The ‘Americanization’ of Canadian speech
A ubiquitous theme in sociolinguistic research on Canadian English concerns the perceived shift from Canadian autonomy to North American heteronomy (Chambers 1991: 93), catalysed by the putative incursion of American norms into Canadian speech. Staple examples routinely cited in support of this scenario include the use of the /i:/ variant in leisure as well as the use of /sk/ in schedule. The variable deletion of the palatal glide in stressed syllables after coronals (news, tune, dew) resulting in variants such as [nu:z] versus [njuzz], is another apparent manifestation of the same process which is report- edly aligning Canadian speech patterns with contiguous American ones (Clarke 1993).
Yet closer inspection reveals that these promiscuous assumptions are not entirely unproblematic. First, as Halford (2008: 26) notes, the social mechanisms by which such features (and their underlying constraints) diffuse across national borders are little dis- cussed beyond the commonplace, but vague, notion that the mass media may be some- how responsible. Second, such inferences are often predicated on comparisons drawn with some ill-defined or idealized nonnative variety of Canadian English. As Chambers (1998b: 18) points out, glideless pronunciations in words such as news and student appear to have been majority variants in Canadian English for at least the past several decades, suggesting that they are by no means the product of recent contact-induced change.