An Associate Professor from UBCO is working with a Vancouver Prof. to study the different vocal clues that identify which area of BC you're from.
Professor Bob Pritchard, who used to live in Vernon, noticed a few of those vocal clues and tested it with his students at the Vancouver campus. "The one for me in particular was Vancouver. At a break in class I asked 5 students to stand up and say the name of the city we were in and 5 stood up and said Vancouver, Vancouver, Vancouver...and I asked the rest of the class, 'what do you hear?' Finally someone stood up and said, 'they all said Vang-couver.'"
At that point Pritchard asked the 5 students where they grew up and all of them were from the Okanagan. He then got in touch with Molly Babel, who specializes in linguistics at the Okanagan campus. Once they realized noone had really studied an Okanagan accent the DRAWL(Determining Regional Accents With Literature) study was born.
At the moment, the two co-leaders of the study are taking in samples from people all across the province, which they plan to compile at the end of summer and hopefully have some fun/interesting/telling results about the different ways each area has adapted their own speech patterns.
If you'd like to read their script, which is specifically design to showcase certain words, GO HERE.