What makes a Windsor, Ont., accent? This dialect coach weighs in

Do you have a tendency to hit the 'r' sound flatly and somewhat heavily on words like 'hair' or 'dare?'

Do you ask for directions to the restroom?

Then you might be sounding like someone born in Windsor-Essex, according to accent coach John Fleming.

"Windsor definitely does have an accent," Fleming told CBC Windsor. "Everywhere has an accent... Windsor has a version of a Canadian accent."

More specifically, Fleming says the Windsor accent is a variation of the southwestern Ontario accent, one he's very familiar with: although he lives and works in Toronto, he was raised in St. Thomas.

"When I'm talking to people from St. Thomas or whatever, I feel like my mouth kind of stretches a little side-to-side more."

For the past 15 years, Fleming has worked as a professional dialect and accent coach — training actors in film, television, theatre and video games to sound as if they're from places other than where they were born and raised.

It means Fleming is highly attuned to the regional nuances of speech.

When it comes to people native to southwestern Ontario, Fleming has identified certain traits: First, there are the classic Canadian vowel sounds on words like 'out' and 'about.'

"Which Americans hear as 'oot' and 'aboot.' But, of course, we here know that it's more like 'ooh,' 'gooh,'" Fleming said.

There's the heavier 'r' sound when it's at the end of words. There's also a monotone quality to the voice — Fleming describes it as a lack of "music" in the accent, compared to the sing-song tones of an Irish or Jamaican accent, for example.

"You'll hear people talking  [in southwestern Ontario] and they don't change the pitch of their voice very much," Fleming said. "It kind of sits there."

Fleming is also conscious of small mechanical details — what some accent and dialect coaches refer to as "oral posture." Such particulars might go unnoticed by the general public, but according to Fleming, they're part of what makes an accent.

"[In St. Thomas], my voice feels like it kind of sits pretty far back in the mouth," he said. "I get a swallowed kind of sound to it."

But southwestern Ontario is a region that stretches from the Windsor-Detroit border past London, almost to Hamilton and the Golden Horseshoe. It's home to about 2.8 million people. What turns a southwestern Ontario accent into a Windsor one?

Fleming believes it comes down to word choices: Because of the city's proximity to Detroit, Windsorites are very comfortable with American terms and use them interchangeably.

For example, 'restroom' instead of washroom or bathroom, 'robe' instead of housecoat, 'trash' instead of garbage and 'gutter' instead of eavestrough.

Windsorites also use imperial measurement, like Fahrenheit instead of Celsius.

That's something Windsor resident Jake Stevenson can freely admit.

"Oh yeah. More American than anything," he said. "Especially how everybody uses Fahrenheit over here."

Stevenson's girlfriend, Ashley Allison, also believes there's some kind of Windsor accent: "I don't really know how to explain it. But we definitely pronounce things very differently."

And if you have any doubt about a Windsor accent, just ask someone who isn't from around here. Less than a kilometre of water separates Windsor from the United States — but people from Michigan and Ohio can sound very different from Windsorites.

Fleming points out the Detroit River seems to act as a barrier between Windsor's accent and what's known as the Inland Northern American accent prevalent across the Midwest.

"I bet one of the things you have noticed in the Inland Northern [accent] are [words] like 'lots,' 'top,' 'job,' 'cloth,' 'office.' That sort of big open 'ah' sound," Fleming said.

Tourists Gracie Sheasby and her boyfriend Cole Delaughder, who travelled from Mount Vernon, Ohio, to visit Windsor, said people at bars and restaurants in Walkerville could tell right away they weren't local.

"That's what we heard. People say we have an accent here," Sheasby said.

"We were really told,"  Delaughder said. "Just, everybody said we had an accent."

Still think Windsor is accent neutral? According to Fleming, that's the trick about accents: Everybody thinks their accent is the normal one.

"We all speak the way we speak, and we think that's very natural," he said. "But anybody from anywhere except here might listen to us and go, 'Oh, you've got quite an accent.'"