The Persistence of Ethnic Identity in Montreal English
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents the final results of an acoustic study of ethno-phonetic differentiation among native varieties of English spoken in Montreal, Canada. The preliminary results, published in Boberg (2004), gave a tentative picture of phonetic differentiation among the three largest ethnic groups in the Montreal English speech community: people of British/Irish, Italian and Ashkenazi Jewish ethnic origin. The complete set of data is now available: a sample of 93 people from a broad range of social backgrounds, subjected to acoustic phonetic and multivariate statistical analysis. These data produce a more reliable and detailed view of how phonetic variables are correlated with ethnic origin. Among the most important findings is that the Jewish community, which arrived a generation earlier than the Italian community, joins the British-origin community in displaying native Canadian features, such as the fronting of /uw / (GOOSE) and the Canadian Raising of /aw/ (MOUTH). Many Italians, by contrast, continue to resist these features, preserving back vowels in /uw / and low vowels in pre-voiceless /aw/, a likely reflection of substrate influence from Italian. Jewish speakers do, however, differentiate themselves from both groups by showing several phonetic developments associated by Labov, Ash and Boberg (2006) with the Southern
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".