In the 1980s, linguist Ian Pringle and colleagues claimed that there was a huge variation in dialect features throughout the thinly-populated Ottawa Valley, notably with large Hiberno-English influence; however, the nature of such variation has never been thoroughly described. At a general phonetic level, the Ottawa Valley twang of Irish-descended people is characterized by raising of and in all contexts, as opposed to the Canadian English's more typical "Canadian raising", which is context-dependent. In terms of syntax, the twang features the use of "for to" in place of the "to" initiative. Additionally, various regions of the Ottawa Valley may possess their own vocabularies (lexical features) as well.