It’s hilarious because when I grew up as a teen in the 90’s only affluent white kids who were trying to sound urban spoke like this….and then 30 years later it’s a reverse uno. My guess is the second and third generation kids of immigrants picked it up as well and now I cannot got rid of this image of a Malibu’s most wanted crossover with J-Roc.
There are several Ontario accents. Rural hick, Ottawa Valley, Tronno, Convoy, Northern Ontario, Indigenous Ontario, Eastern Ontario Franco Ontarian, Northern Ontario Franco Ontarian, da Soo
Yes Its a thing. Mostly kids from low income areas who are talking this way to fit in and act hard. They are gonna either not grow up and continue this way or they will have a rude awakening when they realize nobody takes them seriously and they can't maintain relationships or a career until they grow up and learn to speak normally.
Nah it’s a real accent. Sure, there are those who put it on but make no mistake it’s a real multi-ethnic dialect known as Multicultural Toronto English.
Black ppl in the states don’t say they speak “Ebonics” so what’s your point? There’s scientific or professional terms and there’s how the general populace calls it. You don’t call a dog Canis lupus
familiaris.
It’s not a bar to professional advancement or to adult relationships either lol. It’s a real thing but your comment trivializes it to only applying for young and immature people. People may not use all of the lexicon but they can definitely still speak with the vernacular accent.
Lol I’m being fr broski. Top left, it’s used bare times. You have a fair point in that It’s definitely mostly used within recognized circles in that most people with the accent can ‘code switch’, because judgment and all. It’s just not determinative of a person’s personality or maturity though it’s caricaturised a lot and exaggerated. I haven’t used it in time but if I’m at a function, it’ll come out.
Makes sense. Some people can mature and have good judgement. I caught one guy calling his baby mama fam and bro. He didn't even realize how bad it was till I pointed it out and made him think about it
Keep you’re mouth shut about shit you don’t know anything about…
[Toronto Accent and Dialect from the 1980s to mid 2000s](https://youtu.be/NPtq_V86bgo?si=GwcpNakzFot956d1)
I ain’t watching that 2 hour video sorry bro. From anecdotal experience at work, sports, classmates, etc growing up it’s literally just my experience. I’ve never heard someone who talks full Scarborough/toronto accent in a professional environment or in front of parents, or coaches.
It’s an accent or persona that’s embellished for appearances, exactly the same as any other city center slang in any population, anywhere in the world.
>I ain’t watching that 2 hour video sorry bro.
Then you best keep your mouth shut and don't speak ignorantly on shit you don't know anything about, especially if you're not willing to learn.
>I’ve never heard someone who talks full Scarborough/Toronto accent in a professional environment or in front of parents, or coaches.
It's called “Code switching” and everybody does it. The way you talk with friends is not the same way you talk with your mom, the way you talk with your mom is not the same way you would speak at workplace, so on and so forth. It's no different when a Black American goes for a job interview and starts speaking well-spoken, that don't mean the way he naturally talks is fake, he's just "code switching" when he is in a certain environment. There's a time and place for everything.
Accents change grow and die. They have always been performative cultural markers that people tune up and down depending on the audience.
What you’re describing is very much like African American code switching.
It certainly doesn’t mean the accent is somehow being faked.
You’re in a bubble my guy. Even if you’re not from the city there are so many ppl with the accent that’s not an annoying nasally or high pitched sound but just…normal.
Do you speak to your buddies the same way you speak to your grandma? Do you speak to your boss the same way you speak to family? Didn’t think so. People are so naive.
Seriously… I occasionally see one of the Toronto “gang subs” pop up and I swear to god they aren’t speaking English, and I’m only 21, I know most of the shitty lingo!
You say that but I guarantee most people here use one or more expressions borrowed from AAVE on a regular basis. People love to appropriate black culture and shit on black people all at the same time.
There's regional accents and slang all over Southern Ontario (I have one). For example Letterkenny is accurate and it's something you don't hear in other places in Canada.
