Out with “oot.” No more “aboot.” Canada is talking with a New Speak. In a linguistic pivot called the Canadian Vowel Shift, we are pronouncing “God” more like “gawd,” “bagel” like “bahgel,” “pillow” like “pellow,” and “sorry” less like “sore-y.” The word “Timbit” is becoming “Tembet,” and “Dan slipped on the staircase” now sounds more like “Don” “slept” on it. First discovered in 1995, the new vowels are contagious, spreading rapidly from Victoria to St. John’s, where linguists are mapping the frequency of people’s voices and using ultrasounds to track their tongue and lip placement.

“We’re in the middle of a transformation,” says Paul De Decker, a sociolinguist at Memorial University of Newfoundland. “Our vowels are getting higher and backer in the mouth, and it’s more widespread, more diverse than we initially thought.” Some linguists compare the shift to “Valley Girl” speech, which is perhaps most dramatically demonstrated by an American comedian in the hit YouTube video, “Shoes.” The chorus, “Shoes. Oh my God, shoes,” sounds more like, “Shahs, ah my gawd, shahs.” More mildly in Canada, we find the shift in the Air Canada pre-flight safety video when we hear, “Welcome aboard Air Canada.” Compared to a 1986 version, the “Canada” is now pronounced farther back in the mouth, like “Cahnadah.”

These changes in the mouth are happening under our noses. Even though the new pronunciation is used every day, almost nobody has heard of it—not the president of Canada’s association of university and college English teachers, nor the national director of Teachers of English as a Second Language. As it creeps into our speech under the level of social awareness, the vowel shift is known as a “change from below,” with a suspected epicentre in urban Ontario. Wait, what the hall? De Decker explains the shift as a result of Canadian tolerance. As immigrants and visitors arrive with different accents, we have come to tolerate variation and to play with language ourselves. “If we weren’t tolerant,” he says, “we would crack down and say, ‘No, that’s not how it’s pronounced.’ Instead, we’ve started to push the envelope even further.”

With young women initially leading the shift, some experts suggest they subconsciously adopted it from California as a way to portray a trendier identity. De Decker says the new Canadian vowels only partly resemble Valley Girl speech, and that the similarities may be coincidental; still, he agrees the new vowels are in vogue. “It’s like a badge saying, ‘These are all the people I’ve met, and I have the vowel system to prove it.”