This article examines the origin and historical development of the vowel system of Western Canadian English (WCE). It presents a sociophonetic analysis of interviews with two Western Canadian veterans of the First World War, born in 1890–91, and eight of the Second World War, born in 1917–23. The data reveal that the comparative uniformity attributed to WCE today emerged gradually over the twentieth century. Initial English-speaking settlement, f…
Foreign (a) in North American English
Previous research has shown that Canadian English displays a unique pattern of nativizing the stressed vowel of foreign words spelled with the letter , 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 mor…
Diva Diction
As a follow-up to the author’s 2018 analysis of New York City English in film, this article turns its attention to the whole country over the same 80-year period of 1930–2010, using acoustic phonetic, quantitative, and statistical analysis to identify the most important changes in the pronunciation of North American English by 40 European American leading actresses in their best-known films. Focusing mostly on vowel production, the analysis revea…
The North American Low-Back-Merger Shift
Research Article| December 01 2019 3. The North American Low-Back-Merger Shift: A Continental Sound Change Charles Boberg Charles Boberg CHARLES BOBERG is associate professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is a coauthor, with William Labov and Sharon Ash, of The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) and the author of The English Language in Canada: Status, Hi…
Handbook of Dialectology
New York City English in Film
Research Article| May 01 2018 New York City English in Film: Phonological Change in Reel Time Charles Boberg Charles Boberg McGill University charles boberg is associate professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is a coauthor, with William Labov and Sharon Ash, of the Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) and the author of The English Language in Canada: Status…
The Handbook of Dialectology
Newspaper Dialectology
This article asks whether collaboration with a popular newspaper can be an effective means of collecting data on dialect variation and whether the resulting data are comparable with those gathered by more traditional dialectological methods. These questions are examined with a pair of dialect surveys carried out in 2014 by Metro News, in collaboration with the author, in cities across English-speaking Canada. The resulting data, comprising thousa…
English in the Gaspé region of Quebec
This paper reports on the first-ever linguistic study of the variety of English spoken in the Gaspé region of eastern Quebec, which is 86 percent French-speaking. An on-line survey was used to gather data from 200 participants on 58 phonological, grammatical and lexical variables, drawn mostly, for comparative purposes, from earlier research on Canadian and Quebec English. The analysis, focusing on data from the 124 participants who still live in…
Ethnic divergence in Montreal English
This article reports on a study of ethnic variation in the phonetics of Montreal English. The speech of 93 native speakers of Montreal English from three ethnic groups, British-Irish, Italian and Jewish, was recorded and subjected to acoustic analysis. Several statistically significant differences among the ethnic groups were identified. The present paper undertakes an apparent-time analysis of these differences, to see whether they are getting s…
English as a minority language in Quebec
The variety of English spoken by about half a million people in the Canadian province of Quebec is a minority language in intensive contact with French, the local majority language. This unusual contact situation has produced a unique variety of English which displays many instances of French influence that distinguish it from other types of Canadian or world English. The most obvious instances involve the adoption of French words or senses of wo…
The English Language in Canada
The English Language in Canada examines the current status, history and principal features of Canadian English, focusing on the 'standard' variety heard across the country today. The discussion of the status of Canadian English considers the number and distribution of its speakers, its relation to French and other Canadian languages and to American English, its status as the expressive medium of English Canadian culture and its treatment in previ…
The emergence of a new phoneme
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 , here called “foreign (a)” words, leads to variable outcomes, because English represents not one but three phonemes. The most common outcomes historically have been /ey/ (as in potato ), /æ/ ( tobacco…
Regional Phonetic Differentiation in Standard Canadian English
Taking as a point of departure the preliminary view of regional phonetic differentiation in Canadian English developed by the Atlas of North American English, this article presents data from a new acoustic-phonetic study of regional variation in Canadian English carried out by the author at McGill University. While the Atlas analyzes mostly spontaneous speech data from thirty-three speakers covering a broad social range, the present study analyze…
The Atlas of North American English
The Atlas of North American English provides the first overall view of the pronunciation and vowel systems of the dialects of the U.S. and Canada. The Atlas re-defines the regional dialects of American English on the basis of sound changes active in the 1990s and draws new boundaries reflecting those changes. It is based on a telephone survey of 762 local speakers, representing all the urbanized areas of North America. It has been developed by Bi…