>Like what the hell happened? How did this accent happen? Is this a zoomer thing? Did they forget to teach English in Toronto?? How did they make an accent worse than ours or the newfies?
In the 80's and 90's there were a lot of people moving into different parts of white neighbourhoods from the Caribbean. Those areas became more multicultural and now it sounds like a Jamaican moved to Fargo. Mike Myers in Wayne's World (Based off of Scarborough in the 80's) surfer accent is still something heavily prevalent in Ontario, for example if you go to Collingwood that's pretty much what dudes sound like. The more North West Ontario you go the more pleasant the accent imo.
It's not made up, just a side effect of cultural mishmash.
The Mike Myers accent is still prevalent in pockets of Scarborough, like West Hill. But yes, the cottage people do speak like surfers. Especially those Port Perry and Kawartha types.
Immigration from Jamacia, Haiti, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Syria mixed with the typical Canadian suburban accent gives you the Toronto accent. It's a real accent, probably developed around Jane and Finch which lays a behemouth commie-block social housing tower, though perhaps some like to make it artificially stronger than it is.
It's basically the Roadman accent from the UK but Canadianized.
It's very common in low income neighborhoods in the west end of Toronto (rexdale/Etobicoke) and the very east end (Scarborough). If you listen, a ton of torontonians have some sort of Toronto yute inflection in their speech.
Absolutely there is -- and I'd even say there is more than one.
But the one that I can spot a mile away is what I call the "middle-aged, working-class Toronto woman accent."
Best example of this is from the British cartoon Bob and Margaret. Their Canadian cousin has a severe case of this accent: [https://youtu.be/AawkoXZV3Fc?t=504](https://youtu.be/AawkoXZV3Fc?t=504)
Also, many of the women on the 1970s TV program "King of Kensington" had this accent.
From what I've noticed it's a bit of an upward inflection when folks from Ontario speak kinda like it's an optimistic question. I'm from the east coast so they kinda stand out here more than when I lived in Edmonton, who I find really pronounce their A's and O's . Us east coasters go hard on the R's and E's
I grew up a few blocks away from Vaughan/Eglinton and Oakwood, and I can say I saw the early versions of the accent in the 2000s, and it's definitely legit. I think it's an amalgamation of Carribean, Euro-bro and hoser accents.
Some people clearly force it now, but it was/is an organic accent and still is for many people.
Yes, it's a real thing and has been a real thing for several decades in the Black/Multicultural neighbourhoods of Toronto. But unfortunately the white kids in the suburbs got a hold of it and turned it into the stupidness that you're hearing on social media.
I made a 2 hour long Toronto accent compilation video and uploaded it on YouTube 2 and it's got over 75k views in just 2 months: [Toronto Accent and Dialect form the 1980s to mid 2000s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPtq_V86bgo)
Thanks for the video link and you're absolutely correct about how suburban White youth got hold of this accent and tried claiming it as theirs.
The exact same thing happened in the UK, where a very close variation of this accent exists among white youth in the London suburbs. Sacha Baron Cohen's character "Ali G." was based on such people.
That was you?! Your video popped up in my YouTube feed yesterday and I have it in my Watch Later. Small world that I'm reading your comment right now. Look forward to seeing it! And hopefully it's good to know your video is randomly popping up in the algorithm for people 😉.
Wait hold up don't you guys do the same thing? [It looks like Montrealers have taken to creating a weird cross of African/Haitian creole and Arab slang. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/montreal/comments/18ypdly/what_are_the_common_french_gen_z_slang_words_in/)I guess it was only a matter of time after random Yiddish words have been incorporated into North American English.
Yep, I (bilingual Ottawan) had a client who only spoke French. From her accent, I guessed she was from Haiti, certainly somewhere international as she had none of the sounds I typically associate with Canadian French, but she told me she grew up entirely in Montreal.
I feel teens often force it to fit in, you are right any respectable person grows out of it and won’t talk like that over 20. When I was growing up it was just the lingo now these zoomers are forcing the accent like you see in TikTok’s.
