To talk like a hockey player, talk like a Canadian

As a hockey player, Andrew Bray was familiar with the slang that was thrown around in the “barn” (hockey arena). As a linguist, he wanted to understand how sports-specific terminology evolved and permeated across teams, regions, and countries. In pursuing the sociolinguistic “biscuit” (pack), he faced an unexpected question.

“While conducting this initial study, I was asked questions that shaped the direction of subsequent research,” Bray said. “Trying to understand why Americans sound like fake Canadians?”

Dialects of Canadian English are typified by vowel pronunciations and articulations in words such as “out” and “about,” British loanwords such as “zed,” and similarity to the tag question “huh?” is expressed in

Bray, of the University of Rochester, spoke on May 16 at a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Acoustical Society of Canada, held May 13-17 at the University of Rochester's Shaw Center. We announced the results of a survey regarding its use. Downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

To study how hockey players talk, I had to listen to them talk about hockey. To analyze the unique vowel articulations and vast collection of sport-specific slang terms that players incorporate into their speech, Bray visited various professional teams and interviewed American-born players.

“In these interviews, I ask players to tell us about when and why they started playing hockey, the teams they played for as kids, why they decided to pursue junior hockey in college or the majors, and their current lives as players. “We ask them to discuss their career trajectory. Professionally,” Bray said. “In the interviews, we aimed to get the players to talk about hockey for as long as possible.''

Bray found that while American players borrowed features of the Canadian English accent, particularly in hockey-specific terminology and jargon, they did not follow the underlying rules behind pronunciation. This may explain why the accent sounds “fake” to Canadians.

“It's important to note that American hockey players aren't trying to change the way they speak to sound more Canadian,” Bray said. “Rather, they try to sound like hockey players.”

Players from northern states in the United States, with accents similar to those in Canada, have historically dominated the sport. Adopting this dialect feature is a way in which hockey players are able to outwardly portray their identity through speech, known as a linguistic persona. Many factors influence this persona, including age, gender expression, social category, and, as Bray demonstrated, sports.

Going forward, Bray plans to combine his recent research with his original quest to investigate whether Canadian English pronunciation and hockey's linguistic persona are introduced to American players through the sport's distinctive slang. are doing.