Quote:
Originally Posted by benp
I suspect that much of the pronunciation within the Great Lakes accent is also derived from the influence of French Canadian. Years ago I knew some people who had grown up on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation which straddles the US-Canada border between NY-Ontario-Quebec and I recall that their accent to me sounded quite a lot to what I associated as the Buffalo East Side Polish accent. The more I think about and listen to the Great Lakes accent, I begin to hear where the French influence contributes a lot (dees, dem, and dose instead of these, them, and those). After all, the French were the first European settlers in the Great Lakes.
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I really doubt the French language has greatly affected English as spoken in the Great Lakes region, particularly on the American side. The Northern Cities vowel shift is well documented and has been heavily researched: While there's evidence that the foundations for today's accent were laid in the mid-19th Century (possibly under influence from German immigrants), it didn't really evolve into something resembling its present form until the 1960s. Additionally, while the French language was and, in Quebec, still is widely used by Indigenous peoples in the region, the Mohawk and the rest of the Haudenosaunee were early allies of the British and historically on poor terms with the French and their Indigenous allies. If you're hearing "dees, dem and does" from Mohawk peoples in that area, it's likely more easily explained by the lack of "th" sounds in the Mohawk language (Mohawk also makes extensive use of nasalized vowels, so they wouldn't necessarily point to a French-language origin either).
We see a similar pattern of vowel shifts across North American varieties of English that underwent the cot–caught and father–bother mergers. By losing distinctions between these vowel sounds, our tongues had more space to move around, thereby causing chain reactions as other vowel sounds were pulled in one direction or another. The Northern Cities shift, the Canadian shift and the California shift are all examples of this pattern. However, the three shifts didn't move in the same direction: While the Canadian and California shifts generally pulled vowels lower and further back, the Northern Cities shift generally pushed them forward. Due to the fact that the Northern Cities shift began and is most developed in Upstate New York while the Canadian shift began and is most developed in Southern Ontario, the Englishes spoken on either side of the lakes are actually becoming more divergent today than, say, in the immediate post-war era.
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