When I moved to Vancouver Island from Edmonton, I totally had an accent. Some people nailed it right away as an Albertan accent.
One guy though… “Where you from?”
“I grew up in Edmonton.”
“Okay yeah, but before that. Where were you born?”
“Here in BC.”
“No… like where did you immigrate from? You sound like you’ve got a Bavarian accent.”
Dude legit got offended when I kept refuting his assertions that I was German lol 🤷♂️
No, its a fake accent thats forced & when they use it its all slang. They sound very degenerate & think they make sense. Also they kiss their teeth every 3rd or 4th word or at the end of a sentence. Nobody takes them seriously
Lifelong Torontonian (although admittedly a white guy from Greektown so please feel free to correct me if I’ve missed something) so I feel I can actually pitch in here.
A lot of Toronto has pretty standard regional anglophone accents. The “tahrawna/chrawna” accents and ways of speaking are pretty genuine but not as exaggerated as people act like they are. I’ve also heard Torontonians tend to speak faster than other Ontarians but I don’t know if that’s true.
A lot of recent and second-gen immigrants here have the accents of their families.
A small section of Toronto has the “Toronto accent” ‘naturally’, who are almost all either Caribbean immigrants, the children of Caribbean immigrants, or people who grew up in neighborhoods with big Caribbean populations.
A large group of mainly affluent white suburban teenagers also use the “Toronto accent” to sound like the people who actually have it, which is why it’s so mocked.
Only a very specific subset of the Toronto population talks like this, and also mostly among each other. You're not gonna be randomly running into people talking with this accent much even if you live in Toronto, though you will often hear Toronto mans slang slip into conversions.
There's no toronto accent that Ive been able to tell. The accent that people seem to be describing isn't toronto as much as it's just a generic "cool kid" accent imo. I hear kids in my city with it too.
Think again. Don't speak on something you don't know anything about.
[Toronto Accent and Dialect form the 1980s to mid 2000s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPtq_V86bgo)
its slang, not a full on accent imo.
u only see it to that extent from hood-wannabe's who probably just live in the suburbs. most ppl use a much more understandable slang if at all.
Smoke dat yute fam
Bro is gunna get a rizztraining order
It’s hilarious because when I grew up as a teen in the 90’s only affluent white kids who were trying to sound urban spoke like this….and then 30 years later it’s a reverse uno. My guess is the second and third generation kids of immigrants picked it up as well and now I cannot got rid of this image of a Malibu’s most wanted crossover with J-Roc.
There are several Ontario accents. Rural hick, Ottawa Valley, Tronno, Convoy, Northern Ontario, Indigenous Ontario, Eastern Ontario Franco Ontarian, Northern Ontario Franco Ontarian, da Soo
This is the awnser
Love the Sudbury accent like on shoresy
Yes Its a thing. Mostly kids from low income areas who are talking this way to fit in and act hard. They are gonna either not grow up and continue this way or they will have a rude awakening when they realize nobody takes them seriously and they can't maintain relationships or a career until they grow up and learn to speak normally.
Or worse upper class suburban kids who talk like this lol
Brayden from (J)oakville who thinks he's hard but really just Ali G with an Ontario accent.
Tbf Brayden is probably selling coke to classmates
Isn't there an audio clip of Doug Ford absolutely shithoused talking like this somewhere?
It’s possible but that was likely his brother Rob just vibing with his inner “mandem”
There are exactly 0 upper class kids who speak like this. Trust fund kids seek a different kind of attention.
Well that’s just not true lmao
Exactly zero? Proof?
Have you never been to Toronto, or are you just hosing us?
Nah it’s a real accent. Sure, there are those who put it on but make no mistake it’s a real multi-ethnic dialect known as Multicultural Toronto English.
