Andrew Bray, a linguist at the University of Rochester, began studying the evolution of the trademark sports terminology used in hockey for his master's thesis. For example, a hockey arena is a “barn,” but a puck is a “biscuit.” But when he told people about the project, they kept asking if he was trying to figure out why American hockey players sounded like “fake Canadians.” Intrigued, Bray decided to shift the focus of his research to find out whether hockey players actually have a uniquely Canadian speech pattern, and if so, why.
He found that U.S. hockey players borrowed certain aspects of the Canadian English accent, particularly regarding hockey terminology. However, they do not follow typical pronunciation rules. In other words, “American hockey players aren't trying to change the way they speak to sound more Canadian,” Brey said at a news conference. “They're trying to sound more like hockey players, which is why it's most noticeable in hockey-specific language.”
This is a concept known as a “verbal persona,” and it's a way for a person to verbally communicate how they are perceived (in this case, as a hockey player). Mr. Bray spoke about his research today at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Ottawa, Canada, co-sponsored by the Acoustical Society of Canada.
Bray first needed to figure out how to design a study to test this question. “What do you mean by sounding like a 'fake' Canadian?” he said. The typical Canadian speech pattern is well known. For example, it goes without saying that “out” is pronounced “oot”, “about” is pronounced “aboot”, and questions such as “huh?” are added. At the end of the sentence. According to Bray, there are three typical linguistic variables in Canadian English.
One is called the lumbar join shift, where you lower your tongue to pronounce the vowels in words like “bit” (ih), “bet” (eh), and “bat” (ah). The second is called the Canadian Raise, where you raise your tongue body to pronounce the vowels in words like “tight” and “doubt.” Finally, there are vowels in words like “bait” and “boat.” Canadians pronounce these vowels with only one tongue configuration, known as monophthong pronunciation. (When the tongue moves into the secondary configuration, it produces a diphthong pronunciation.)
Bray wondered if the American players were showing a change in Canadian English in their speech, but to varying degrees, with their pronunciations sounding just slightly different, rather than sounding “fake.” That's what I thought. He decided to focus on the elements of the word mother tongue. Because he thought these pronunciations were likely the most prevalent in “fake Canadian” speech among American hockey players.
University of Georgia Ice Dawgs
Next, Bray needed to build his own “Corpus of Hockey Player Speech,” which focused on American-born hockey players. That required extensive interviews with players. He focuses on the American Hockey League (AHL) and East Coast Hockey League (ECHL), as players in professional National League Hockey (NHL) may not have the time to participate. , narrowed down the candidates to four teams: the Charlotte Checkers and the Greenville Swamp. Rabbits, Rochester Americans, South Carolina Stingrays.
Bray played hockey for the University of Georgia Ice Dawgs, which allowed him to quickly build rapport with his subjects over their shared interests and sit down to talk about the trajectory of their hockey careers. Among other benefits, it helped me avoid the dreaded “observer's paradox,” where having someone talk about your speech makes you feel self-conscious and subtly changes the way you normally speak. He collected data from 20 similar interviews, each lasting about 30 minutes, conducted between 2017 and 2019.
He then converted these interviews into a database of “formants,” or resonant frequencies that amplify some harmonic groups in the audio more than others. Mr. Bray's ASA presentation focused on two common vowel formants. The first formant (F1) roughly corresponds to the height of the tongue, and the second formant (F2) corresponds to how far forward or backward the tongue is during pronunciation.
For vowels like “bait,” Bray found some evidence of word-vowel pronunciation (with minimal tongue movements) among U.S. hockey players. This is what you would expect in Canadian English and perhaps parts of the upper Midwest, but this is not the case. Otherwise, it exists in dialects of American English. Vowels like “boat” appeared to be more “pseudomonophthongous” in nature. However, when comparing these to the Canadian English benchmark expectations for his F1 and F2 formants, the American hockey player came close, but fell just short. Their pronunciation also does not match standard American English dialects.
“This may be why they sound 'fake',” Bray says. “I argue that this is the construction of a hockey-specific linguistic variant, influenced by Canadian English, but not entirely Canadian.” The way the players pronounced “hockey” appears to be “an entirely new pronunciation of the word associated with this community.” Bray believes this influence may be related to his original research on hockey slang, noting that “hockey slang terms differ from the expected pronunciation of other non-hockey-related terms.” I hope this turns out to be the case.
Bray suspects that this is happening through some kind of “vocabulary spread.” At the junior league level (approximately ages 14 to 20), U.S. players may not have such distinctive speech patterns, but as they play longer and acquire hockey slang, their pronunciation changes over time. It may change gradually. The more they identify as hockey players, the more they sound like “fake Canadians.”
