Canadian English

A Sociolinguistic Perspective

James A. Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415535366
• eBook ISBN: 9781135913762
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This textbook is the only one of its kind to introduce the study of Canadian English in the context of basic concepts of linguistics and sociolinguistics. The book provides foundational information on linguistic principles and on the different branches of sociolinguistics, ranging from the large-scale 'macro' study of language usage (the sociology of language, dialect surveys) to the 'micro' study of language use (sociophonetics, sociolinguistic variation and change). Each chapter highlights the different ways of collecting and analyzing data, including census data and historical texts, surveys and questionnaires, publically available corpora, and interviews. Mini-projects at the end of each chapter offer hands-on experience with the methods presented in the chapter. In addition to discussing the classic works in the study of Canadian English, this book engages with such contemporary issues as new-dialect formation, language and social identity, and ongoing language change, making it key reading for students taking courses in the areas of Canadian English, varieties of English, language variation, and sociolinguistics.

1
Introduction

1.1 What Is “Canadian English”?

At first glance, this question might seem odd. Everyone knows what we’re talking about when we say “American English” or “British English” or “Australian English”, so why shouldn’t there be a “Canadian English”?

Part of the problem with using a term like “Canadian English” (or indeed, a term for any “national” variety of English) is that it implies a higher degree of differentiation from other dialects of English than might actually exist. The English spoken in Canada is mutually intelligible with varieties of English spoken elsewhere in the world; that is, a speaker of Canadian English can be understood by a speaker of Australian English, and vice versa. All dialects of English have a lot in common: where there are differences, they tend to be relatively superficial, such as different words for the same thing or different pronunciations for the same word. We can often identify where someone comes from in the English-speaking world by their choice of words and how they pronounce them. In addition, the term “Canadian English” glosses over the fact that the English spoken across most of Canada is very similar to American English. Most people outside of North America don’t even notice the difference.

Another problem with using a term like “Canadian English” to identify a national dialect is that it also implies a higher degree of internal consistency than might actually exist. For example, some Canadians and Americans will talk about how much they like “a British accent”, ignoring the wide range of regional (as well as social) distinctions among the varieties of English spoken in the British Isles, not only in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary, but also in their grammatical structure—in fact, there may be more variation within British English than there is between British English and other national dialects! While the English spoken in Canada does not show the same degree of diversity in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar as is found in British English, there are audible differences between the English spoken in central and western Canada and that spoken in the Atlantic provinces (especially Newfoundland and Labrador), and even within each of these varieties there is some evidence for fine-grained phonetic distinctions and regional vocabulary.

While acknowledging these problems, I believe that there is some value in retaining the term “Canadian English”. First, although the term dialect is linguistically questionable and most linguists prefer to use the more neutral term variety (see Chapter 3), the notion of “dialect” may be psychologically, politically and/or socially meaningful for the people who speak it. As a result, this meaning can influence not only their beliefs about and attitudes toward language usage and to other speakers, but also their own linguistic behaviour. Finally, since dialect surveys of “American English” usually ignore speakers north of the Canada–US border (although the recent Phonological Atlas of North American English [Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006] is a notable exception), the English spoken in Canada has figured only marginally in studies of North American English.

1.2 Why a Sociolinguistic Approach?

When most people think of a language (or a dialect), they usually think of something static and self-contained. In fact, most public discourse around language takes this view. For example, you probably have an idea of what “English” is, or what “American English” is, as well as what it isn’t. You also probably don’t like the way people younger than you speak or the way people from other places speak, and you might even feel that the way they speak is ruining your language. But the reality is that each language includes a great deal of variation (regional and social) and is constantly changing.

