Canadian English: a Linguistic Reader
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Occasional Papers Number 6 Strathy Language Unit Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario Canadian English: A Linguistic Reader Edited by Elaine Gold and Janice McAlpine Occasional Papers Number 6 Strathy Language Unit Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario Canadian English: A Linguistic Reader Edited by Elaine Gold and Janice McAlpine © 2010 Individual authors and artists retain copyright. Strathy Language Unit F406 Mackintosh-Corry Hall Queen’s University Kingston ON Canada K7L 3N6 Acknowledgments to Jack Chambers, who spearheaded the sociolinguistic study of Canadian English, and to Margery Fee, who ranges intrepidly across the literary/linguistic divide in Canadian Studies. This book had its beginnings in the course readers that Elaine Gold compiled while teaching Canadian English at the University of Toronto and Queen’s University from 1999 to 2006. Some texts gathered in this collection have been previously published. These are included here with the permission of the authors; original publication information appears in a footnote on the first page of each such article or excerpt. Credit for sketched illustrations: Connie Morris Photo credits: See details at each image Contents Foreword v A Note on Printing and Sharing This Book v Part One: Overview and General Characteristics of Canadian English English in Canada, J.K. Chambers 1 The Name Canada: An Etymological Enigma, 38 Mark M. Orkin Canadian English (1857), 44 Rev. A. Constable Geikie Canadian English: A Preface to the Dictionary 55 of Canadian English (1967), Walter S. Avis The Hobgoblin of Canadian Spelling, T.K. Pratt 61 The Sounds of the Language, R.E. McConnell 78 Canadian Eh? From Eh to Zed, Elaine Gold 92 Part Two: A mari usque ad mare—Regional Variation Across Canada Newfoundland The Role of Irish English in the Formation of New World 112 Englishes: The Case of Newfoundland, Sandra Clarke A Note on Newfoundland Frankum, John Hewson 130 Galore (A Short Excerpt), Michael Crummey 133 Identity Marking and Affiliation in an Urbanizing 135 Newfoundland Community, Gerard Van Herk, Becky Childs and Jennifer Thorburn The Maritimes African Nova Scotian English, Shana Poplack 146 and Sali Tagliamonte “Elizabethan English” on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, 155 Lewis J. Poteet Dictionary of Cape Breton English: Regional Vocabulary, 162 William Davey and Richard MacKinnon Quebec Contemporary Quebec English Usage: Reflections 177 of the Local, Pamela Grant Ontario The Irish Heritage of the English of the Ottawa Valley, 198 Ian Pringle and Enoch Padolsky The Prairies The Dialect Called Bungi, Margaret Stobie 207 This is What I’m Thinkin: A Bungi Tale Transcribed, 211 Francis J. Walters (Trans. Eleanor Blain) The Land of Open Doors: Being Letters from Western 214 Canada 1911-1913 (Short Excerpts), J. Burgon Bickersteth Coyote Comes to Canada, Katherine Barber 225 British Columbia & the North First Nations English Dialects in Canada, 228 Jessica Ball & B. May Bernhardt General Resources for Further Study 233 v Foreword The Canadian public and beginning linguistics students are the intended audience of this book. Its purpose is to familiarize Canadians with the special characteristics of their national variety of the English language, to sketch some of the regional differences in English across Canada, and to raise awareness of how and why regional and social variation occur. This book may also appeal to those who are studying English varieties comparatively. This is not a collection of the latest research articles on Canadian English; often these are theoretical and statistical, taking earlier studies as a point of departure. This collection brings together new work and old, academic and popular publications, with the goal of presenting a readable, historically informed overview of English in Canada. We have included “Resources for Further Study” sections and editorial footnotes throughout this collection to guide readers to new research and to additional resources on particular regions. Elaine Gold <[email protected]>1 & Janice McAlpine <[email protected]>2 A Note on Printing and Sharing This Book This book is being made freely available as a pdf file on the website of the Strathy Language Unit. Individuals may download it and print sections or the whole of it. Any photocopy service can print and bind a copy of this book for personal use. This book may not, however, be reproduced commercially or in quantity, nor may it be reposted on a commercial website. Individual authors and original publishers should be credited if any portion of this book is republished in an educational course pack. People with disabilities who would prefer this book in a different electronic format may contact the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. 