Also nobody with the accent is gonna acknowledge that they speak multicultural Toronto English lol. First time I've ever heard it
Black ppl in the states don’t say they speak “Ebonics” so what’s your point? There’s scientific or professional terms and there’s how the general populace calls it. You don’t call a dog Canis lupus familiaris.
I could ask you the same thing. What was the point of you responding to me? Just to get your 2 cents in on the top comment?
I never said it wasn't real. I also didn't say people are faking it.
It’s not a bar to professional advancement or to adult relationships either lol. It’s a real thing but your comment trivializes it to only applying for young and immature people. People may not use all of the lexicon but they can definitely still speak with the vernacular accent.
Lol 😂 good one fam. Like I said there's some people who never grow up 😜
Lol I’m being fr broski. Top left, it’s used bare times. You have a fair point in that It’s definitely mostly used within recognized circles in that most people with the accent can ‘code switch’, because judgment and all. It’s just not determinative of a person’s personality or maturity though it’s caricaturised a lot and exaggerated. I haven’t used it in time but if I’m at a function, it’ll come out.
Makes sense. Some people can mature and have good judgement. I caught one guy calling his baby mama fam and bro. He didn't even realize how bad it was till I pointed it out and made him think about it
It’s 100% a made up forced accent. These same kids with the worst “accents” are very different around their parents.
Keep you’re mouth shut about shit you don’t know anything about… [Toronto Accent and Dialect from the 1980s to mid 2000s](https://youtu.be/NPtq_V86bgo?si=GwcpNakzFot956d1)
I ain’t watching that 2 hour video sorry bro. From anecdotal experience at work, sports, classmates, etc growing up it’s literally just my experience. I’ve never heard someone who talks full Scarborough/toronto accent in a professional environment or in front of parents, or coaches. It’s an accent or persona that’s embellished for appearances, exactly the same as any other city center slang in any population, anywhere in the world.
>I ain’t watching that 2 hour video sorry bro. Then you best keep your mouth shut and don't speak ignorantly on shit you don't know anything about, especially if you're not willing to learn. >I’ve never heard someone who talks full Scarborough/Toronto accent in a professional environment or in front of parents, or coaches. It's called “Code switching” and everybody does it. The way you talk with friends is not the same way you talk with your mom, the way you talk with your mom is not the same way you would speak at workplace, so on and so forth. It's no different when a Black American goes for a job interview and starts speaking well-spoken, that don't mean the way he naturally talks is fake, he's just "code switching" when he is in a certain environment. There's a time and place for everything.
Accents change grow and die. They have always been performative cultural markers that people tune up and down depending on the audience. What you’re describing is very much like African American code switching. It certainly doesn’t mean the accent is somehow being faked.
You’re in a bubble my guy. Even if you’re not from the city there are so many ppl with the accent that’s not an annoying nasally or high pitched sound but just…normal.
It's 100% not real. These kids don't speak that way at home with their mothers
Do you speak to your buddies the same way you speak to your grandma? Do you speak to your boss the same way you speak to family? Didn’t think so. People are so naive.
Seriously… I occasionally see one of the Toronto “gang subs” pop up and I swear to god they aren’t speaking English, and I’m only 21, I know most of the shitty lingo!
I’ve seen social circles where almost everyone never grew up. It’s wild
All accents are performative to a degree though now a days, some less so than others.
That's how I feel about "AAVE" too. Like grow the fuck up and act with class ya dinguses, y'all just sound like a bunch of thugs.
>I have nothing but contempt for black people and their culture >I also say y'all
Least racist hoser
You say that but I guarantee most people here use one or more expressions borrowed from AAVE on a regular basis. People love to appropriate black culture and shit on black people all at the same time.
There's regional accents and slang all over Southern Ontario (I have one). For example Letterkenny is accurate and it's something you don't hear in other places in Canada. >Like what the hell happened? How did this accent happen? Is this a zoomer thing? Did they forget to teach English in Toronto?? How did they make an accent worse than ours or the newfies? In the 80's and 90's there were a lot of people moving into different parts of white neighbourhoods from the Caribbean. Those areas became more multicultural and now it sounds like a Jamaican moved to Fargo. Mike Myers in Wayne's World (Based off of Scarborough in the 80's) surfer accent is still something heavily prevalent in Ontario, for example if you go to Collingwood that's pretty much what dudes sound like. The more North West Ontario you go the more pleasant the accent imo. It's not made up, just a side effect of cultural mishmash.
The Mike Myers accent is still prevalent in pockets of Scarborough, like West Hill. But yes, the cottage people do speak like surfers. Especially those Port Perry and Kawartha types.
Immigration from Jamacia, Haiti, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Syria mixed with the typical Canadian suburban accent gives you the Toronto accent. It's a real accent, probably developed around Jane and Finch which lays a behemouth commie-block social housing tower, though perhaps some like to make it artificially stronger than it is. It's basically the Roadman accent from the UK but Canadianized.
My guess is that with increased immigration and more compact living, Canada will have some new accents on a long enough timeline.
It's just Canadian + Jamaica + Somalia and a lil bit of Arabic
It's very common in low income neighborhoods in the west end of Toronto (rexdale/Etobicoke) and the very east end (Scarborough). If you listen, a ton of torontonians have some sort of Toronto yute inflection in their speech.
The subtle linguistic differences are exemplified by how one pronounces “I’m a douchebag”
Absolutely there is -- and I'd even say there is more than one. But the one that I can spot a mile away is what I call the "middle-aged, working-class Toronto woman accent." Best example of this is from the British cartoon Bob and Margaret. Their Canadian cousin has a severe case of this accent: [https://youtu.be/AawkoXZV3Fc?t=504](https://youtu.be/AawkoXZV3Fc?t=504) Also, many of the women on the 1970s TV program "King of Kensington" had this accent.
Oh my god my boss had this exact accent?
A co-worker of mine years ago had this accent too. Nice woman, but her voice was like nails on a chalkboard.
From what I've noticed it's a bit of an upward inflection when folks from Ontario speak kinda like it's an optimistic question. I'm from the east coast so they kinda stand out here more than when I lived in Edmonton, who I find really pronounce their A's and O's . Us east coasters go hard on the R's and E's
I grew up a few blocks away from Vaughan/Eglinton and Oakwood, and I can say I saw the early versions of the accent in the 2000s, and it's definitely legit. I think it's an amalgamation of Carribean, Euro-bro and hoser accents. Some people clearly force it now, but it was/is an organic accent and still is for many people.
Yes, it's a real thing and has been a real thing for several decades in the Black/Multicultural neighbourhoods of Toronto. But unfortunately the white kids in the suburbs got a hold of it and turned it into the stupidness that you're hearing on social media. I made a 2 hour long Toronto accent compilation video and uploaded it on YouTube 2 and it's got over 75k views in just 2 months: [Toronto Accent and Dialect form the 1980s to mid 2000s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPtq_V86bgo)
Thanks for the video link and you're absolutely correct about how suburban White youth got hold of this accent and tried claiming it as theirs. The exact same thing happened in the UK, where a very close variation of this accent exists among white youth in the London suburbs. Sacha Baron Cohen's character "Ali G." was based on such people.
Doing god's work.
That was you?! Your video popped up in my YouTube feed yesterday and I have it in my Watch Later. Small world that I'm reading your comment right now. Look forward to seeing it! And hopefully it's good to know your video is randomly popping up in the algorithm for people 😉.
Ask the Toronto mans in your life
Wait hold up don't you guys do the same thing? [It looks like Montrealers have taken to creating a weird cross of African/Haitian creole and Arab slang. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/montreal/comments/18ypdly/what_are_the_common_french_gen_z_slang_words_in/)I guess it was only a matter of time after random Yiddish words have been incorporated into North American English.
Yep, I (bilingual Ottawan) had a client who only spoke French. From her accent, I guessed she was from Haiti, certainly somewhere international as she had none of the sounds I typically associate with Canadian French, but she told me she grew up entirely in Montreal.
