Weather forecasts seem straightforward – temperatures, clouds, maybe a bit of rain. But the language used to describe the weather can reveal surprising quirks about how English works. A recent linguistic study takes a closer look at an unusual pattern heard in Canadian radio forecasts and shows that even familiar phrases like “we are five degrees” can challenge long-held assumptions about grammar. Read More
In recent research, Jila Ghomeshi and Mercedes Duncan at the University of Manitoba examined weather reports from a local radio station. They noticed announcers sometimes say things like “we are minus 15” or “Brandon, you are sunny.” At first glance, these sentences sound informal but unremarkable. However, linguistically they are quite striking, because English weather statements traditionally use the pronoun it, as in “it is raining” or “it’s cold.”
Ghomeshi and Duncan show that this substitution is not random. In standard grammar, the “it” in weather expressions is often treated as an “expletive” – essentially a grammatical placeholder with no real meaning. But the researchers argue that the use of “we” and “you” in these broadcasts suggests something more interesting is happening.
Their key insight is that these pronouns are indexing place, not people. When a Winnipeg broadcaster says “we are five degrees,” listeners understand this to mean “here in Winnipeg it is five degrees.” In other words, the pronoun “we” is standing in for the location shared by speaker and audience. According to Ghomeshi and Duncan, this supports the idea that “weather-it” is not a meaningless filler but a kind of “quasi-argument” that subtly encodes contextual information such as location.
The researchers also compare this pattern with other known non-standard uses of we – for example, the “royal we” or the “nursery-we”, which is used by caretakers in sentences like “We have to use our inside voice.” They show that the weather-report usage behaves differently. Crucially, the we in “we are five degrees” cannot be replaced by a full noun phrase referring to people, which strengthens the case that it is really pointing to place.
Ghomeshi and Duncan further note that second-person examples like “Brandon, you are cloudy” work in a similar way. Here, the city name is addressed directly, and “you” again refers to the location being reported on. Together, these patterns suggest that English speakers can creatively personify places when talking about the weather.
While the construction appears to be regionally limited, the authors argue that its very existence is theoretically important. By highlighting how speakers encode location via personal pronouns, Ghomeshi and Duncan show that even routine weather talk can deepen our understanding of how grammar, meaning, and context interact in everyday English.