1 Elaine Gold teaches in and is Undergraduate Coordinator of the Linguistics Department, University of Toronto. 2 Janice McAlpine was formerly Director of the Strathy Language Unit, Queen’s University. 1 Part One: Overview and General Characteristics of Canadian English English in Canada1 J. K. Chambers 1. Background, including demographic and geographical information 1.1. Geographical information. Canada is the second largest nation in the world, after Russia, occupying almost ten million square kilometres. It encompasses six time zones, spanning four-and-a-half hours from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast. Climate, topography, local networks, geographical orientation, and other factors vary regionally so that the physical experiences of Canadians in the far north, for instance, bear little resemblance to those in the southernmost regions. Culturally, Canada is complicated by the existence within the Canadian boundaries of two long-standing national consciousnesses which simultaneously share Canadian nationality and maintain their own. Québec is the power base for the francophone minority, equal partners in Confederation since its inception in 1867. Newfoundland joined Confederation only in 1949 after centuries of colonial ties to Britain and self- government. 1 To appear in Varieties of World English, ed. Tometro Hopkins (London: Continuum International). J.K. Chambers <[email protected]> is a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University of Toronto. Canadian English: A Linguistic Reader 2 Linguistically, their presence affects Canadian English (hereafter CE) in interesting and very different ways (Chambers 1991). Québec‟s location interrupts the continuity of the English-language majority, splitting the Atlantic provinces from the central and western provinces, and perpetuates bilingual buffer zones in the adjacent provinces of New Brunswick on the east and Ontario on the west. (See Map in Appendix.) Newfoundland, though overwhelmingly anglophone, did not share mainland Canadian settlement history, and her political autonomy gave rise to an indigenous standard accent which is only now beginning to reflect the influence of mainland CE (Clarke 1991). Any generalizations that might be hazarded about CE must necessarily be qualified—implicitly or explicitly—by their presence. Demographically, the population of 29,639,035 (in the 2001 Census) is often called sparse, but it is hardly that in world terms. Canada‟s population is twice Australia‟s, and three and a half times greater than Sweden‟s. It is almost the same as South Africa‟s and only slightly less than Spain‟s. The sparseness of Canada‟s population is noticeable mainly when one considers the thousands of square kilometres available for settlement. By comparison, the United Kingdom, which would fit handily into even the smallest of Canada‟s seven inland provinces, has about twice the population, and the United States, more comparable in size as the fourth largest nation in the world, has eight times the population. One of the sources of Canadian national unity is the fact that the population is geographically concentrated along the southern border. Most Canadians live within two hundred kilometres of the U.S.-Canadian border. The Map of Canada (see Appendix) shows major urban areas, which house nearly two-thirds of the Canadian population; the remaining third live mainly in smaller cities and towns in the catchment area of the largest cities. The border is enormous, stretching more than 4,000 kilometres, but the population concentration in that long, thin ribbon belies the popular stereotype of Canada as a country of isolated homesteads. Canadians are not only highly urbanized but also overwhelmingly middle-class, to an extent that can scarcely be comprehended by outsiders. As in the New-World societies of the United States and Australia, two factors conspired to determine the relatively homogeneous class structure (Chambers 1998c). On the one hand, Canada‟s earliest settlements offered virtually no amenities to settlers with aristocratic predilections, with the result that they were naturally excluded from most societies. On the other, the earliest political initiatives fostered geographical mobility as a means of uniting the enormous expanses that needed to be governed. The combination of social egalitarianism and freedom of movement led to occupational and social mobility on a scale unknown in the colonizing nations. Social trends in the first half of the twentieth century further increased the class homogenization. Urbanization shrank the agricultural class to less than ten per cent of the population, and occupational mobility keeps the unskilled labour group at less than English in Canada, J.K. Chambers 3 five per cent (Camu, Weeks and Sametz 1971). More