The Canadian Shift among Filipinos in Metro Vancouver

The present study provides preliminary insight into the linguistic patterns of Filipinos in Metro Vancouver, an important ethnic community in the region. Specifically, this thesis sought to explore whether Filipinos are (linguistically) integrated by determining if they participated in the Canadian Shift (CS), an on-going change in Canadian English involving the lowering and/or retracting of the vowels /æ, ɛ, ɪ/. Twelve second-generation Filipinos between the ages of 19 and 30 took part in sociolinguistic interviews, and formant frequency data based on 408 tokens of /æ, ɛ, ɪ/ were constructed from recordings of Boberg’s (2008) word list. The results revealed that CS is robust, with evidence of women in the lead. These indicated that there are no substrate language transfer effects at least concerning this phonetic variable. This study ultimately demonstrates that despite remaining a marginalized demographic, second-generation Filipinos are linguistically integrated and are therefore rightful members of the region’s speech community.