How do you pronounce Lieutenant Governor?

Weird, isn’t it?

If you’re not up to speed with your old-colonial vernacular, here’s the deal: Canadian English dictates the word “lieutenant” be pronounced lefttenant, rather than lootenant. Linguists explain that the “f” is a relic of the country’s British imperial history, while the alternate pronunciation comes from the U.S.

Yet as Ontario prepares to herald the appointment of its 29th Lieutenant Governor in the coming weeks, it appears the traditional pronunciation of the symbolic figurehead’s moniker is largely out of use, at least amongst the masses. You might call it an anachronism.

“I would never use that,” said Ryan Kasperowitsch, one of more than a dozen people in downtown Toronto on Thursday who instinctively said “lieutenant” American-style when asked by the Star.

Dylan Hollingsworth, a bike courier near St. Lawrence Market, also insisted he’d never say “lieutenant” with an “f.”

“Everything changes and you kind of have to roll with it,” he said.

According to Charles Boberg, a professor of linguistics who studies Canadian English at McGill University, the original British way of saying the word has been going out of style for decades. A 1972 survey of 14,000 Grade 9 students and their parents — who would have grown up in the 1940s — found that 43 per cent of Ontario fathers and 37 per cent of the province’s mothers said lefttenant. Their children, meanwhile, used the traditional pronunciation even less — 19 per cent among boys and 14 per cent for girls.

Though he isn’t aware of more recent empirical data for the word, Boberg believes the old British elocution has fallen even further by the wayside.

“I suspect that use of the British form is now pretty close to zero among younger Canadians.”

University of Toronto linguist Aaron Dinkin agrees the British pronunciation seems to be losing out, and suggests the massive cultural influence of our southern neighbours is a big factor.

“The shift to the F-less pronunciation,” Dinkin said, “is probably a result of the combination of the F-less pronunciation being dominant in the U.S. … plus the fact that the F pronunciation is so unconnected to the (spelling).”

Though it is widely acknowledged that the word “lieutenant” comes from French — a military officer who is “holding the place” of someone with a higher rank, said Dinkin — the origins of the F-sound are less clear.

The Oxford English Dictionary states the pronunciation is “difficult to explain,” but suggests the old French word originally had a “w” sound at the end of the first syllable, and that eventually got confused with an “f” or a “v” and created the British way of saying the word.

Taylor Roberts, a linguist in Toronto who studied at York University, said the two pronunciations have also more in common than you might think. That’s because “f” and “u” sounds are both “labial” pronunciations, meaning one’s lips are positioned similarly when uttering each of them.

“It’s not a coincidence that it changes to “u”, or a labial sound. It does that because it’s closer to what it was in the beginning,” said Roberts.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one place that still insists there’s an “f” in lieutenant is the Lieutenant Governor’s office. John Gross, who handles social media for the LG, said their policy is to try to preserve the traditional pronunciation because the F-less way of saying the word isn’t part of our verbal history.

“It is regarded as an Americanism and that is why we discourage it,” said Gross, joking that sometimes schoolchildren ask him why the Lieutenant Governor is left-handed.

He added, however, that they are willing to change their tune if it better reflects the reality of contemporary Canadian English. “I don’t know where this is going to evolve in the future,” he said. “If the tide is changing, who knows what will happen, what the official line will be.”

For Hollingsworth, change is already past due. “We’ve always had that mix of British and American pronunciation and slang. Our whole identity is permeated by it,” he said.

Yes, he added, it’s nice to give a nod to the Loyalist history of the Dominion, but to resist the natural course of change would be futile, an inward and pointless exercise in nostalgia.

“Maybe it’s time to let go,” he said.