Canadian English

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Until fairly recently, Canadian English was a severely understudied national variety of English. Reliable sociolinguistic data of a national scope has been especially hard to come by and, until the mid-1990s, was virtually inexistent. The geographical proximity to the American super power is quite unique to Canadian English and contrasts it with other varieties of English, such as Australian, New Zealand, or UK varieties of English. Combined with a relatively low awareness of Canadian English features (a result of the school system), some commentators, especially outsiders, tend to confuse Canadian English with American dialects.

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Saratov State University

 

 

 

 

 

CANADIAN ENGLISH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                     Written by

Irene Mavrina

Group 411(2)

 

 

 

 

Saratov, 2012

Introduction

Until fairly recently, Canadian English was a severely understudied national variety of English. Reliable sociolinguistic data of a national scope has been especially hard to come by and, until the mid-1990s, was virtually inexistent. The geographical proximity to the American super power is quite unique to Canadian English and contrasts it with other varieties of English, such as Australian, New Zealand, or UK varieties of English. Combined with a relatively low awareness of Canadian English features (a result of the school system), some commentators, especially outsiders, tend to confuse Canadian English with American dialects. Comparisons of degrees of difference are always relative: while a local East Anglian English speaker may confuse a Torontonian for an American, Canadians usually have little difficulty telling the one from the other. The last ten years in particular have produced significant data on a national scale that allows the characterization of the variety more adequately than before.

Development through settlement: first and second waves

Canadian English is by and large the outcome of the two earliest settlement waves. The first wave was a direct result of the American Revolution in 1776, with about ten thousand so-called United Empire Loyalists fleeing the territory of the newly-founded United States. The Loyalists were New World dwellers who preferred to remain British subjects in what was to become Canada. They came from the mid-Atlantic states, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, upstate New York, on the one hand and New England on the other hand. This wave, peaking in the mid 1780s, settled the province of Upper Canada, now Ontario and their speech patterns are responsible for the general make-up of Canadian English today (that is, the notion of the ‘founder principle’), including its more ‘American’ than British twang.

The second wave started in 1815 at the end of the Napoleonic wars and, until 1867 when Canada gained considerable independence from Britain (Confederation), was responsible for over a million immigrants from England, Scotland, Wales, and importantly, Ireland. There is some dispute as to the degree of influence of this wave, which was much larger than the first one. However, existing studies strongly suggest that the first (American) wave was most influential in everything but one area of language: that is, language attitudes—the evaluation of linguistic items as more or less ‘desirable’ and interference with consciously accessible language features.

From the start of the British and Irish migrations in the second wave to the mid-to-late twentieth century, all things British were considered superior by many Canadians. Today, Canadian Dainty is a thing of the past and only a vanishingly small minority still adheres to, in Layton’s words, an accent that makes the even the English feel ‘unspeakably colonial’.

But the British connection did leave a trace on Canadian English in some isolated tokens. One of these is the use of tap for what Americans generally call faucet (the knob that turns on water). This term came in use in the mid-nineteenth century, when the first houses were equipped with running water. As a colony, Canada’s close economic ties to Britain ensured that not only British plumbers, but also their terms were imported. To this day, it is the majority term (about 80 percent and more) from coast to coast to coast and a Canadianism (see below for a typology). Very rarely, British traces are witnessed in the most formal speaking styles today: newsreaders at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation will pronounce the first sound in schedule like the ‘sh’ in shoe, which is not done by 90 percent of Canadians, including other media outlets, who use the first sound in school for schedule.

Starting in the late-nineteenth century, Canada encouraged immigration from a much broader range of countries, while maintaining barriers against non-Europeans at first. After the Second World War, these remaining barriers were lifted and, today, Canadians come from all possible backgrounds. Census data show that in major cities up to 40 percent and more do not speak English natively. In Quebec, the province’s largest city Montreal—where French is the sole official language—is unrivalled in its international composition; here again about 40 percent do not speak French natively, though French is dominant elsewhere in the province.

However, recent studies have shown that second generation Canadians (i.e. children born to immigrant parents in Canada) are adopting a language system that is natively Canadian, regardless of ethnic background. There is evidence to say that second generation Canadians of Anglo-Irish, Chinese, and Italian descent essentially share the same linguistic system. This homogeneity points towards the unifying force of shared open social networks and shared communities of practice. Exceptions to this trend are those extremely close-knit neighbourhoods, such as Montreal’s Italian and Jewish quarters. Traditionally, local speakers have not gone much beyond these groups, which has lead to the development of distinct linguistic features over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Homogeneity and autonomy

One of the most interesting questions about Canadian English is why it is at all different from US English dialects. Given Canada’s proximity to the US and its close ties in terms of trade and business or its exposure to American media outlets, TV, radio and magazines, it is striking that US-Canadian differences persist.

