16.1 Introduction

As is typical of (post-)insular varieties, the distinct features and striking linguistic retentions of Newfoundland English (NE) are to a large degree determined by the region's complex history and long period of isolation (physical, social, and political). Those same factors may also be responsible for a dearth of extremely early records of vernacular speech, as Newfoundland's marginal status would have contributed to a lack of awareness of, or interest in, the details of its intangible culture, at least among the mainstream elite who would have determined what was recorded and archived. In what follows, we demonstrate how the recordings that do exist, combined with the inherently conservative nature of NE, permit us to glimpse an earlier stage of English and one of its variable features, “Canadian Raising.”

The earliest audio recordings of Newfoundland English, which date back to the early 1920s, were largely intended for radio broadcasting. Very few broadcast recordings made prior to the mid 1940s have been preserved, however. As Webb (Reference Webb2008: 13) notes, “[a] fraction of the programming of the [Newfoundland] Broadcasting Corporation was recorded, given the difficulties and expense of recording, and only a fraction of that has survived.” These early recordings typically represent the public language of prominent speakers, among them members of the government and the clergy. They thus involve in large measure a standard, perhaps hyper-standard, morphology and syntax, particularly the “cultivated Anglo-Irish” (Kirwin Reference Kirwin and Clarke1993) accent of the merchant and political class of Newfoundland's capital and largest city, St. John's. Some speakers of this cultivated variety even employed features borrowed from their perceptions of British Received Pronunciation, among them highly retracted vowel pronunciations in the lot and thought lexical sets (cf. Pringle Reference Pringle and Greenbaum1985: 189–190 for a parallel in Canadian English in general, given the association of British English with erudition and refinement).

We are fortunate nonetheless that the region has a long and rich history of the documentation of folk culture, which includes recordings of vernacular speech. By way of example, two years after Newfoundland became the tenth province of Canada in 1949, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) introduced the weekday radio program Fishermen's (now Fisheries) Broadcast. An important component of this program consisted of conversations with fishers from the many tiny “outports” which dot the province's coastline. In addition, from the early 1960s, various departments and units of the province's sole university (Memorial University of Newfoundland) became involved in the preservation of cultural heritage, including the region's conservative vernacular speech forms. Foremost among these units was the Folkore and Language Archive (MUNFLA; www.mun.ca/folklore/munfla). Its audio collection, both reel and cassette – a portion of which has now been digitized – contains many interviews and other field research conducted, in particular, by Memorial faculty and undergraduate Folklore students. The archive houses material from approximately 30,000 Newfoundlanders, or some 6% of the province's entire population. Most of the interviewees are elderly and rural.

In short, despite the relative lateness of vernacular speech recordings in Newfoundland, existing recordings enable us to extend apparent-time analyses to speakers born as early as 1870. This time-depth compares quite favorably with that of the earliest recorded vernacular regional speech data in other parts of the English-speaking world, among them Britain (the Survey of English Dialects, or SED, recorded in the 1950s; e.g. Orton and Dieth Reference Orton and Dieth1962; Orton et al. Reference Orton, Barry, Halliday, Tilling and Wakelin1962–71) and New Zealand (the ONZE corpus, originally recorded in the 1940s; e.g. Gordon et al. Reference Gordon, Campbell, Hay, Maclagan, Sudbury and Trudgill2004).

In this chapter, we utilize MUNFLA recordings to investigate the phonetic feature usually termed Canadian Raising (CR). Though it has been claimed (Trudgill Reference Trudgill and Warkentyne1985: 40) that this feature is not found in NE, early vernacular recordings indicate the contrary. We analyze acoustically a small sample of traditional vernacular speech, to determine what light this sheds on the origins of CR, both in NE and more generally. Prior to that, however, we provide a brief historical overview of both NE and CR, including the divergent linguistic approaches that have been offered to explain the emergence of this feature in a number of varieties of English.

16.2 Newfoundland English: A Brief Introduction

Within the North American context, NE is unique. To this day, it remains distinct from mainland Canadian English (CE), though it has certain features in common with CE, particularly as spoken in Canada's neighboring Maritime Provinces (see, e.g., Clarke Reference Clarke2010). The unique character of NE stems from several factors not shared with most of the Canadian mainland. Among the chief of these are time of settlement and population origins, NE being a product of relatively early and extremely localized source area out-migration. Though the bulk of permanent European migration to Newfoundland occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, settlement on the east coast of the island dates back to the first decades of the seventeenth century. Early European settlers came from two principal sources. Starting in the early seventeenth century, West Country merchants brought out fishery workers (initially on a seasonal basis) from the counties of Devon and Dorset, along with the border areas of such neighbouring counties as Somerset and Hampshire (Handcock Reference Handcock1977). From c. 1675 onwards, these merchants also engaged workers from the southeast of Ireland – principally, from within a 30-mile radius of the city of Waterford, encompassing County Waterford, southwest Wexford, south Kilkenny, and the southeastern portions of Tipperary and Cork (Mannion Reference Mannion1977a: 8).

