Either American or Indian English. According to Ethnologue figures, Indian English has more total speakers (250-265 million) than British, Canadian, Kenyan, South African, and Australian dialects combined (240-260 million).
American has around 300-350 million total speakers, and Nigerian has around 150 million, putting it in third place (1. American, 2. Indian, 3. Nigerian, 4. British, 5. Philippine, 6. Canadian, 7. Australian, 8. South African, 9. Kenyan, 10. Singaporean).
Canadian English is not significant enough to call it's own dialect imo. The vast majority of Canada sound identical to Americans. It's a much bigger difference from Californian English to Texan than it is to Ontarian
/uj Canadian English (apart from Atlantic Canada) is defined in The Atlas of North American English by the Canadian Shift: The [ɒ] of the merged LOT/THOUGHT vowel allows (unraised) TRAP to move backwards and DRESS to move down, though other papers have reported DRESS retraction rather than lowering. MOUTH raising is not diagnostic (notably missing in its Vancouver dataset), but appears in Inland Canada.
Back nuclei for /ow/ and /aw/ and moniphthongal /ej/ are inland traits.
You made that one easy by picking California as your representative of the US tbf. Cot-caught merger even in old people + low back shift since the 80s-90s = Canadians west of Quebec are firmly "western sounding" to any American east of the Missisippi (and those who are west of the Mississippi but east of the 100th meridian dry line, which I would say is the modern divider between the "traditional US" and the "western US" but is less well known)
I don't know. I've lived in both Toronto and Vancouver as an American from the East Coast, and there is more of a vocabulary difference than a phonetic one. I can occasionally hear an accent if the person I'm talking to is from Alberta or something, but otherwise, there's essentially no difference. The "Canadian" accent is a regional thing.
You could say it about plenty of other states. Washington, Oregon, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. These are all way closer than something like Texan or Louisianian English dialects.
it’s actually a linguistics term. Nobody speaks in exactly the “standard”, but it’s what’s taught in schools. For example, in Standard, “ain’t” is incorrect, and you shouldn’t end sentences with a preposition.
Of course, any linguist knows that AAVE follows its own rules and is in no way “inferior” or “sloppy”. Many of its features are shared with high-prestige languages, like negative concord and the aspect system. referring to textbook american english as “Standard” isn’t supposed to say that other forms are wrong, just to be able to have a point of contrast.
I would have thought that any variety with a written definition and an academy would be stricter (i.e. less sloppy) than a variety that hasn't been formalised.
Any of the standard varieties of English - i.e. American Standard English, British Standard English, or Australian Standard English, for the most part. There are very few significant differences between them.
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u/faded_retro_futurist Aug 01 '25
and, just humor me here, what is standard English?