The loss of /hw/ in English in words like where and wheat is virtually complete in contemporary North American English, though /hw/ has lingered in Ontario, Canada. For vernacular speech from Almonte and Parry Sound, the authors analyze the decline of /hw/ in apparent time among individuals born from the 1880s to the 1950s. They place these observations within the field of language obsolescence and suggest that Parry Sound and Almonte are examples of intermediate isolation, less profound than is typical in studies of dialect loss. Almonte has retained /hw/ much longer than Parry Sound; this pattern parallels the greater share of /hw/-ful Scots and Irish speakers in Almonte’s early immigration and accords with Parry Sound’s increased outside contact due to a rising tourism industry. Both communities uniformly exhibit more /hw/ in content words than in function words as the feature recedes to total absence for speakers born in the 1950s. This pattern is an example of linguistic order persisting during obsolescence.
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