Canadian English Word Stress: A Corpora-Based Study of National Identity in a Multilingual Community

Abstract

Canadian English (CE) word stress, apart from sharing stress patterns with either the American or the British norms, reveals nationally specific rhythm-based features. The evidence was collected by working through the English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD) and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (COD). The next step was comparing frequencies of words with varying stress patterns in three national written and spoken speech corpora: the British National Corpus (BNC), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of Canadian English (CCE). The words under analysis displayed nearly identical frequencies in the three sources; 89 most frequent polysyllabic words were selected for online express-survey. Canadian subjects (30) representing the diversity of CE linguistic identities (anglophones, francophones, allophones) which affected their decisions on word stress locations demonstrated their preferences for either the Canadian, the British or the American stress patterns, accordingly. The viability of the Canadian stress patterns was supported by the data from two more Canadian natural speech corpora: International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA) and Voices of the International Corpus of English (VOICE). Acoustic and perceptual analyses based on production and perception processing performed by native (anglophone) CE speakers demonstrated the significance of secondary stress in CE stress patterns.