Montreal: Place des R's

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the Montreal Gazette, Tuesday  November 22  2005

Just call this city Place des Rs

MIKE BOONE
The Gazette


Maybe Montreal would have made it if we used our "R"s differently.

But we roll them instead of dropping them, so Montrealers are on the
outside of The Atlas of North American English, looking in at New Yawk and
other cities in a publication that includes 139 maps, charting all the
continent's most important English dialects. English, as spoken in
Montreal, is lumped together with ROCese in a huge land mass that
stretches from sea to shining Quebec-New Brunswick border.

"The book has one Canadian dialect that goes from Vancouver to Montreal,"
said Charles Boberg, one of the Atlas's co-authors. "And then there are
some distinct varieties we identify for the Maritimes and for
Newfoundland." Boberg is an Edmontonian who teaches linguistics at McGill
University. He is currently on sabbatical, working on a study of Canadian
English in which the uniqueness of Montreal speech will be recognized.

"On the basis of vocabulary," Boberg said, "Quebec is the most distinct
region in Canada. This will be very hard for a Newfoundlander to swallow."
Boberg says French exerts a "huge influence" on how English is spoken in
Montreal. This goes beyond casual references to stopping at the guichet to
get money for the dep. "Look at words used for a small apartment," he
said. "In most Canadian cities, it might be called a bachelor apartment.
In American cities, it's a studio.

"Here we call it a 21/2. That's something you don't hear anywhere outside
Quebec." William Labov, who wrote The Atlas of North American English,
along with Boberg and Sharon Ash, is a University of Pennsylvania
professor whom the New Yorker, in a recent piece on the Atlas, called the
"father of sociolinguistics." A student under Labov at Penn, Boberg says
the scholar looks "at how language is affected by social factors and how
society is affected by language."

Labov is interested in how grammar and sound systems are influenced by
such factors as social class, age and education. During the 1960s, he went
to department stores in New York and studied the way staff and customers
pronounced phrases such as "fourth floor." The dropped "R" - which at one
time was part of British upper-class speech - moved down the social ladder
as Britain's world power status declined.  The aristocratic Franklin
Roosevelt, as the New Yorker points out, said, "The only thing we have to
feah is feah itself" - "R"lessness that, 60 years later, has become more
common in Tony Soprano's milieu.

Boberg says Montreal French has a variation "between the tongue-tip 'R'
and the back-of-the-throat 'R.' " The latter, a longer, rolling "R," is a
reliable indicator of lower age and higher education. Among
English-speaking Montrealers, the strong release of the final consonant,
in words such as "right" and "that," suggests the speaker is a member of a
non-WASP ethnic group, perhaps Jewish or Italian. Boberg has been here
eight years. He just got tenure at McGill and plans to stay a while.
"Montreal is a wonderful city," he says, "in all its varieties."

Rrrrrrrright on.

mboone at thegazette.canwest.com

 The Gazette (Montreal) 2005

http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/news/montreal/story.html?id=5d42296a-c7f9-4348-b702-c79021cd19ee

Copyright  2005 CanWest Interactive