Lunenburg English

Moribund English dialect of Nova Scotia, Canada

Lunenburg English is a moribund, German influenced dialect of English, However, some homonyms and some smaller particularities are also limited to the region. Front Central Back Close Near close Mid Open Diphthongs

The accent is nonrhotic and so in terms of lexical sets, is merged with , and are merged with (making or, oar, and awe homophonous as ), and is merged with and are the and vowels, which are the long versions of and (and so shared is differentiated from shed only by vowel length: ). Both and are rendered , the long counterpart of as in foot : sure , curb There is word internal linking , as in story (compare store ). Not all people in Lunenburg still speak that way, especially since younger people tend to reintroduce the etymological That is caused by the influence of newcomers who come from other parts of the province or from Massachusetts. The ending points of the diphthongs (as in go ) tend to be fully close , more similar to syllable initial (as in yet and wet) than to
The accent features Canadian raising and so flight has a different vowel from fly , and the noun house has a different vowel from the verb house The raising is phonemic in the latter case and so the stressed vowel in the former word belongs to the phoneme , and the corresponding verb has : In Lunenburg, the phrase about a boat contains two identical stressed and two identical unstressed vowels: , rather than the Standard Canadian English , with distinct stressed vowels.

The non rhoticity derives from the New England settlers (also proved by the fact that and are monophthongs , rather that opening diphthongs of the type found in German), there are also characteristics in the pronunciation that probably come from the German settlers. One example is the tendency to pronounce in witch (including the historical in which, which does not exist in Lunenburg) the same as as in van, which is particular to the Lunenburg County and probably rooted in German, which has only
Another example is the lack of the dental fricatives and , which are replaced by the alveolar stops and (rendering thank and tank homophonous as ). Sample of a conversation between two people: "De kids vere over der in da woods, gettin inda dis an dat." "Dey never did?" "Yeah, an now dey gone da get some of dem der apples you see." "You don't say?" "no foolin, dey over der now." "Dey brung some of dem apples over heera da day before." "Oh, dey vere some good eatin I bet." "Now look, you make no nevermind, dose vere da best apples I ever did have, dey vas some good." "Oh, here dey come now, dey bedda know da wash der feet off." The "t" at the end of words is usually silent: "get" becomes "ge."