So like there’s a University of Toronto professor who is so really really into Canadian English that she got more than 200 native Torontonians to talk and stuff so she could study it, right?

So when the Star calls her, she’s like all whatever, explaining how older people don’t talk like younger people and girls don’t talk like boys and how changes in Toronto English reflect how Canadian English is shifting too.

Eh?

“Well poor ‘eh,’” Canadian English-language expert Sali Tagliamonte says with a laugh. “Everybody thinks that Canadians use a lot of ‘eh’ — and they do — but they use something else a lot more, at least if they’re under 30. And that’s ‘right.’ Now go 100k north of here, into the countryside, you will hear a lot more ‘eh’ than in Toronto.”

So much for that scene in Argo when CIA “exfil” agent Ben Affleck coaches the U.S. hostages hiding in the Canadian embassy in Tehran how to talk “Toronno” instead of “Toronto.”

And buh-bye Bob and Doug Mackenzie, they of the toques, 2/4s and Canadian stereotype of mountains, moose and Mounties.

That said, insists Tagliamonte, don’t think we Canadians don’t have an accent.

“We have an accent; it’s a very strong accent and there’s a lot of change going on,” she says. “I am always in the business of tracking the new changes and what’s going on, just like a medical biologist tracks new viruses in any given year.

“We don’t talk like Shakespeare. We don’t talk like our grandparents. And we don’t even talk like our kids.”

Which was the focus of her Toronto English Project, which began a decade ago, the results of which were published in February in a Cambridge University Press volume, The Verb Phrase in English .

She chose Toronto because it’s Canada’s biggest city, and it’s where English has been the predominant language for centuries.

Her first challenge was finding a representative sample of people of all ages who were born and raised here. Not easy in a town where more than half the population comes from elsewhere.

So Tagliamonte’s research team knocked on thousands of doors in neighbourhoods such as Eglinton/Lawrence, The Beach and Toronto North, all identified by the 2001 census as having the lowest rates of immigrant residents in the GTA. She also resorted to online appeals and social “friend of a friend” networking.

In the end, she had 265 hours of recorded oral histories by 214 Toronto natives aged 8 to 92. They talked about what it was like growing up here, what their neighbourhoods were like and even where they were during the blackout of August 2003.

From there, Tagliamonte started marking the verb phrases, tags, intensifers and quotatives — linguistics-speak for how people communicate — and sorted them according to age and gender.

“There’s a veritable revolution going on,” she explains. “The people who are in their 70s and 80s don’t sound anything like adolescents. I mean, they can still understand each other, but there’s a real generation gap.”

Like what?

Like “like” versus “he says, she says” as quotatives, the way we relate what other people have said.

“If you listen to your grandmother tell stories, she’ll do something like this: ‘And he said, “Blah-blah-blah.” Then she said, “Blah-blah.” And I thought to myself, “Blah-blah.”’ That’s how an older person tells a story.

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“But a younger person says: ‘And then I said, “OMG. What?” And I’m like, “You’re kidding me.” And he’s like, “I’m not kidding.”’”

Intensifiers are adverbs that amp up meaning.

A younger woman might say, “OMG, Bradley Cooper is so so hot.”

An older one? “George Clooney is really good-looking.”

And one even older? “Gregory Peck was very handsome.”

Meanwhile, verbs are getting overhauled.

For example, “must” is getting musty and is being replaced by “have to.” Think “I have to go” versus “I must go.”

And older English-speakers are more likely to say “I’ve got a cat,” while younger ones will say “I have a cat.”

One surprising finding was detected among younger speakers.

“In adolescence, there’s a huge split between the girls and the guys,” says Tagliamonte. “More typically the girls tend to be in the forefront of linguistic change, whereas the guys resist it. A good example of that in Toronto is that the girls were using ‘so’ (as an intensifier) whereas the guys were using ‘pretty.’”

That’s pretty weird, right?