Nardpuncher
Rear Admiral
It probably doesn't sound like "a-boot" to you, but it does sound more like that to American ears. "Been" is pronounced more like "bean," and where Americans say "yeah" more like "ye-a-uh," you say something more like "yah." Of course I'm generalizing and not taking local dialect into account, but that's what Americans generally hear as the major differences between American english and Canadian english.I'm another Canadian who's never heard 'aboot'
I think for many Canadians we will say "been" as bin or bean depending onhow the wind blows that day.
Seriously, we do say it both ways, but I'm not going to try and think of what verbs I feel more like saying bin in front of and which ones feel more 'natural' to say the bean one in front of.