The Canadian shift in Montreal
Based on an impressionistic study of 16 young Canadians, mostly from Ontario, Clarke, Elms, and Youssef (1995) reported that the short front vowels of Canadian English are involved in a chain shift, the "Canadian Shift," triggered by the merger of in low-back position, whereby is retracted to low-central position, and are lowered toward the low-front space vacated by . This article extends the study of the Canadian Shift to the English-speaking c…
The North American Regional Vocabulary Survey
This paper presents the results of a new survey of lexical variation in North American English, called the North American Regional Vocabulary Survey(NARVS). Apart from introducing many new variables that have not been previously studied, the paper examines the use of two quantitative methods,net variation and major isoglosses, as ways of distinguishing the most important regional lexical divisions and the most powerful lexical variables from regi…
The Dialect Topography of Montreal
A new survey of variation and change in Canadian English, called Dialect Topography, has been extended from Southern Ontario, where it was conceived and originally implemented, to Montreal. In the tradition of earlier questionnaires investigating Canadian English, the new data contribute to our knowledge of Canadian English at several levels of structure, including phonology, morpho-syntax, and lexicon. In this paper, the Montreal data are compar…
Real and Apparent Time in Language Change
Linguists often rely on synchronic generational differences in language to supply evidence of language change in progress in “apparent time,”yet this approach must always be evaluated against the possibility that such differences reflect change over speakers' lifetimes (“age grading”), rather than language change. The present paper compares apparent-time data on Montreal English with “real-time” data from earlier studies of the same community, in…
Ethnic patterns in the phonetics of Montreal English
Most North American cities no longer display strong ethnic differentiation of speech within the European-origin population. This is not true in the English-speaking community of Montreal, Canada, where English is a minority language. Differences in the phonetic realization of vowels by Montrealers of Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnic origin are investigated by means of acoustic analysis. A statistical analysis of ethnic differences in formant fre…
The Phonological Status of Western New England
Research Article| February 01 2001 THE PHONOLOGICAL STATUS OF WESTERN NEW ENGLAND CHARLES BOBERG CHARLES BOBERG Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2001) 76 (1): 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-76-1-3 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation CHARLES BOBERG; THE PHONOLOGICAL STATUS OF WESTERN NEW ENGLAND. American Speech 1 February 2001; 76 (1): …
Geolinguistic diffusion and the U.S.–Canada border
The way in which language changes diffuse over space—geolinguistic diffusion—is a central problem of both historical linguistics and dialectology. Trudgill (1974) proposed that distance, population, and linguistic similarity are crucial factors in determining diffusion patterns. His hierarchical gravity model has made correct predictions about diffusion from London to East Anglia, but has never been tested across a national boundary. The aim of t…
The Attitudinal Component of Variation in American English Foreign (a) Nativization
When foreign words spelled with (e. g., llama, Mazda, pasta, spa, tobacco) are phonologically nativized in modern English, the foreign vowel [a] is variably realized as one of two English phonemes: short /æ/ (as in fat) or long/a: /(as in father). This is the linguistic variable “foreign (a) .” British and American English show different nativization patterns. Whereas British nativization operates on phonological principles with /æ/ as a default …
The Canadian shift in Montreal
Based on an impressionistic study of 16 young Canadians, mostly from Ontario, Clarke, Elms, and Youssef (1995) reported that the short front vowels of Canadian English are involved in a chain shift, the "Canadian Shift," triggered by the merger of in low-back position, whereby is retracted to low-central position, and are lowered toward the low-front space vacated by . This article extends the study of the Canadian Shift to the English-speaking c…
Ethnic patterns in the phonetics of Montreal English
Most North American cities no longer display strong ethnic differentiation of speech within the European-origin population. This is not true in the English-speaking community of Montreal, Canada, where English is a minority language. Differences in the phonetic realization of vowels by Montrealers of Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnic origin are investigated by means of acoustic analysis. A statistical analysis of ethnic differences in formant fre…
Real and Apparent Time in Language Change
Linguists often rely on synchronic generational differences in language to supply evidence of language change in progress in “apparent time,”yet this approach must always be evaluated against the possibility that such differences reflect change over speakers' lifetimes (“age grading”), rather than language change. The present paper compares apparent-time data on Montreal English with “real-time” data from earlier studies of the same community, in…
