There are a few exceptions: Newfoundland’s population was disproportionally shaped by immigrants from southwestern England and southeastern Ireland, and since the island is geographically isolated and only joined Canada in 1949, it has retained a way of speaking that is dramatically unlike the rest of the country. Other parts of Eastern Canada – including Cape Breton Island and in parts of Prince Edward Island – have also retained distinctive accents.

History, eh?

But if a person travels into western Canada – into Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia – the accent becomes more American-sounding and locally indistinguishable. “The West was a melting pot for settlers from many regions, so there was this leveling out of differences, not only in Canada, but in the US,” says Boberg. “The settlement depth in Western Canada goes into the 1890s, so it is about a century old. The time depth and the population density being very sparse, those encourage widespread leveling and homogeneity.” This makes it very difficult, even for Canadians, to tell the difference between someone from Winnipeg and someone from Vancouver – or from Seattle.

For most non-native English speakers, distinguishing more generally between American and Canadian accents is extremely difficult – Boberg compares it to telling the difference between two minor areas in Britain – but linguists have isolated some distinctive qualities that are helpful. A feature of Canadian speech called ‘the Canadian shift’ involves something called a ‘low-back merger’, which describes Canadians’ tendency to erase the difference between certain vowels that come from the lower part of the mouth – ‘lot’ and ‘thought’, for example. Canadians in Windsor pronounce the word ‘stack’ in the same way that Americans pronounce the word ‘stock’ in the neighboring US city of Detroit.

According to Boberg, people casually trying to identify a Canadian accent should focus two sounds. Canadians do something called ‘Canadian Raising’, meaning that they pronounce some two-part vowels (known as dipthongs) with a higher part of their mouths than people from other English-speaking regions – this is what causes the ‘ou’ sounds in words like ‘out’ and ‘about’ to be pronounced something like ‘oot’ and ‘aboot’.