Geographical isolation also played a role in the development of NE. Until the mid-twentieth century, Newfoundland's small population was scattered in hundreds of tiny coastal fishing outports, many linked to the outside world only by boat. A cross-island railway was completed only in 1898, and a paved highway not before 1967. Even today, a number of small outports on the island's south coast remain without road connections. Such conditions were far from conducive to much outside input, or to large-scale dialect mixing. Other than in larger communities, the southwest English and southeast Irish populations remained largely geographically segregated, the Irish confined for the most part to the southern Avalon Peninsula in the province's southeast corner. As a result of these various factors, the English varieties that emerged on the island of Newfoundland are characterized by their conservative nature.

Linguistic conservatism is readily apparent in the data of the new online Dialect Atlas of Newfoundland and Labrador <www.dialectatlas.mun.ca>, grounded in MUNFLA recordings of rural speakers almost all of whom were born between 1871 and 1912. Its phonetic and morphological components document the regional distribution of fifty-eight variable linguistic features in sixty-nine coastal communities. Many of these point to the maintenance of source variety features that continue to differentiate Irish- and southwest-English-settled areas of the province. By way of example, syllable-initial /h/ deletion in lexical words is found among conservative rural NE speakers of southwest-English descent, but is largely absent from comparable “Irish-origin” speakers (cf. also Clarke Reference Clarke2010: 47–48). These recordings, then, suggest that /h/-deletion (along with environmentally conditioned addition of initial non-phonemic [h]) was a feature brought to Newfoundland by early settlers from southwest England. This is of considerable interest, relative to the claim of Wells (Reference Wells1982: 255) that /h/-deletion did not generally arise in England until well after the founding of the American colonies. Likewise, the online Dialect Atlas indicates that the traditional speech of English- and Irish-settled regions of the island is distinguished by the use of a “dark” or velar postvocalic /l/ in the former, as opposed to a “clear” or palatal pronunciation in the latter. The widespread presence in traditional NE of a velarized contoid postvocalic /l/ runs counter to the suggestion of Trudgill (Reference Trudgill1999: 237) that a dark /l/ variant did not arise in British English before the late nineteenth century (cf. Hickey Reference Hickey, Fanego, Mendez-Naya and Seoane2002, who suggests, rather, an “ebb and flow” in the velarization of /l/ in the history of English).

In this chapter, we utilize MUNFLA recorded data of conservative traditional speakers of NE to investigate a phonetic feature whose origins and chronology remain unresolved within the history of English. Given its iconic association with CE – despite its occurrence in a number of other varieties – this feature is generally referred to as Canadian Raising. It involves environmentally conditioned realizations of the diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ (see, e.g., Chambers Reference Chambers1973, Reference Chambers2006).

16.3 Origins of Canadian Raising

Though this feature had been earlier described by linguists, the term “Canadian Raising” was coined by Chambers (Reference Chambers1973), who observed that the phenomenon was not unique to CE. CR is generally viewed as involving distinct realizations of the nuclei of the diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ when they are followed by a tautosyllabic voiceless consonant. Before a voiceless coda, the nucleus is raised to a mid schwa- or wedge-like variant. This gives rise to such contrasts as louse [lʌʊs] vs. lousy [laʊzi], and white [wʌɪt] vs. wide [waɪd] and why [waɪ].

Canadian Raising has been associated with CE for at least the past century and a half. Using dialect atlas data, Thomas (Reference Thomas1991) showed that the raising of both /ai/ and /au/ characterized the speech of residents of Ontario born as early as 1861. Yet despite its status as an iconic feature of CE, CR does not occur among all present-day speakers, nor in all areas of the country (Labov, Ash, and Boberg Reference Labov, Ash and Boberg2006: 222, Boberg Reference Boberg2010: 204–205). Boberg (Reference Boberg2008: 139–140), for example, found CR to be variable in Quebec as well as in Newfoundland, and less strong in British Columbia than in a number of other Canadian provinces.

