Canadian Raising - Varieties

Varieties

For many speakers, Canadian raising is not stopped just by any voiced consonants; rather, only voiced consonants that come right before a morpheme boundary stop it. So, the voiced /d/ in "rider" stops the raising, because it is morpheme-final, while the /d/ in "spider" does not, and for these speakers "rider" does not rhyme with "spider". Similarly, "pilot" gets raised because 'l' is non-final, but the 'l' in "pile it" stops the raising—although in such circumstances (before resonant consonants, it seems), the raising may be optional for some speakers. There are many other dialect-specific complexities: For example, even the speakers just described, for whom "rider" and "spider" do not rhyme, may differ on whether raising applies in "hydrogen", although unquestionably it does apply to "nitrogen".

Canadian raising can also apply across word boundaries in idiomatic expressions. Hence, high school as a term meaning "a secondary school for students approximately 14–18 years old" has raising of the vowel in "high", whereas high school with the literal meaning "a school that is high (e.g. in elevation)" is unaffected. (The two terms are also distinguished by the position of the stress accent, as shown.)