The Manitoba Sound

Melissa Martin investigates the Manitoban accent and its roots in Indigenous languages and waves of settlers:

“Manitobans don’t think about this much. Our accents aren’t famous or a point of civic pride. Unlike English speakers in New Yawk or Bawwston, we don’t often see our ways of speaking presented in pop culture media.
“So we don’t usually conceptualize ourselves as speaking like Manitobans — until someone else points it out.
“Yet language is tied to place, as surely as mountains and rivers. The words we use, the colours of our vowels, the way consonants find their way through our teeth: those belong to here, too — and they are changing.”

I love learning about these hidden, subtle things that create community and identity in almost imperceptible ways.