Inherent variability and the obligatory contour principle
English coronal stop deletion is constrained by the preceding segment, so that stops and sibilants favor deletion more than liquids and nonsibilant fricatives. Previous explanations of this constraint (e.g., the sonority hierarchy) have failed to account for the details, but we show that it can be comprehensively treated as a consequence of the obligatory contour principle (OCP). The OCP, introduced to account for a variety of categorical constra…
The North American Regional Vocabulary Survey
This paper presents the results of a new survey of lexical variation in North American English, called the North American Regional Vocabulary Survey(NARVS). Apart from introducing many new variables that have not been previously studied, the paper examines the use of two quantitative methods,net variation and major isoglosses, as ways of distinguishing the most important regional lexical divisions and the most powerful lexical variables from regi…
Geolinguistic diffusion and the U.S.–Canada border
The way in which language changes diffuse over space—geolinguistic diffusion—is a central problem of both historical linguistics and dialectology. Trudgill (1974) proposed that distance, population, and linguistic similarity are crucial factors in determining diffusion patterns. His hierarchical gravity model has made correct predictions about diffusion from London to East Anglia, but has never been tested across a national boundary. The aim of t…
The Phonological Status of Western New England
Research Article| February 01 2001 THE PHONOLOGICAL STATUS OF WESTERN NEW ENGLAND CHARLES BOBERG CHARLES BOBERG Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2001) 76 (1): 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-76-1-3 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation CHARLES BOBERG; THE PHONOLOGICAL STATUS OF WESTERN NEW ENGLAND. American Speech 1 February 2001; 76 (1): …
The Dialect Topography of Montreal
A new survey of variation and change in Canadian English, called Dialect Topography, has been extended from Southern Ontario, where it was conceived and originally implemented, to Montreal. In the tradition of earlier questionnaires investigating Canadian English, the new data contribute to our knowledge of Canadian English at several levels of structure, including phonology, morpho-syntax, and lexicon. In this paper, the Montreal data are compar…
The emergence of a new phoneme
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 , here called “foreign (a)” words, leads to variable outcomes, because English represents not one but three phonemes. The most common outcomes historically have been /ey/ (as in potato ), /æ/ ( tobacco…
New York City English in Film
Research Article| May 01 2018 New York City English in Film: Phonological Change in Reel Time Charles Boberg Charles Boberg McGill University charles boberg is associate professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is a coauthor, with William Labov and Sharon Ash, of the Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) and the author of The English Language in Canada: Status…
English as a minority language in Quebec
The variety of English spoken by about half a million people in the Canadian province of Quebec is a minority language in intensive contact with French, the local majority language. This unusual contact situation has produced a unique variety of English which displays many instances of French influence that distinguish it from other types of Canadian or world English. The most obvious instances involve the adoption of French words or senses of wo…
The Attitudinal Component of Variation in American English Foreign (a) Nativization
When foreign words spelled with (e. g., llama, Mazda, pasta, spa, tobacco) are phonologically nativized in modern English, the foreign vowel [a] is variably realized as one of two English phonemes: short /æ/ (as in fat) or long/a: /(as in father). This is the linguistic variable “foreign (a) .” British and American English show different nativization patterns. Whereas British nativization operates on phonological principles with /æ/ as a default …
English in the Gaspé region of Quebec
This paper reports on the first-ever linguistic study of the variety of English spoken in the Gaspé region of eastern Quebec, which is 86 percent French-speaking. An on-line survey was used to gather data from 200 participants on 58 phonological, grammatical and lexical variables, drawn mostly, for comparative purposes, from earlier research on Canadian and Quebec English. The analysis, focusing on data from the 124 participants who still live in…
Diva Diction
As a follow-up to the author’s 2018 analysis of New York City English in film, this article turns its attention to the whole country over the same 80-year period of 1930–2010, using acoustic phonetic, quantitative, and statistical analysis to identify the most important changes in the pronunciation of North American English by 40 European American leading actresses in their best-known films. Focusing mostly on vowel production, the analysis revea…
Newspaper Dialectology
This article asks whether collaboration with a popular newspaper can be an effective means of collecting data on dialect variation and whether the resulting data are comparable with those gathered by more traditional dialectological methods. These questions are examined with a pair of dialect surveys carried out in 2014 by Metro News, in collaboration with the author, in cities across English-speaking Canada. The resulting data, comprising thousa…
