Introduction

The past twenty-five years have seen an enormous growth in research into World Englishes, reflecting a new recognition of the status of the many national English dialects. Canadian English has been no exception to this trend and we have witnessed a dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of research into this variety. The stature it is now accorded as a separate dialect of English is reflected in the number of dictionaries, thesauruses, usage guides, and other reference works published since the late 1990s that were devoted specifically to Canadian English (e.g., Guide to Canadian English usage; Canadian Oxford dictionary; Oxford Canadian Dictionary; Collins essential Canadian English dictionary and thesaurus; Fitzhenry and Whiteside Canadian thesaurus) as well as audio-visual productions (e.g., Dialects of Canadian English; Talking Canadian).

Despite this exciting research activity, a conference devoted solely to research on Canadian English had yet to take place. In order to celebrate Jack Chambers' seminal contribution to the understanding of Canadian English, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto organized a conference to reflect the vibrancy of contemporary research on Canadian English. The conference, held in January 2005, aimed to address the following questions:

• • What are the characteristics of Canadian English that distinguish it from other English dialects?

• • How does Canadian English vary across the nation?

• • What changes are occurring in Canadian English right now?

• • How has Canadian English been influenced by contact with other languages such as Aboriginal languages, French, and the many immigrant languages it has come into contact with?

• • What effect does American English have on Canadian speech?

• • What is the role of Canadian English in the context of World English?

The conference was an exciting event, filled with talks, video presentations, audio presentations, and research posters. The full range of topics was covered: the history of Canadian English, phonological characteristics that distinguish Canadian English, morphosyntactic changes that are taking place in the variety, acoustic analyses of the vowel system, studies of dialect perception, and effects of French on English and of English on French, among others. The articles in this volume represent the richness of presentations at the conference as well as the diversity of the presenters themselves, ranging from graduate students to established and world-renowned specialists.

We begin with a section called 'Sounds Canadian'. The first two articles in this section focus on Canadian Raising, a term coined by Jack Chambers and a process that has been central to Chambers' research paradigm. In the opening paper, Chambers provides a comprehensive review of this phonological phenomenon, tracing the earliest attestations of Canadian Raising in Canada and reviewing current work on the topic, including some of the instrumental phonetic work that has been done recently. He argues that-despite some of his own earlier predictions-Canadian Raising persists hardily in Canada.

In the second paper, William Idsardi argues that Canadian Raising is indeed a process in Canadian English, and provides evidence for this. He adduces evidence against a recent claim that Canadian Raising is not an allophonic process, but that the low and raised vowels are contrastive, and thus phonemic. Idsardi provides innovative data, showing that Canadian Raising continues to be allophonic.

The next two papers in this section examine vowel systems of two distinct urban contexts. Robert Hagiwara presents data from his project on Winnipeg English. One of the primary goals of this work is to establish baseline data so that researchers can make meaningful comparisons between the vowel systems of different dialects. Hagiwara includes a very interesting discussion of the vowels that result from Canadian Raising. He shows that raising involves a shift in the trajectory of the entire diphthong, a shift that affects the vowel [oI] as well as the raised variants of [aI] and [aʊ].

Pauline Hollett examines the vowels of St. John's English in an attempt to establish whether the 'Canadian Shift', as described in Clarke et al. (1995), is becoming established in Newfoundland. She is able to use data collected in St. John's 20 years ago, and thus presents a real-time study of the vowel system...