In the early 20th century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure made a distinction between looking at a language as it develops over time (diachronic linguistics) and trying to understand a language as it exists right now, without reference to its past (synchronic linguistics). Saussure’s distinction stemmed in part from his desire to move away from 19th-century philology, which was concerned with understanding the history and interrelationship of languages, and so necessarily took a diachronic approach to the study of language. In the 20th century, the new discipline of linguistics was concerned with studying each language as a self-contained structural system (in Saus-sure’s terms, the object of linguistics should be to study the abstract system langue, or “language”, rather than what people actually do with that system, parole, or “speech”). As a result, descriptive linguistics has generally been concerned with writing a grammar of each language, which is then taken to represent the linguistic system of that language. (This concern was especially prominent in the United States in the early 20th century, when linguists were hurrying to document the many disappearing indigenous languages of North America.)

In the 1950s and 1960s, the description of individual languages gave way to the study of language in the individual speaker’s brain, an approach pioneered by Noam Chomsky in a theoretical framework initially known as transformational-generative grammar (or simply, generative grammar) that underwent further refinements as Government and Binding (or Principles and Parameters) in the 1980s and since the mid-1990s as the Minimalist Program. In this theoretical framework, language is seen as a mental faculty that allows the speaker to produce and understand grammatical sentences (i.e. utterances that conform to the linguistic system), and it is the object of linguistic inquiry to figure out the nature of that mental faculty, rather than the production and understanding of speech or the grammar of particular languages. This approach has come to dominate linguistics, at least in North America.

At the same time that generative grammar was being developed in the 1960s, some people who studied language became dissatisfied with the increasing exclusion from linguistic analysis of the social and cultural aspects of language. Some began to examine the link between language and culture from an anthropological perspective (linguistic anthropology, or anthropological linguistics, also referred to as the ethnography of speaking), with some examining large-scale patterns of language use across communities, such as why people speak a particular language, when they speak it and with whom (sociology of language), and others studying the quantitative patterning of linguistic behaviour across different social groups and situations (sociolinguistic variation and change). While the approaches and methods of these different schools of linguistics all differ, they are generally subsumed under the heading of sociolinguistics, since they are all concerned not only with the structural aspects of language, but also with the role that language plays in the social and cultural life of human beings.

A purely linguistic approach to Canadian English would simply describe the structural aspects of the dialects of English spoken in Canada: pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. However, this description would leave unexplored and unexplained a great deal of information that is relevant for understanding why English is spoken in Canada, why it has the form it does and how its speakers view and use it. For these reasons, in this book I have decided to take a sociolinguistic approach to the study of Canadian English, being concerned not only with its structural (or language-internal) aspects but also with the social, cultural and ideological (or language-external) aspects of the varieties of English spoken in Canada.

1.3 Structure of the Book

This book is intended not only as an introduction to and overview of Canadian English, but also as an introduction to the methods used in sociolinguistic approaches to the study of language. Rather than providing a comprehensive overview of the ever-expanding literature on the study of English in Canada (see Boberg 2010), I have tried to present the key facts about Canadian English and a representative sample of key and recent works to illustrate these facts. The book is divided into chapters that deal with different aspects of the study of Canadian English, each of which includes discussion of the methodology relevant to its topic.

Chapter 2, “Some Basics”, provides a general overview of the study of language and the discipline of sociolinguistics and introduces the reader to different methodological approaches to studying language, with a particular focus on sociolinguistic variation and change, the main methodological approach adopted in this book. Readers who already have some background in linguistics, and specifically in sociolinguistics, may wish to skip this chapter. “What is Linguistics?” outlines the different areas of study in linguistics: phonetics (the study of speech production), phonology (the study of sound systems), morphology (the study of word structure), syntax (the study of word order) and semantics (the study of meaning). “What is Sociolinguistics?” outlines the major approaches to the study of language in its social context: sociology of language (macro sociolinguistics), the ethnography of speaking or linguistic anthropology (qualitative sociolinguistics) and language variation and change (quantitative sociolinguistics).

Chapter 3, “The Origins and Development of Canadian English”, examines the factors involved in the formation of new dialects and the historical and demographic developments that led to the development of the English language in Canada. “The Origins and Spread of English Dialects” takes a large-scale view of the relationships among the different dialects of English spoken around the world. “Principles of New Dialect Formation” looks at different theories of how new dialects come about, why they are similar to each other and why they differ. “The History of Canadian English” presents an overview of the major historical events in the development of English in Canada, preceding the American Revolution through the War of 1812 and Confederation, to the demographic shifts that took place in the 20th century. “Canadian English as a New Dialect” applies the principles of new-dialect formation to the development and features of Canadian English.

