[dghughes]

I'm from the Maritimes and have never heard anyone here i know say aboot I think to certain people in the US it just sounds that way.

I knew a girl from Liverpool England and she thought I was from Ireland, not 100% convinced but more so than Canada. I'm from PEI which at one point was going to be called New Ireland.

[mabbo]

The problem with "aboot" is that it's not... quite that. I've lived in a few different English speaking countries, I'm from rural Canada, and I now living in Toronto, the epicentre of accents. Over time, I've started to hear some of the differences, but I won't claim to be an expert.

IMHO: We don't say "Aboot", but something closer to (but not quite) "Abehwt", compared to the American "Abowt". From what I can tell, Americans can hear a difference, and frankly we Canadians can't at all. But Americans seem to hear the difference as more exaggerated into the "Aboot" territory.

In short: We do say "About" very differently, and we're generally totally unaware of it.

[chc]

Yeah, it's generally less like "a boot" and more like "a boat." In phonetic terms, I think Americans use /aʊ/ (think "ow" like you hit your thumb) there while Canadians use either /ɔʊ/ or /ɔ:/, which is more of an "oh" sound.

[stan_rogers]

The [ɔ] is more o-ish (rounder) than [a], certainly, but it's nowhere close enough to render as "a boat" - the initial vowel is too low and the [ʊ] portion of the diphthong is too high for that approximation to work.

The "aboot" thing did exist at one time in Southern Ontario when, as Stephen Leacock (our Mark Twain) put it: "In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages without trying to invent slang, so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversations." The Scots influence was huge in Upper Canada until about the middle of the 20th (and was refreshed by an influx of authentic accents after WW II), and "aboot" wouldn't have been a gross mischaracterisation south of Parry Sound, with Toronto and Windsor excepted.

(Down east, the Scottish influence was more Gaelic then Scots. 25 years ago, it wasn't hard to find Gaelic speakers on Cape Breton whose English was clearly a second language; the kids were mostly English-first by then, though, and Gaelic's little more than a heritage language now. If anything, the Gaelic-influenced pronunciation of "about" and "house" is flatter than the American version.)

[talideon]

As an Irishman, I can see where she was coming from. I was channel hopping one day and stumbled across a documentary, can't remember what it was about, but the people in it sounded Irish[1], but... off, somehow. There were little accent and vocabulary differences. Then one of them said something utterly Canadian, and that's when I realised that it was actually Newfoundland.

[1] To be precise, like as if they're from the south east, around Wexford and Waterford.

[dghughes]

Yeah Newfoundland people have a very thick dialect some so much it can be very hard to understand to anyone not from the island.

I'm not from Ireland but both my paternal grandparents' ancestors are from Monaghan and Ulster.

It's interesting to hear an opinion on which area in Ireland that Newfoundland people sound like.