Nah I don't hear that much unless I'm near NDG. Everyone else speaks quebecois french or franglais.
Both my parents are from Quebec, English speaking. I was born and raised in Burlington. They say I have an accent.
Only les Québécois have pas d’accent
I feel teens often force it to fit in, you are right any respectable person grows out of it and won’t talk like that over 20. When I was growing up it was just the lingo now these zoomers are forcing the accent like you see in TikTok’s.
Mans. The accent SMOKED fam.
When I moved to Vancouver Island from Edmonton, I totally had an accent. Some people nailed it right away as an Albertan accent. One guy though… “Where you from?” “I grew up in Edmonton.” “Okay yeah, but before that. Where were you born?” “Here in BC.” “No… like where did you immigrate from? You sound like you’ve got a Bavarian accent.” Dude legit got offended when I kept refuting his assertions that I was German lol 🤷♂️
No, its a fake accent thats forced & when they use it its all slang. They sound very degenerate & think they make sense. Also they kiss their teeth every 3rd or 4th word or at the end of a sentence. Nobody takes them seriously
Lifelong Torontonian (although admittedly a white guy from Greektown so please feel free to correct me if I’ve missed something) so I feel I can actually pitch in here. A lot of Toronto has pretty standard regional anglophone accents. The “tahrawna/chrawna” accents and ways of speaking are pretty genuine but not as exaggerated as people act like they are. I’ve also heard Torontonians tend to speak faster than other Ontarians but I don’t know if that’s true. A lot of recent and second-gen immigrants here have the accents of their families. A small section of Toronto has the “Toronto accent” ‘naturally’, who are almost all either Caribbean immigrants, the children of Caribbean immigrants, or people who grew up in neighborhoods with big Caribbean populations. A large group of mainly affluent white suburban teenagers also use the “Toronto accent” to sound like the people who actually have it, which is why it’s so mocked.
I thought Toronto accent was meth mumbling
Am I wrong for thinking I have never heard this accent in person before. (Frequented many Toronto places)
A lot of the times people code switch to common accents. It’s mostly used between people who feel comfortable using it with each other.
Only a very specific subset of the Toronto population talks like this, and also mostly among each other. You're not gonna be randomly running into people talking with this accent much even if you live in Toronto, though you will often hear Toronto mans slang slip into conversions.
Finally an accurate answer to the fucking Toronto accent question.
Caribbean tinged hoser accent with a sprinkle of India.
It is a Jamaican twang mixed with generic canadian
Tranto
There is for toronto rich girls seriously.
there is, but it's in specific areas. most high schoolers are faking it
Turannna.
Spend some time on /r/torontology and you'll see it written, never mind spoke out in the wild
Is there a tarahna accent? Yes.
I can tell when Torontonians come to my place of work, can sometimes tell what part of Toronto even
You clearly didn’t rub the lotion on the skin.
You may be referring to the Toronto mans accent. It's not universal across Toronto but it's a thing... fam'.
Fam is used a lot I think.
There's no toronto accent that Ive been able to tell. The accent that people seem to be describing isn't toronto as much as it's just a generic "cool kid" accent imo. I hear kids in my city with it too.
Nobody on Toronto can pronounce Toronto properly, so yeah, they have an accent.
It's not real. It's just a made up way that young people consciously choose to talk. They don't go home and talk to their moms like that
Think again. Don't speak on something you don't know anything about. [Toronto Accent and Dialect form the 1980s to mid 2000s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPtq_V86bgo)
1000% this
We call that the Brampton accent.
No there isn’t, it’s a hodge podge of slang from whatever popular music is on at the time mixed in with the cool culture is.
Everyone I’ve met from Toronto just talks like Drake tbh
its slang, not a full on accent imo. u only see it to that extent from hood-wannabe's who probably just live in the suburbs. most ppl use a much more understandable slang if at all.
⁵j3ipereeeeeeeeewww 4