This project is a collaboration between Prof. Molly Babel (Linguistics) and Prof. Bob Pritchard (School of Music).

The dialect geography of British Columbia is incomplete, with all of western Canada generically lumped into the category of “the West” in standard descriptions of North American English dialects (e.g., Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006). A recent dissertation by Swan (2016) documents subtle differences between English as spoken by monolinguals in Vancouver and Seattle, suggesting the greater Pacific Northwest may share a regional dialect. These current dialect descriptions are based on a small number of typically urban individuals (de Wolf et al., 2004), and this limits our understanding of the local dialect geography in several ways. For one, this research tends to focus on the speech patterns of monolinguals, which biases descriptions of the regional dialects towards the accents of White-Anglo speakers. Secondly, the focus on urban centers ignores the rural areas that comprise most of British Columbia’s geography. Altogether, this paints an excessively narrow picture of BC’s Englishes.

The goal of this project is to provide more appropriate empirical coverage of BC Englishes by recording the speech patterns of UBC students who represent the cultural, linguistic, and regional groups that more accurately reflect their local populations. Using software we will acoustically analyze the speech patterns, providing a more accurate dialectological map as we connect the pronunciation differences to individual’s self-reported linguistic and geographic histories using data analysis techniques suited to potentially correlated high dimensional data. Crucially – and as a novel contribution to this project – we will pilot a set of online and automated recording techniques so that we can then extend the project to collect data in remote rural locations using our innovated methods. By first recording speakers at UBC, we will be able to troubleshoot and refine our approach, ensuring robust and reliable data collection across the living rooms and kitchen tables of BC. We will use selected children’s literature written by Canadian authors as our elicitation materials to create more interest and accessibility to the project.

This research serves multiple purposes. Firstly, it provides basic empirical coverage of the Englishes spoken in British Columbia, preventing erroneous and over simplified claims from making their way into academic texts and the local consciousness. Secondly, language is a performance, and through clever elicitation and recording strategies we can create repositories and art pieces that tell the stories of our communities through their voices. Thirdly, the recordings can be used in subsequent speech perception and speech processing research to elucidate how the different Englishes spoken in British Columbia are comprehended. This follow-up work will allow us to explore how linguistic identity affects spoken language comprehension, which is vital to creating productive multicultural society.

Thus, in summary, the proposed work will provide the necessary materials to allow researchers at UBC to understand how social and regional identities shape our linguistic pronunciation patterns. These are important issues in urban and multi-cultural settings like UBC and the greater British Columbia where regional, social, and ethnic identities intersect. In addition, our documentation of linguistic variation in BC will provide a corpus for future speech perception work.