The one-word expression that has come to partially define a Canadian is dying. Instead “right” has moved in, elbowing “eh” out of the way among young, urban speakers of Canadian English.

“Eh is this quintessential thing that we think of as being so Canadian,” says Sali Tagliamonte, a linguist at the University of Toronto.

“In Toronto, and I would expect other cities like Ottawa and Vancouver; there’s a massive decline in the use of ‘eh.’ My kids don’t use it. They just don’t. They use something else.

“Eh was the one that kind of identified Canadians for the longest time,” said the linguist, who has four children, ages 10 to 23, and a 30-year-old stepson. “But when I talk to my kids [they say], ‘I don’t want to sound like an old man!’

The expression is still common in rural Canada, she said, because people in the country tend to retain more conservative features of language.

“In the cities, kids are using a different tag. They say ‘right.’”

Her research also points to the popularity of “and stuff,” “and everything” and “you know” to end a sentence.

But change goes far beyond losing the lowly “eh.”

“So many things are shifting,” she says. “You see these incredible shifts across the 20th century.”

An example: A long time ago, people started saying “really” in place of “very.” Really big, really fast, really great.

But now the younger generation has replaced “really” with “so.” And it’s girls who are leading that charge. Teenage boys, she says, are more often stuck back on “really.”

Another: Young people say “I have a dog” while older Canadians often say “I’ve got a dog,” unless they have a cat.

And “I said” is being replaced with “I’m like...”

“Language is a complex, adaptive system,” she said. “That’s what I do. I model the variability in that amazing, complex system. It’s even more complex than most systems because it involves human beings.”

“The greatest thing about my work on Northern Ontario is that a lot of things that have died out in the city are still being used.”

“In order to catch someone saying ‘eh’ you might have to go to an older person or you might have to go outside the city core because kids aren’t really using that any more.”

There’s a reminder for anyone marketing a product to young people, she adds. Don’t assume they talk like their grandparents.

“How we perceive other people is based on how they talk.”

Ms. Tagliamonte once told a radio interviewer that her husband uses “eh”. “He was deeply offended, and I said, ‘Honey, you’re Canadian. Your family goes back in Canada four generations. You use it.’”

“No I don’t,” he said.

She keeps after him on this. “It irritates the hell out of him. Every time I hear it I say, ‘Oop, there’s another one.’”