Inherent variability and the obligatory contour principle
English coronal stop deletion is constrained by the preceding segment, so that stops and sibilants favor deletion more than liquids and nonsibilant fricatives. Previous explanations of this constraint (e.g., the sonority hierarchy) have failed to account for the details, but we show that it can be comprehensively treated as a consequence of the obligatory contour principle (OCP). The OCP, introduced to account for a variety of categorical constra…
The Attitudinal Component of Variation in American English Foreign (a) Nativization
When foreign words spelled with (e. g., llama, Mazda, pasta, spa, tobacco) are phonologically nativized in modern English, the foreign vowel [a] is variably realized as one of two English phonemes: short /æ/ (as in fat) or long/a: /(as in father). This is the linguistic variable “foreign (a) .” British and American English show different nativization patterns. Whereas British nativization operates on phonological principles with /æ/ as a default …
Geolinguistic diffusion and the U.S.–Canada border
The way in which language changes diffuse over space—geolinguistic diffusion—is a central problem of both historical linguistics and dialectology. Trudgill (1974) proposed that distance, population, and linguistic similarity are crucial factors in determining diffusion patterns. His hierarchical gravity model has made correct predictions about diffusion from London to East Anglia, but has never been tested across a national boundary. The aim of t…
The Phonological Status of Western New England
Research Article| February 01 2001 THE PHONOLOGICAL STATUS OF WESTERN NEW ENGLAND CHARLES BOBERG CHARLES BOBERG Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2001) 76 (1): 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-76-1-3 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation CHARLES BOBERG; THE PHONOLOGICAL STATUS OF WESTERN NEW ENGLAND. American Speech 1 February 2001; 76 (1): …
The Dialect Topography of Montreal
A new survey of variation and change in Canadian English, called Dialect Topography, has been extended from Southern Ontario, where it was conceived and originally implemented, to Montreal. In the tradition of earlier questionnaires investigating Canadian English, the new data contribute to our knowledge of Canadian English at several levels of structure, including phonology, morpho-syntax, and lexicon. In this paper, the Montreal data are compar…
Real and Apparent Time in Language Change
Linguists often rely on synchronic generational differences in language to supply evidence of language change in progress in “apparent time,”yet this approach must always be evaluated against the possibility that such differences reflect change over speakers' lifetimes (“age grading”), rather than language change. The present paper compares apparent-time data on Montreal English with “real-time” data from earlier studies of the same community, in…
Ethnic patterns in the phonetics of Montreal English
Most North American cities no longer display strong ethnic differentiation of speech within the European-origin population. This is not true in the English-speaking community of Montreal, Canada, where English is a minority language. Differences in the phonetic realization of vowels by Montrealers of Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnic origin are investigated by means of acoustic analysis. A statistical analysis of ethnic differences in formant fre…
The Canadian shift in Montreal
Based on an impressionistic study of 16 young Canadians, mostly from Ontario, Clarke, Elms, and Youssef (1995) reported that the short front vowels of Canadian English are involved in a chain shift, the "Canadian Shift," triggered by the merger of in low-back position, whereby is retracted to low-central position, and are lowered toward the low-front space vacated by . This article extends the study of the Canadian Shift to the English-speaking c…
The North American Regional Vocabulary Survey
This paper presents the results of a new survey of lexical variation in North American English, called the North American Regional Vocabulary Survey(NARVS). Apart from introducing many new variables that have not been previously studied, the paper examines the use of two quantitative methods,net variation and major isoglosses, as ways of distinguishing the most important regional lexical divisions and the most powerful lexical variables from regi…
The Atlas of North American English
The Atlas of North American English provides the first overall view of the pronunciation and vowel systems of the dialects of the U.S. and Canada. The Atlas re-defines the regional dialects of American English on the basis of sound changes active in the 1990s and draws new boundaries reflecting those changes. It is based on a telephone survey of 762 local speakers, representing all the urbanized areas of North America. It has been developed by Bi…
Regional Phonetic Differentiation in Standard Canadian English
Taking as a point of departure the preliminary view of regional phonetic differentiation in Canadian English developed by the Atlas of North American English, this article presents data from a new acoustic-phonetic study of regional variation in Canadian English carried out by the author at McGill University. While the Atlas analyzes mostly spontaneous speech data from thirty-three speakers covering a broad social range, the present study analyze…
The emergence of a new phoneme