Generally speaking, the linguistic features in the west (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia) are less diversified than in the east (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec), which has been settled for a century or more longer. The island of Newfoundland, which joined Canada only in 1949 after hundreds of years as a separate British colony, is the most distinctive linguistic community as compared to Standard Canadian English.

Relative similarity, or homogeneity, of dialects is a common denominator of regions that have been settled for relatively short periods of time. As time progresses, regional, and social dialects are being formed, examples of which include the distinctive neighbourhoods of Montreal. For Ontario westwards, relative linguistic homogeneity has been proposed since at least 1951. Incidentally, the concept is paired with the question of Canadian linguistic autonomy. Canadian linguistic features are maintained by the country’s communication lines that run along the east-west axis, across mountain ranges, vast stretches of prairie land, and other physical barriers. The existence and persistence of Canada, successful in staving off American expansion in the nineteenth century, has given rise to national, pan-Canadian networks: it is not uncommon for Canadians to grow up in the Golden Horseshoe (the area surrounding Toronto and home to one sixth of the population), study in Edmonton on the Prairies, go to graduate school in Vancouver, BC and find work in Halifax, NS These east-west connections and travel streams weave Canadian English together since the completion of the trans-Canada railway in 1886 and have, so far, put a check on larger linguistic diversification.

Pronunciation

We can find the linguistic expression of the Canadian east-west connection at all linguistic levels.  Vowels, for instance, love to change but when they change in Canada they have been shown to rarely – for some changes never—to cross the Canada-US border. For example, the ‘Canadian shift’, first detected in the mid 1990s, affects the ‘short front vowels’, i.e. the three vowels exemplified in black, pen or tin.  In Canada these vowels move in the opposite direction to the well-established ‘Northern Cities Shift’ in parts of the United States. So in Canada, the vowel in black, for instance, is pronounced farther back in the mouth. Canadian dialects are actually diverging from the American dialects that have experienced the shift, and this despite the high levels of interaction between the two countries.

Other features include ‘Canadian raising’, the most-widely known Canadian pronunciation feature.  Canadian raising affects the diphthongs in words such as wife, price or life and house, about orshout. Canadian pronunciations, though far from universal, are often perceived as weef instead ofwife and a boot instead of about by outsiders. There are also other, less well-known Canadian differences, such as the Canadian integration pattern of foreign sounds represented by <a>. In words like pasta, lava, plaza, and drama the foreign <a> sound acquires the vowel in father in American English and British English, but the vowel of cat in Canadian English.

In 1999, Charles Boberg using Trudgill’s hierarchical gravity model demonstrated that there are considerable differences between Canadian and American English speakers.  The main variables of the gravity model are the size of the centers of influence, measured in population (P), and the distance (d) between them.  The general prediction of the model was that the larger the centers and the smaller the distance between them, the greater their influence on one another.  Boberg examined the influence of six major American cities on six major Canadian cites.  The American cities included four major cities on or near the Canadian border (Seattle, Detroit, Buffalo, and Boston) as well as the metropolises and world cultural capitals on the east and west coasts (New York City and Los Angeles).  The Canadian cities represented a selection of major population centers across the country (Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax) as well as Windsor.  A second series of calculations measured the influence of Canadian cities on each other, since it may be presumed that American influence that enters Canada in one place may spread to other cities by means of secondary influence.

Due to economics, it is not permissible to summarize all the comparisons Boberg made and the results obtained.  However, one particular comparison, Detroit’s influence on Windsor, is worth quoting at length because according to the gravity model Windsor should be completely assimilated to Detroit within one generation.  Boberg points out that some Ontarians do in fact think that people in Windsor speak like Americans.  However, Boberg’s survey clearly showed that Windsor is just as Canadian as Toronto; in fact he found the same system whether he looked at a 53-year-old man or a 27-year-old women.  The vowels /A/ and /:/ are completely merged in the low-back corner, and /Q/ remains low position; the only raising of /Q/ occurs before nasals.  The result of this is that stack is pronounced in Windsor with almost the same vowel quality as stock in Detroit.  Boberg concludes that if the speakers are representative of the Windsor population in general, it must be concluded that, at least at the level of the phonetics and phonology of the vowel system, the massive influence of Detroit predicted by the model is simply nonexistent.

