Sounds of the Golden Horseshoe: Canadian-American differences at the Niagara border

In this paper I present a section of linguistic items illustrating some of the ways in which Canadian English is coming to resemble American English, and other items illustrating ways in which the Canada-U.S. border remains a linguistic barrier. The data are from the Dialect Topography of the Golder Horseshoe. Dialect Topography entails a set of methods through which information about pronunciation, lexical choices and language usage are collected from a representative population from a particular region. The Golden Horseshoe is the heavily populated area around the tip of Lake Ontario from Oshawa to New York State. I present several pronunciation and lexical variables in terms of independent variables such as age and regionality