The remaining chapters of the book outline variation in the structural features of Canadian English and how they differ from other varieties of English and regionally within Canada. Chapter 4, “Lexical Variation”, focuses on the lexical features of Canadian English, not only differences between the vocabulary of Canadian English and that of other varieties of English, but also regional variation within Canadian English. This chapter also provides an overview of the methods of dialect topography in studying regional variation in vocabulary and examines the extent to which words can be considered “Canadianisms”, as well as discussing dictionaries of Canadian English and regional dictionaries. Chapter 5, “Phonetic and Phonological Variation”, focuses on the sound systems of Canadian English, not only the units of the phonological system but also their phonetic realizations. Chapter 6, “Grammatical Variation”, focuses on the grammatical and discourse features of Canadian English. Chapter 7, “The Present and the Future of Canadian English”, considers ongoing changes in Canadian English, using the apparent-time construct and age-based distributions, as well as the sociolinguistic consequences of increasing ethno-linguistic diversity in English Canada’s largest cities, and ends with some consideration of the long-term effects that these changes might have on the character of Canadian English.

2
Some Basics

2.0 Introduction

Linguistics and sociolinguistics are like other specialized disciplines in that they use terms and methods that are particular to them. In the rest of the book, I assume that readers have a basic understanding of these terms and methods. Those readers who do may skip forward to the next chapter. This chapter is intended to provide readers with a basic understanding of linguistics and sociolinguistics. In the first part, I discuss linguistics and its various branches. In the second part, I discuss different approaches to the study of language in its social context.

2.1 What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is a scholarly discipline that is concerned with the study of language. When I tell people that I’m a linguist, the two most common questions they ask me right away are “How many languages do you speak?” and “What language do you teach?” These questions undoubtedly stem from the colloquial meaning of the word linguist, which usually means “someone who speaks a lot of languages”. While some linguists do tend to focus on some aspects of a particular language (e.g. the sound pattern of English), linguistics is not concerned with studying an individual language but rather with the study of language in general: what its structure is, where it comes from and what it is used for. Because language is so intimately caught up with every aspect of human life, it can be studied from a number of different perspectives:

• Physical: How is language stored in the human brain? How does it get there? What is the nature of mental representation? How are other activities of the brain (knowledge, thoughts, feelings) converted into language, and how is language physically produced as speech?
• Structural: What units does language consist of? What governs how those units are combined or altered?
• Cultural/social: What do people use language for? What role does it play in expressing and influencing human culture? What role does it play in creating and expressing social meaning? What effect does it have on society and culture?

Thanks to this breadth of potential perspectives under which language can be studied, linguistics is variously considered to be a cognitive science, a social science and part of the humanities.

Within linguistics, we normally distinguish core linguistics from those approaches to the study of language that overlap with other scholarly disciplines, such as psychology (psycholinguistics) and sociology (sociolinguistics). Core linguistics is concerned with questions that are relevant only to the study of language structure:

• How are sounds produced and used (phonetics and phonology)?
• How are sounds put together into words (morphology)?
• How are words put together into sentences (syntax)?
• How is meaning expressed linguistically (semantics)?

In the following sections, I will provide a brief overview of each of these areas.

2.1.1 Phonetics: The Study of Speech Production

Phonetics is the area of linguistics that concerns how speech sounds are produced by the human vocal apparatus. One goal of phonetics is the characterization of any and all possible human speech sounds. To further this goal, the International Phonetic Association has developed a set ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Some Basics
• 3 The Origins and Development of Canadian English
• 4 Lexical Variation
• 5 Phonetic and Phonological Variation
• 6 Grammatical Variation
• 7 The Present and the Future of Canadian English
• Glossary
• Appendix: International Phonetic Alphabet
• References
• Index