Another interesting observation made by Boberg worth noting here to demonstrate that a Canadian English exists is the following: “it is along this stretch of the border, where large numbers of Americans and Canadians are geographically closer and more integrated than anywhere else in North America, that we find the greatest degree of linguistic differences” (15).  The point to be taken is that the boundary between the United States of America and Canada is not merely a political one; that the boundary divides two different ‘Englishes’.  Boberg concludes:

Canada is clearly not a part of the American speech community in some respects, and its independence in this regard is presumably supported and perpetuated by the general post-acquisition stability of grammars at a more abstract level and by Canadian institutions, such as schools, textbooks, dictionaries, and national media, at the less stable level of lexicon and phonemic incidence. 

Grammar

Variation in grammar—morphology and syntax—can also be found in Canadian English. Reported since the early 1980s, but never thoroughly studied, Standard Canadian English allows (to give just one example) the placing of as well sentence-initially. Thus, in a sentence such as The Canucks had good forwards that day. As well, their blue liners were better than last time, other standard dialects would usually accept as well only after ‘last time’, i.e. sentence-finally.

The study of Canadian English has come a long way since the first serious attempts in the mid-1950s. It has reached critical mass and is now in the position to tell the story of Canadian English and its varieties. 2010 marked a milestone with the publication of Charles Boberg’s The English Language in Canada, the first scholarly overview monograph on Canadian English. The book is a symbol of how far the field has come as a collective effort, while also serving as a spring board for further work on the ‘other’ North American English.

 

Vocabulary

Words are most accessible to speakers, and comments abound. Terms like washroom  ‘public bathroom’, all-dressed pizza ‘pizza with all the available toppings on it’, garburator  ‘in-sink garbage grinder’, parkade  ‘car parking structure’ or the ubiquitous toque  ‘woolen hat’ are easy to find and are sometimes used as ad-hoc identity markers in Canadian regions.

Historically speaking, about 70 percent of Canadianisms , which are defined as terms ‘native or of characteristic usage in Canada’, are comprised by noun compounds that are especially difficult to spot: for instance, butter and tart are ‘ordinary’ words, but butter tart ‘pastry shell with a filling of butter, eggs, sugar and raisins’ is a ‘type 1’ Canadianism. In the historical Canadian dictionary project, four basic types of Canadianisms are recognized: type 1: form origins in Canada; type 2: preserved in Canada; type 3: having undergone semantic change in Canada; and type 4: culturally significant terms. The Dictionary of Canadiansims on Historical Principles, first edition, lists about 10,000 Canadianisms from 1498 to 1965/6. The revision project, DCHP-2 , includes terms until the present day, such as grow-op ‘grow operation of marijuana plants’, small packet ‘special rate mail item’, or the prototypical tag marker eh, with its many functions—for example, ‘eliciting opinion’ or ‘emphatic stress’.

 

 

                                     CANADIAN STYLE AND SYNTAX

Canadians unlike Americans have a choice in matter pertaining to spelling.  Canadians can choose to spell the following words either the American or British way: center/centre, practice/practice, analyze/analyse, color/colour.  However, consistency must govern usage.  Thus, if a Canadian in a formal paper chooses to use British spelling, he or she must take care to use all British suffixes where there are common suffixes to chose from.  This is the advice given by the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary in the Style Guide section under Appendices.  The aforementioned dictionary is considered, and for good reason, the authority on matters pertaining to style.

 

            A particular syntactic distinguishing feature of Canadian English is the post adjectival position of the word Canada after certain proper names.  According to Avis “this development reflects French syntax and owes its origin to the federal government’s policy of promoting bilingualism nationally: Air Canada, Environment Canada, Parks Canada, Statistics Canada, and so on” (Canadian English 13). The practice has spread to other institutions, for example, Unity Canada, and is “fashionable even amongst business firms, domestic and multinational: Bell Canada, Shell Canada”.  Avis concludes that the rapid growth of the novelty makes such a sentence quite idiomatic: “Canadian hockey players get support from Sport Canada when playing for Team Canada in the Canada Cup series” (13).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

  • http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362Jurcic2.htm
  • http://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-use/canadian-english/
  • http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/CanadianEnglish.html
  • http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/Canadian/canphon3.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contents

  • Introduction
  • Development through settlement: first and second waves
  • Homogeneity and autonomy

  • Pronunciation

  • Grammar

  • Vocabulary

  • Canadian Style and Syntax

  • Bibliography

 

 

 


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