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 , here called “foreign (a)” words, leads to variable outcomes, because English represents not one but three phonemes. The most common outcomes historically have been /ey/ (as in potato ), /æ/ ( tobacco…
The English Language in Canada
The English Language in Canada examines the current status, history and principal features of Canadian English, focusing on the 'standard' variety heard across the country today. The discussion of the status of Canadian English considers the number and distribution of its speakers, its relation to French and other Canadian languages and to American English, its status as the expressive medium of English Canadian culture and its treatment in previ…
English as a minority language in Quebec
The variety of English spoken by about half a million people in the Canadian province of Quebec is a minority language in intensive contact with French, the local majority language. This unusual contact situation has produced a unique variety of English which displays many instances of French influence that distinguish it from other types of Canadian or world English. The most obvious instances involve the adoption of French words or senses of wo…
Ethnic divergence in Montreal English
This article reports on a study of ethnic variation in the phonetics of Montreal English. The speech of 93 native speakers of Montreal English from three ethnic groups, British-Irish, Italian and Jewish, was recorded and subjected to acoustic analysis. Several statistically significant differences among the ethnic groups were identified. The present paper undertakes an apparent-time analysis of these differences, to see whether they are getting s…
English in the Gaspé region of Quebec
This paper reports on the first-ever linguistic study of the variety of English spoken in the Gaspé region of eastern Quebec, which is 86 percent French-speaking. An on-line survey was used to gather data from 200 participants on 58 phonological, grammatical and lexical variables, drawn mostly, for comparative purposes, from earlier research on Canadian and Quebec English. The analysis, focusing on data from the 124 participants who still live in…
Newspaper Dialectology
This article asks whether collaboration with a popular newspaper can be an effective means of collecting data on dialect variation and whether the resulting data are comparable with those gathered by more traditional dialectological methods. These questions are examined with a pair of dialect surveys carried out in 2014 by Metro News, in collaboration with the author, in cities across English-speaking Canada. The resulting data, comprising thousa…
The Handbook of Dialectology
Handbook of Dialectology
New York City English in Film
Research Article| May 01 2018 New York City English in Film: Phonological Change in Reel Time Charles Boberg Charles Boberg McGill University charles boberg is associate professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is a coauthor, with William Labov and Sharon Ash, of the Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) and the author of The English Language in Canada: Status…
The North American Low-Back-Merger Shift
Research Article| December 01 2019 3. The North American Low-Back-Merger Shift: A Continental Sound Change Charles Boberg Charles Boberg CHARLES BOBERG is associate professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is a coauthor, with William Labov and Sharon Ash, of The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) and the author of The English Language in Canada: Status, Hi…
Foreign (a) in North American English
Previous research has shown that Canadian English displays a unique pattern of nativizing the stressed vowel of foreign words spelled with the letter , 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 mor…
Diva Diction
As a follow-up to the author’s 2018 analysis of New York City English in film, this article turns its attention to the whole country over the same 80-year period of 1930–2010, using acoustic phonetic, quantitative, and statistical analysis to identify the most important changes in the pronunciation of North American English by 40 European American leading actresses in their best-known films. Focusing mostly on vowel production, the analysis revea…
Veteran Vowels
This article examines the origin and historical development of the vowel system of Western Canadian English (WCE). It presents a sociophonetic analysis of interviews with two Western Canadian veterans of the First World War, born in 1890–91, and eight of the Second World War, born in 1917–23. The data reveal that the comparative uniformity attributed to WCE today emerged gradually over the twentieth century. Initial English-speaking settlement, f…
Current changes underway in Canadian English
This paper presents an apparent-time analysis of current changes underway in Canadian English, based on the New Survey of Canadian English , a questionnaire comprising 85 linguistic variables answered by nearly 14,000 native speakers of English in every region of Canada in 2023–2024. Responses are divided into three age groups: 55 and older, 30–54 and under 30 years old. Questions and individual variants are ranked by how much inter-group differe…
Linguistic Variation and Morphology (23 obras) · Linguistics (20 obras) · History (16 obras) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (14 obras) · Geography (11 obras) · Multilingual Education and Policy (11 obras) · History (10 obras) · American English (8 obras) · Computer Science (8 obras) · Philosophy (8 obras)