Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
That's an interesting question.
My sense is that Anglo-Montrealers are less and less "just among themselves" these days, which is not really conducive to maintaining a single accent across the community or even giving rise to a new one.
For the average Anglo-Montrealer, a lot of their daily conversations in English are probably with second or third language English speakers (both francophones and allophones) as opposed to native anglos. And that's not even mentioning daily conversations that take place in French. Or a mix of French and English.
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It's interesting that Montreal Anglos historically (and even more so now) despite living in one city were fractured and not really one "speech community", yet
western Canadians are so homogeneous in accent despite being separated from one another by hundreds or thousands of km of sparsely populated terrain and sharing such disparate original roots or linguistic heritage (eg. British Columbians descended from Brits, versus Albertans who were originally Americans versus western Canadians descended from easterners etc., plus all the immigrants directly moving to the west straight from overseas, be they Norweigians, Ukrainians, Germans, Chinese etc).
Something managed to unite western Canadians to assimilate to a relatively homogeneous accent despite the vast distances involved and time spent travelling between them.
Then again, social distance and geographical distances don't line up. The example of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) stood out to me living in the US. I definitely noticed that various black communities all over the country, from California to the northeast shared elements of AAVE that had noticeable similarities with southern US English, despite being thousands of miles away -- a shared history (including segregation and a strong Black American identity that ensued) made a Californian speaker of AAVE and New Yorker AAVE speaker sound more like one another than their other Californian and New York neighbours.
Often the things that divide us in terms of who we talk and don't talk to, and end up sounding like during our formative years aren't a matter of physical or geographic barriers but social ones.