Though documented in various locations outside Canada, CR is fairly rare in World Englishes. It has not been noted in England itself, apart from the English Fens (Britain Reference Britain1997). None the less, CR is a feature of a handful of early, and often conservative, transatlantic varieties of English. These include American varieties spoken in New England (Kurath and McDavid Reference Kurath and McDavid1961; Thomas Reference Thomas1991) – among them Martha's Vineyard (Labov Reference Labov1963) and Vermont (Roberts Reference Roberts2007) – and as far south on the US Eastern seaboard as South Carolina and Georgia (Kurath and McDavid Reference Kurath and McDavid1961). CR also occurs in some insular varieties of the Caribbean (the Bahamas, Bermuda, Saba) and the South Atlantic (the Falklands, Tristan da Cunha, St. Helena) (Trudgill Reference Trudgill and Warkentyne1985, Reference Trudgill1986). Several studies (e.g. Vance Reference Vance1987; Dailey O'Cain Reference Dailey-O'Cain1997; Moreton and Thomas Reference Moreton, Thomas, Cole and Hualde2007; Sadlier-Brown Reference Sadlier-Brown2012) have documented the existence of CR in the northern USA, particularly in areas bordering Canada; some of these attribute its presence to more recent dialect contact with CE. Across English dialects, the CR pattern occurs considerably less frequently for the diphthong /au/ than for /ai/.

Historically, the Modern English diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ derive from the Middle English long vowels /iː/ and /uː/, respectively, as illustrated by [fiːf] five and [huːs] house. Their current standard English phonetic realizations are the result of the Great Vowel Shift of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which affected Middle English long vowels: in a chain-shift-like development, the raising of the low and mid long vowels resulted in diphthongization of the high vowels /iː/ and /uː/. This shift yielded many possible diphthongal reflexes in various Early Modern and conservative present-day regional varieties of British English. A word like Middle English [huːs], for example, has resulted in regional British pronunciations that vary in nuclear height, all the way from a low [haʊs] pronunciation through (variably fronted) mid realizations – including [həʊs], [hɛʊs], and [hæʊs], along with monophthongal variants – through to the historically unchanged high back vowel [huːs] realization found in strongly vernacular varieties in northern England and in Scotland.

The origins of the CR pattern in English are disputed. Two chief theories prevail, one grounded in dialect contact, the other in phonetic causation. The first of these was advanced by Peter Trudgill (Trudgill Reference Trudgill and Warkentyne1985, Reference Trudgill1986), who claimed that dialect mixing was a necessary condition for the development of CR. According to Trudgill, the allophonic variants of /ai/ and /au/ associated with different (post-Great-Vowel-Shift) regional inputs in situations of dialect contact, and ensuing new dialect formation, may undergo reduction (focusing) and subsequent reallocation. In the case of /ai/ and /au/, these variants re-align themselves with different phonetic environments. It is Trudgill's claim that dialect mixing clarifies the presence of CR in CE. Dialect contact is also viewed as the source of the only documented case of CR in Britain, which occurs in the English Fens (Britain Reference Britain1997); likewise, the development of CR in South African Cape Flats English has been attributed to dialect mixing (Finn Reference Finn, Schneider, Burridge, Kortmann, Mesthrie and Upton2004).

The second approach sees CR as a natural phonetic development, which may be independently re-innovated rather than inherited. In many varieties of English, vowels and diphthongs tend to be shorter in pre-voiceless environments than elsewhere; it has been hypothesized (e.g. Chambers Reference Chambers1973; cf. Thomas Reference Thomas2001: 36) that shorter durations may result in truncated (i.e. more raised) onsets. More recently, however, Moreton and Thomas (Reference Moreton, Thomas, Cole and Hualde2007) – in an analytically sophisticated sociophonetic account of CR – have failed to uncover durational shortening for /ai/ in a pre-voiceless environment. Rather, they advance an “Asymmetric Assimilation” hypothesis to account for the cross-dialect phonetic differences observed among English diphthongs in pre-voiceless vs. other contexts. According to this account, when diphthongs precede a voiceless coda, their offglides tend to be peripheralized in vowel space. In addition, their nuclei tend to shorten. Shorter nuclei are more subject to the co-articulatory effects of the glide, and hence tend to rise. In other words, diphthongs in pre-voiceless position are dominated by (and assimilate to) their offglide, rather than their nucleus. A corollary of this hypothesis is that in situations of emerging CR, offglide raising precedes nucleus raising in pre-voiceless position, rather than the reverse.

