Local
We‘ve got our own way to talk
By SARAH ELIZABETH BROWN
Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Most visitors take snapshots of the Terry Fox monument or Sleeping Giant.
Rebecca Roeder‘s idea of a Thunder Bay sight is the sign she spotted that reads: “1,000 shag tickets for $32.”
As a researcher who studies peculiarities of language from place to place, such things are particularly amusing.
A sociolinguist from Chicago, Roeder is currently at the University of Toronto on a two-year post-doctorate fellowship.
As a sociolinguist, Roeder is interested in the relationship between language and culture.
She‘s in Thunder Bay for two weeks to study what makes the local version of English unique.
A common approach is to look at a language‘s change over time. She interviews people from young to old searching for differences as well as common speech patterns different from places outside the city or region.
Though the city‘s older generation thinks young people‘s language has “gone to the dogs,” the Thunder Bay quirks found so far are common to both old and young speakers, she said.
This city is an interesting case because many people come here and stay for generations, said Roeder.
“So there‘s a solid base of language that changes within itself, it‘s not so affected by outside influences, although you have these other ethnic groups.”
Toronto, with its myriad of influences coming and going, has a dialect that is essentially impossible to trace, Roeder explained. But Thunder Bay had very definite groups of people arrive at certain times, so its dialect could be followed back in time.
Later research could look into any effects of the Finnish or aboriginal languages, for example.
One of her University of Toronto colleagues is Ron Smyth, originally from Thunder Bay.
Headed home for a sabbatical, Smyth suggested to her that Thunder Bay‘s particular linguistic quirks were worth examining.

Varieties of English have been studied all over North America, but this region has largely been missed so far, she said. Only one Thunder Bay resident was interviewed for the Linguistic Atlas of North America published recently, she noted.
Roeder is finding interview subjects through Smyth‘s friends and family, as well as those of the person she‘s staying with in Kaministiqua.
And she‘s finding they‘re happy to talk about talking.
So far she‘s sat down with 15 people from ages 17 to 88, born and raised here, for a1 1/2-hour interview that includes questions about the subjects‘ perception of how they and others talk.
Interviewees read a short story and list of words so Roeder has different types of speech to examine.
She records the interviews and will take them back to a lab to be poked and prodded with instruments.
Beyond the obvious quirks of words like snowmachine or Skidoo – she‘s used to snowmobile – as well as the obligatory camp, shag and Persian, she‘s finding pronunciations of certain words that are pure Thunder Bay.
The vowels “a” and “o”, though generally said a certain way in most of North America, are pronounced a bit differently here.
She and Smyth suspect it‘s a trait traceable back to early European settlers from the Scottish highlands, who had a similar way of saying those vowels.
It‘s called a founder‘s principal, where the first groups to bring English to a place have a lasting impact on the language, and it just may be a linguistic rule in play here, said Roeder.
“The first groups that came in large numbers are the ones that really laid down the dialect that later gets passed down across generations,” she said. “Our hypothesis at this point is that there is some connection to the Scottish highlanders in what‘s been preserved here.”
Even children born to parents from Italy or Poland would pick up what‘s already here as they learned English, she said.
The result is locals born here say Thunder Bay without emphasizing the Y on the end of Bay – by not moving the mouth as much as others would – making the word sound slightly different from an outsider‘s pronunciation.
“Higher” and “hire” also have unique pronunciations here, and the local version of “Oh, OK” is a bit different as well.
Locals say ice cream, trampoline and magazine with an emphasis on the last half of the word, rather than on the beginning as in other places Roeder has been.
Another local quirk is “yous guys,” and “I seen” is common in Thunder Bay speech as well, she said.