3. The North American Low-Back-Merger Shift: A Continental Sound Change

CHARLES BOBERG is associate professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is a coauthor, with William Labov and Sharon Ash, of The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) and the author of The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative Analysis (Cambridge, 2010). Most recently he coedited, with John Nerbonne and Dominic Watt, The Handbook of Dialectology (Wiley Blackwell, 2018). His current research focuses on variation and change in the vocabulary and phonetics of Canadian English as well as on accent variation in North American film and television. Email: [email protected].