Another area of contention is whether, in any given locality, CR represents a conservative feature (“failure to lower,” i.e. the retention in pre-voiceless environments of historically earlier post-Great-Vowel-Shift mid-vowel onsets) or a true innovation (whereby low vowel nuclei become raised to mid position before voiceless segments). Chambers (Reference Chambers1973) suggests that, in CE, pre-voiceless raising was an innovation rather than a retention. Likewise, on the basis of acoustic evidence, Moreton and Thomas (Reference Moreton, Thomas, Cole and Hualde2007) show that raising rather than failure to lower underlies the development of CR in the Cleveland, Ohio region between 1878 and 1977. On the other hand, and while his focus is not CR, Britain (Reference Britain2008) makes a convincing case that the fronted mid (rather than fully low) onsets of the /au/ diphthong in contemporary New Zealand English – typically interpreted as innovative raising – represent, rather, the retention of a conservative feature, inherited directly from nineteenth-century British and Irish input varieties. Similarly, Roberts's (Reference Roberts2007) acoustic analysis of Vermont English shows that CR resulted from mid-vowel lowering, rather than low-vowel raising.

16.4 Canadian Raising: The Newfoundland Situation

Despite Trudgill's claim (Reference Trudgill and Warkentyne1985: 140) that CR does not occur in NE, the NE literature is in fairly broad – though by no means unanimous – agreement that CR is, indeed, found in the province. On the basis of auditory evidence, Kirwin (Reference Kirwin and Clarke1993: 75) concludes that Irish-origin varieties of NE display a CR-like pattern for /ai/, but not for /au/. Clarke (Reference Clarke2010: 38) concurs. She also notes that conditioned raising for the /au/ diphthong (as well as for /ai/) occurs in many areas of the province settled primarily or exclusively by the southwest English. This raising, however, is often not as marked in the case of /au/ as it is among mainland Canadian speakers, in that many traditional Newfoundland speakers do not have fully lowered onsets in non-pre-voiceless environments. For some, in fact, mid vowels appear to be the norm in all environments, pre-voiceless or not. This is the case, for example, in the mixed southwest English/southeast Irish-settled community of Carbonear, as documented by Paddock (Reference Paddock1981).

The new online Dialect Atlas of Newfoundland and Labrador – also based on auditory evidence – offers further information on the /ai/ and /au/ diphthongs in the traditional speech of the island of Newfoundland. Of the sixty-nine communities investigated, just under one-third display a CR-like patterning for /ai/, in the form of a somewhat more raised nucleus in a pre-voiceless environment. This pattern is more evident among Irish-origin speakers than among those of southwest-English ancestry whose ancestors migrated to the island's northeast coast, primarily from the counties of Dorset, south Somerset and Hampshire (see, e.g., Handcock Reference Handcock1977: 42–43). Speakers from this latter group (along with some traditional speakers of Irish descent) tend to have raised (e.g. [ə, ɐ, and ʌ]) onsets in all environments. As to /au/, the majority of the Atlas sample tends to display greater nuclear raising in pre-voiceless position, even though the degree of difference may be small. Lack of /au/ differentiation is most obvious, however, in Irish-settled portions of the island, where the usual nuclear realization is non-fully-lowered [ɐ].

The very small amount of acoustic analysis conducted to date tends to confirm that CR is a variable feature in NE. Thomas (Reference Thomas2001: 62–63) identifies a CR pattern for both /ai/ and /au/ in the speech of a single male resident of the capital, St. John's, born in 1934. Boberg (Reference Boberg2008: 139–140) has analyzed acoustically the speech of six young native Newfoundlanders attending McGill University in Montreal. Though he found /ai/ raising generally among these speakers, /au/ raising in pre-voiceless environment was displayed by only half of his sample.

The situation is complicated in NE by the tendency for the nucleus of /ai/ to be variably backed and/or somewhat rounded, articulated in the mid-vowel range (typically, as [ə̹, ʌ or ʌ̹]; e.g. Clarke Reference Clarke2010: 39). The online Atlas indicates that almost half of the sixty-nine communities investigated display some degree of retraction and/or rounding for white/wide words; these are located in both Irish- and southwest-English-settled regions of the province, though slightly more prevalent in the latter. In Thomas's (Reference Thomas2001) acoustic analysis of a single conservative St. John's speaker, /ai/ and /oi/ are merged, so that both tie- and toy-words are pronounced with a mid central vowel.Footnote ¹

Given the (largely) auditory evidence for raising in both /ai/ and /au/ contexts in traditional NE, the question of its origins obviously arises. As we have noted earlier, it is highly unlikely that CR emerged from a situation of dialect mixing. Outside a handful of mostly larger east coast communities, descendants of the original southwest English and southeast Irish settlers were for the most part geographically segregated. Even within mixed communities, network affiliations were drawn primarily along sectarian (i.e. ethnic) lines. Moreover, in terms of the /ai/ and /au/ diphthongs, the original English and Irish input varieties can be assumed to have been fairly similar.

