This Paper discusses a particular phonological rule that occurs in several English dialects, including Canadian English. The rule will be referred to throughout as ‘Canadian Raising’ purely for mnemonic purposes; no geographical rigour is intended by the epithet ‘Canadian’—a point that is made abundantly clear in §4, where the distribution of the rule is taken up. The appropriateness of the term resides in the relative role the rule plays in Canadian English, where its effect is the most readily identifiable trait of the dialect. Thus, speakers of Canadian English are often identified by the speakers of adjoining dialects by their pronunciation of words like wife and south, which are usually mis-heard by speakers of General American as weef and sooth.

The main facts about Canadian Raising were first organized systematically three decades ago by Martin Joos, in a short article entitled “A phonological dilemma in Canadian English” (1942). Since then, they have been cursorily referred to in the literature several times (for example: Bloomfield 1948: 62; McDavid 1963: 470, etc.) and have been reorganized in a different theoretical framework (Halle 1962: 343) with no augmentation—and usually a simplification—of Joos’s observations.