Between me not having (outside of some specific words) much of a midwest accent and MrsTobinL being a canuck, I have heard some things said about us ‘yanks’ as they didn’t realize I am one. On the whole though if you roll your eyes at entitled american behavior as well you will do fine.
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USA USA USA
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It’s funny.
I can hear a difference in the Maritimes, and in the Territories, but the rest all sounds “normal” to me: I can’t hear an accent.
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Wow. Hearing “Take Off” again took me back to when I used to listen nervously to Dr. Demento past my bed time, huddled under the covers with a battery-powered portable radio. I think that represented my very first adolescent rebellion.
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Dunno about that weekend, but maybe if I drop a few loonies to get tickets to the see the Hip… as long as you aren’t up in Scarberia…
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Actually, some neighbors of mine here in CT got tickets to the Hip show up in Hamilton, and got their friends “back home” tickets because I guess all the Canadian servers were bogged down, but everyone trying to get tickets here in the US had no trouble (though I gotta imagine there were plenty in Buffalo trying for tickets).
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So my native language is German, but I spent two years in Ontario.
I wasn’t exactly new to the English language before coming there (still proud about my TOEFL score), but years after returning from Canada to Austria I read an article on the internet about typical features of Canadian English. And I was like, wait, how else would you pronounce “pasta” and “drama”?
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Yep. I lived in BC for a number of years and other than some words that are anachronisms for the US (like “keen”) and stuff like KD, the accent really pops out with words like process. It is almost always pro-cess with a long O for Canadians, but a short O for Americans. Otherwise, not really different from a generic Midwest US accent in practice (for the most part).
Sounds quite familiar…
Perhaps Happy Mutants are created via an incubation process?
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Let’s not forget Denis:
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That “Quebec” French is mostly just joual. The rest of us, the often forgotten French Canadians outside of Quebec, speak French too. We swear in similar ways to that Atlas Obscura article we just do it with a different accent.
For instance, Drunk man speaking Chiac to a young Quebec girl The built in subtitles in the youtube clip aren’t gonna help you there but listen to the different accents - they are both speaking French but they are speaking it pretty differently. If you can roll with the French there’s a great NFB doc on Chiac.
As for the Anglos, rural Ontarians can have a pretty funny accent.
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Gets really good when you get the Valley accent…
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Watch the show “19-2” on Netflix (Canada, anyway) if you want to learn how to swear in Quebec. Pretty good realistic cop show, actually.
yeah, I remember all the Canadian Nissan and Mazda commercials from when I was a kid…
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Lots of languages share that basic “A” sound. There are, of course, slight differences, but the sound is still quite similar accross German, French, Italian, Spanish, Croatian, Finnish, Japanese and Chinese, to name just a few.
The English “ah” is just a poor imitation of the sound in foreign loanwords. Apparently, the Canadians figured out that they needn’t even try in the first place.
I still need to figure out the “aboot” thing, though. Apparently there is a slightly different diphthong in Canadian English “about” than there is in “cow”. To me, the one in “about” sounds a bit more like the German diphthong “au”, which you will also hear if the word “cow” is pronounced by a German or Austrian with a strong accent.
But I’m completely clueless how that sound is even remotely similar to a long [u] as in “boot”.
Whoa. I’m not the only one who did this.
@anon29631895, you might be onto something.
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There was a segment on The National aboot a week ago re: the ticket kerfuffle. Lots of complaints that scalpers were hoarding 'em.
One of the many wonders of living super close to Canuckistan is that at least one of their TV channels show up on your cable system. 
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Don’t forget the Canadian military variant of Franglais.
The US WWII military had their aboriginal American code talkers, who “encrypted” messages in their native languages.
The Canadian military developed a language based on equal parts English, Quebec French, military acronyms, English swear words and French swear words.
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Letterkenny Problems ftw!
FTFY …
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