Nor does it appear likely that CR was inherited directly from input varieties. To our knowledge, this pattern has never been documented in the traditional speech of the two principal source regions for NE, southwest England and southeast Ireland. In both regions, in fact, mid rather than low diphthong nuclei tend to predominate, irrespective of environment. For Ireland, Barry (Reference Barry, Bailey and Gorlach1982: 103) suggests that the diphthongized phonemes, introduced in the seventeenth (as well as eighteenth) century, in all likelihood contained the centralized mid vowel /ə/, i.e. /əɪ/ and /əʊ/. Likewise, Hickey (Reference Hickey, Kirk and Baoill2001, Reference Hickey2004) confirms that in the Waterford region of southeastern Ireland, home to most Irish out-migrants to Newfoundland, the usual onset for /ai/ is [ə], and for /au/, [ɛ] or [æ]. As to England, Britain (Reference Britain2008) states that regional dialect evidence from the time of Ellis (Reference Ellis1889) right through to the SED data of the 1950s points to mid-open onsets for the /au/ diphthong in the south of England, with open [aʊ] largely restricted to the north and northwest. In their SED Basic Materials, Orton and Wakelin (Reference Orton and Wakelin1967) provide variants of /ai/ and /au/ for the southwestern counties which constituted the principal sources of migrants to Newfoundland: Dorset, Devon, Somerset, Hampshire, and Wiltshire. Both pre-voiceless and other environments exhibit virtually identical nuclei, among them [ə], [æ], [a], and [ɒ].Footnote ²

In short, the evidence appears to point to CR as an independent, phonetically motivated pattern in NE. To investigate the origins of CR in NE, we now turn to the investigation of a small but representative sample of earlier recordings of traditional vernacular speech.

16.5 Methodology

16.6 Results

Vowel plots for each of the four speaker groups are provided in Figures 16.1 to 16.4. In each, the vertical dimension represents the first formant (F1), or vowel height; the horizontal axis, the second formant (F2), or vowel fronting/retraction. Each figure plots the group mean value, in Bark units, for both the /ai/ and /au/ diphthongs, contrasting pre-voiceless and “elsewhere” environments. For each diphthong, two points are plotted: the durational midpoint taken at 50% of the vowel duration, and a point measured at 80% into the vowel, which, as noted above, we take to represent the nucleus and the offglide, respectively. By way of comparison, each Figure also provides group mean F1/F2 values for both /æ/ (as in trap/bath) and /a/ (as in lot/cloth/thought).

Figure 16.1 Mean values for /ai/ and /au/, Older English group.

Table 16.2 lists numerical mean F1 values of /ai/ and au/ for each of the four groups, in both environments investigated. As this table shows, despite nuclear height differences in the expected direction between voiceless and “elsewhere” contexts in five of the eight cases, only three of these proved statistically significant.

16.6.1 Results for /ai/

Figures 16.1 and 16.2, along with Table 16.2, indicate that the two older groups clearly display a CR-like pattern in their articulation of /ai/, via greater (i.e. higher) nuclear means in a pre-voiceless environment.Footnote ³ While t-tests reveal the difference between voiceless and “elsewhere” nuclear realizations of /ai/ to be significant only in the case of the Older English, the difference in mean F1 values between the two environments – obtained by subtracting the latter from the former – proved substantial for both older groups (+0.58 for the Older Irish, +0.51 for the Older English). The two younger groups, on the contrary, display almost identical mean nuclear heights in both environments, suggesting that CR is not a regular feature of their speech.

Figure 16.2 Mean values for /ai/ and /au/, Older Irish group.

Figure 16.3 Mean values for /ai/ and /au/, Younger English group.

Figure 16.4 Mean values for /ai/ and /au/, Younger Irish group.

