Regional variation
The recently compiled Atlas of North American English (Labov et al. 2006) reveals a number of salient regional divisions in Canadian English. The largest regional division comprises an expansive area stretching from Vancouver in the west to the Anglophone community of Montreal in the east. Atlantic Canada (including the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland) lies outside the confines of this inland zone. Within the latter, fur- ther divisions serve to delimit an inner core encompassing Edmonton in the north west to Toronto in the south east (Boberg 2008b: 131). These divisions are established on the basis of a number of coinciding phonetic isoglosses derived from acoustic mea- surement of several vocalic variables including (but not limited to) the low—back merger of /n/ and /o:/, the Canadian Shift, and Canadian Raising detailed above.