Exploring the Vowel Space of Multicultural Toronto English

Abstract

While multiethnolects have been documented in major European metropolises over the last several decades, no such varieties have been reported in North America. This is surprising given the high degree of global immigration in many North American cities. We consider Toronto, Ontario, one of the most multicultural cities in the world, and explore the features of a Multicultural Toronto English. Data comes from young people in an ethnolinguistically diverse region of the Greater Toronto Area. We investigate five vocalic phenomena: goose fronting, the Canadian Vowel Shift, Canadian raising, ban/bag tensing, and goat monophthongization. Our results indicate a great deal of interspeaker variability with some suggestion that young, immigrant men are least likely to produce normative Canadian English patterns. However, a lack of cohesion in covariation between phenomena is consistent with a multiethnolect as understood as a variable repertoire. We argue that Multicultural Toronto English represents linguistic alterity and a means of everyday resistance for young Torontonians.