Speaking Canadian English

An Informal Account of the English Language in Canada

Mark M. Orkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138910423
• eBook ISBN: 9781317436324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What do English-speaking Canadians sound like and why? Can you tell the difference between a Canadian and an American? A Canadian and an Englishman? If so, how? Linguistically speaking is Canada a colony of Britain or a satellite of the United States? Is there a Canadian language?

Speaking Canadian English, first published in 1971, in a non-technical way, describes English as it is spoken in Canada – its vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax, grammar, spelling, slang. This title comments on the history of Canadian English – how it came to sound the way it does – and attempts to predict what will happen to it in the future. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics.

Chapter One
Introduction

I myself talk Ontario English; I don't admire it, but it's all I can do; anything is better than affectation.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Introduction

ON FIRST ENCOUNTER, THE MOST UNUSUAL THING ABOUT THE language of English-speaking Canadians is that many speakers, when they are not merely being diffident, seem hardly aware of its existence. Whether this be considered a vice—a symptom of national myopia—or a virtue, depends upon one's point of view. Eric Partridge, an inveterate student of the English languages, appears to look on it with some approval. He writes:

In Canada [the linguistic nationalist movement] is strong, not vocal, for it is hardly conscious: Canadians have a very distinctive variety of English, far more different from that spoken in Britain than is the English spoken by Australians; yet Canadians—so imperceptibly, so constantly has the process operated—'just get on with the job'; having this very different English, they therefore do not feel the need to have it at all.¹

This lack of concern which most English-speaking Canadians show towards their daily speech contrasts sharply with the interest of a great many French-speaking Canadians in their own distinctive variety of French, which first attracted attention well before the end of the seventeenth century and has continued to inspire study and discussion ever since. A recent bibliography of writings on Canadian French from its beginnings to the present day by Gaston Dulong embraced more than a thousand entries;¹ the first extended compilation, that of Geddes and Rivard in 1906, numbered almost six hundred references.² On the other hand, a list of writings on Canadian English, had it been drawn up at the beginning of the century, would have contained no more than a handful of references, most of them fragmentary. By 1965, W. S. Avis was able to glean only 165 titles, 124 of them published since the end of the second world war.³

There are, of course, good reasons for this contrast, not the least important being the fact that while English has long been the dominant language of Canada, French is the language of a minority only, with the result that the study of Canadian French has often been as much a matter of ethnic and political self-assertion as it has been of linguistic research.⁴ On the other hand, most English-speaking Canadians, secure in the belief that they are the recipients in full measure of the linguistic and political traditions of England, have never felt the same need for reassurance as their French-speaking compatriots. This belief, however, and the neglect of Canadian English which it helped to foster, are not easily justified, since from early times the speech of English Canada has in fact differed appreciably from British English, and particularly from the dialect of southern England, which, under the name of Received Standard English, has been accepted by most Englishmen and some others as "the best English." Indeed, Canadian English is probably farther from the parent stock than Indian, Australian or South African English, and in some ways as different as American English, with which it has more in common than any other member of the English-speaking family.

The greatest barrier to the investigation of Canadian English has always been a lack of scientific information. Until very recently, language study in Canada was a trackless waste into which none but a few brave pioneers had ventured and much of which even today remains unexplored. In 1890, Alexander F. Chamberlain complained, and with justice, that "towards the investigation, scientifically, of the spoken English of the Dominion little indeed has been done." ¹ Almost sixty years later, Morton W. Bloomfield pessimistically echoed Chamberlain's sentiment, adding that not enough preliminary work had been done on the subject to make a full study of Canadian English possible.² M. H. Scargill was saying virtually the same thing in 1957. "A definitive history of the English language in Canada," he observed, "is yet to be written, and few scholars would attempt to write it at present. The vast amount of preliminary work necessary for such a history has not been done." ³

Of all the reasons for this long neglect of the study of Canadian English, the foremost has undoubtedly been indifference. The average Canadian of today has progressed little beyond those Americans about whom it was written more than a century ago:

"Many... even of the most learned class are not altogether conscious of any national peculiarities of speech; they may have a vague suspicion of their existence, but possess no accurate knowledge of their nature." ¹ This attitude is well demonstrated by Canadian schools and universities which offer courses in many of the important living languages and some of the dead ones; yet the study of Canadian English as such nowhere appears on a school curriculum. "Our French Canadian colleagues have a culture and a language of their own," writes Scargill, "and they study them. Our many Slavic communities are advanced in the study of their own language in Canada. It is the English-speaking Canadians who lag behind, who do not consider their language worthy of study, who do not seem to know or care if they have a culture and a language to give expression to it." ²

Before the middle of the nineteenth century, it scarcely seems to have occurred to anyone that the English language spoken in Canada might be deserving of attention or comment. Indeed, if Canada had any importance at all, it was not because of her cultural or intellectual attainments. John Lambert, whose Travels Through Canada and the United States of North America, in the Years 1806, 1807 and 1808 was published in London in 1810, observed that the true state of Canada "seemed to be as little known to the people of England as the deserts of Siberia." Into these hyperborean regions there had ventured, it is true, a few men who brought back with them words until then unknown in England. One of the earliest was the geographer, Richard Hakluyt, who in 1584 wrote: "The Esquimawes of the Grande Bay, and amonge them of Canada, Saguynay, and Hochelaga . . . are subjecte to sharpe and nippinge winters, albeit their somers be hotter moche then oures." ³ To other travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we owe Barren Ground (1691) for the tundras stretching east and west of Hudson Bay, pemmican in the spelling pimmegan (1743), bluff (1792), to signify a clump of trees, muskeg, spelled muskake (1775), and baked-apple (1775), the fruit of the cloudberry plant (rubus chamaemorus), also called bakeapple.

With the opening of the nineteenth century, a little light was shed on this darkness by a procession of visitors to the Canadas, who, in the fashion of travellers everywhere, hastened to set down their impressions in print.¹ The few travel books written by Americans or Continental Europeans saw the frontier scene with some detachment, as A. R. M. Lower has noted,² and lacked the supercilious tone of many of the English works, which were largely a catalogue of grievances and criticisms. If one may fairly judge from the latter, the early Canadians were an illiterate, money-grubbing, evil-smelling lot from the very beginning, English and French alike, and they did little, if anything, at least during the nineteenth century, to mend their untaught, unmannerly ways. Canada itself was looked upon as a sort of makeshift England, as unenlightened as it was remote, and wholly lacking in the agréments of the original.

The British traveller, when he thought about it at all, expected to find his own brand of English spoken in the Canadas, and was distressed by the prevalence of American words and speech habits. If these did not provoke the hostility and intolerance, sometimes amounting to downright vilification, which British observers have often reserved for Americanisms encountered on their native heath, they were at least greeted with a distinct sniff of disapproval.³ As early as 1821, John Howison, in Sketches of Upper Canada, Domestic, Local and Characteristic, published at Edinburgh, had remarked of the settlers that "their object is to have a great deal of land under improvement, as they call it";¹ and an anonymous writer of the 1830's wrote disparagingly of "the mis-adoption of would for should by the Canadians in the American manner," and the use of clear out in the sense of go away.²

In 1839, Anna Jameson, an English expatriate and author of Winter Studies or Summer Rambles in Canada, also made use of the now familiar aside, "At Hamilton I hired a light wagon, as they call it." ³ In the same vein, the Honourable Amelia M. Murray wrote of her Canadian sojourn in Letters from the United States, Cuba and Canada (1856): "These farms are divided into what are called lots; each lot is one hundred acres."⁴ One may note in passing that most of the words which these early travellers brought home with them were in fact of irreproachable British origin, although fallen into disuse in the land of their birth. Thus, improvement in the sense quoted is traced by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary to 1473 and identified as obsolete except in United States dialect; wagon (or wag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• Contents
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• CHAPTER ONE Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO Hallmarks
• CHAPTER THREE The Origins of Canadian English
• CHAPTER FOUR Its Ingredients
• CHAPTER FIVE Pronunciation
• CHAPTER SIX Spelling and Syntax
• CHAPTER SEVEN Its Names
• CHAPTER EIGHT Slang
• CHAPTER NINE The Future of Canadian English
• LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX