Veteran Vowels: Early Western Canadian English in World War Oral Histories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the origin and historical development of the vowel system of Western Canadian English (WCE). It presents a sociophonetic analysis of interviews with two Western Canadian veterans of the First World War, born in 1890–91, and eight of the Second World War, born in 1917–23. The data reveal that the comparative uniformity attributed to WCE today emerged gradually over the twentieth century. Initial English-speaking settlement, following the arrival of the railway in 1885 and continuing up to the Great Depression, produced a mix of features reflecting its diverse origins. Canadian Raising and a conservative variant of goat are uniform from the beginning, but the allophonic structure of short-a (trap-bath, including bag-raising), the low-back merger, the marry-Mary and north-force mergers, fronting of goose, and the Low-Back-Merger (or Canadian) Shift are all variable in the veterans’ speech. The sound changes that reduced that variation over the remainder of the twentieth century provide an accessible example of the convergence and leveling that have created new regional dialects from diverse migrant populations throughout history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".