Yet, as Figures 16.1 and 16.2 also indicate, the nucleus of /ai/ is mid rather than low for both older groups: the F1 mean nuclear value, for both voiceless and “elsewhere” environments, is higher than that of /æ/ and /a/. This is particularly the case for the Older English. In fact, despite the presence of CR, the two older groups display the highest mean nuclear values for /ai/, in both environments. The Younger Irish, on the contrary (as shown Figure 16.4) – with voiceless and “elsewhere” F1 mean values of 7.22 and 7.25, respectively – display considerably lower /ai/ diphthongal midpoints than does any other group. Their nuclear mean value is lower than that of /æ/, and approaches /a/. The same tendency is also evident among the Younger English, though not as marked.

Figures 16.1 through 16.4 also provide further insight into /ai/ rounding/retraction in traditional NE. As noted earlier, both English- and Irish-origin NE has been claimed to display variably rounded and/or backed realizations of this diphthong. These vowel plots show that typical variants of /ai/ are centralized, and not more retracted than the typical articulations of /a/, the lot/cloth/thought vowel. In the case of the Younger Irish, however, there is a significant (p < .05) difference in our sample between voiceless and “elsewhere” environments, with greater /ai/ retraction in the latter.

16.7 Conclusion

Through acoustic analysis, this chapter has shown that CR was variably present, for both /ai/ and /au/, in a small sample of traditional NE speakers born between 1898 and c. 1935. As we have indicated, the origins of this feature cannot be claimed to be historical: regional dialect evidence suggests that the CR pattern is unlikely to have been inherited from the ancestors of these NE speakers, who migrated to the island from southwest England and southeast Ireland between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. (That said, the addition of NE to one of a number of early transatlantic varieties in which CR is found (see Section 16.3 above) raises the intriguing possibility that a CR-like precursor may have characterized the historical British inputs into these varieties.) Nor can the origins of CR in NE be attributed to Trudgill's hypothesis of dialect mixing, given the homogeneity of Newfoundland's British and Irish founder populations, along with the relative separation within the province of the two founder types as a result of both geographic and sectarian divisions. The evidence suggests, then, that CR may have been an independent phonetic innovation in NE. However, since CR is already a feature of the speech of the oldest Newfoundlanders investigated here, the general absence of earlier recordings precludes, at least for the moment, further acoustic investigation into the phonetic development of this feature in NE – notably, the applicability of Moreton and Thomas's (Reference Moreton, Thomas, Cole and Hualde2007) “Asymmetric Assimilation” hypothesis.

While our data also do not provide a definitive answer to the issue of whether raising or “failure to lower” was involved in the development of CR in NE, they do shed some light on this issue. Among the two older groups investigated – both of whom display a CR-like pattern for /ai/ and /au/ – diphthong nuclei, whether in pre-voiceless or other environments, are not fully lowered, but are articulated in the mid range (see Figures 16.1 and 16.2). Our study shows, in other words, that a CR pattern can exist in situations other than those involving a fully lowered diphthong nucleus in non-pre-voiceless position. Indeed, comparison of the realizations of the two older groups (Figures 16.1 and 16.2) to those of the two younger groups (Figures 16.3 and 16.4) suggests that, over a generation, diphthongal nuclei continued to lower in most cases, with ensuing loss of the CR distribution. The situation among our older NE speakers appears similar to that documented by Sudbury (Reference Sudbury2001) for Falklands Islands English, for which she states (p. 67), “the allophonic contrast is less distinctive than in other dialects such as Canadian English, because the onsets of both diphthongs are seldom fully open.” This may also help to clarify why CR has been claimed by some (cf. Trudgill Reference Trudgill and Warkentyne1985) to be absent from NE.

In conclusion, while our acoustic analysis is grounded in samples of traditional NE speech recorded only in the 1970s and 1980s, these have provided new insights into the feature of CR as used by Newfoundland speakers born near the turn of the twentieth century. When contextualized within the broader articulatory-based results of the new online Dialect Atlas of Newfoundland and Labrador, we are confident that they also provide an accurate snapshot of this phonetic feature as it existed among speakers born in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Thus, we are able to add a chronological dimension to the investigation of CR in more recent NE. D'Arcy (Reference D'Arcy2000: 47), for example, concludes from a study of the speech of a pre-adolescent and adolescent upper-middle class St. John's female that CR may be a fairly innovative feature in NE (yet cf. Clarke Reference Clarke2012: 515). The present study, however, indicates that it has existed within Newfoundland for a considerable period of time – perhaps subject to the type of “ebb and flow” described by Hickey (Reference Hickey, Fanego, Mendez-Naya and Seoane2002) for a number of changes in the English language. As such, our study demonstrates the value to contemporary local linguistic endeavors of access to archived real-time language data.