News about the Strathy Language Unit and Canadian English studies
Deppenapostroph
Date: Oct. 11, 2024 | Category: In the Media
Perhaps we can't blame Canadian English in particular, but many in Germany are upset by the official sanctioning of English's 'idiot's apostrophe'.
Bussin' Slang
Date: Sept. 4, 2024 | Category: In the Media
Can you speak Gen Z?
Rethinking English
Date: July 26, 2024 | Category: In the Media
CBC's Ideas recently re-broadcast an interview with linguist Mario Saraceni about English's complex role as a global language.
Canadian English Accents
Date: July 2, 2024 | Category: In the Media
"In the process of learning English, it has become ours — comfortably ours with all its uniqueness ... I wish that people could see and understand that while many of us may speak English differently than people raised in Canada, we are all communicating in one language."
I'm fluent in English, but my accent still feels like a barrier to acceptance (CBC News, July 1, 2024)
Wah Gwan Toronto
Date: June 5, 2024 | Category: In the Media
Drake and Snowd4y's new parody song, Wah Gwan Delilah, is a nod to Multicultural Toronto English.
'Dundas Square don't shine as bright as you': Love it or hate it, Drake's new song is an ode to Toronto youth culture (Toronto Star, June 4, 2024)
What does 'Wah Gwan' mean? Drake teams up with local artist Snowd4y for the Toronto version of 'Hey There Delilah' (Sportskeeda, June 4, 2024)
Hockey English
Date: May 21, 2024 | Category: In the Media
"Bray found that American athletes borrow features of the Canadian English accents, especially for hockey-specific terms and jargon, but do not follow the underlying rules behind the pronunciation, which could explain why the accent might sound 'fake' to a Canadian."
To sound like a hockey player, speak like a Canadian (May 16, Phys.org)
16 Newfisms
Date: May 10, 2024 | Category: Guest Column
Author: Aiden Hickey
[This piece is the fourth and final in our series: Englishes from the Maritimes.]
Long may your big jib draw ↔ Good luck to you in the future / Godspeed
In my previous piece, I contrasted a pair of similar grammatical features in the Englishes of Cape Breton and Newfoundland. I used those examples to emphasize a larger point that there are regional nuances which emerge from such comparisons, underscoring in turn the distinctiveness of the two semi-autonomous varieties of Atlantic Canadian English. Put differently, I used those examples to serve as a corrective to the commonplace assumption that Cape Bretoners and Newfoundlanders speak the same regional variety of English, an assumption which is based on the kindred accents and the wide array of words, expressions and phrases which are shared by speakers of each island.
In this final piece, I transition to the earth-bound, sometimes hilarious, and inventive vocabulary of Newfoundland English, a vocabulary which oftentimes overlaps with the vocabulary of Cape Breton English. Pouring over the dictionaries of each island—Davey and Mackinnon’s Dictionary of Cape Breton English and Kirwin, Story, and Widdowson’s Dictionary of Newfoundland English—has once again provided me with the tempting opportunity to share with you some of the unusual words and expressions which speakers of each island share, shift and tweak the meanings of, and so forth. However, the sheer amount of fishing and nautical terms which overlap in the two dictionaries, due in large part to the long-established lobster (Cape Breton) and cod (Newfoundland) economies of these Maritime regions, are far too voluminous to compare, contrast and recount here. Thus, I have selected some of the most stand-alone terms and expressions which claim the highest degree of currency in Newfoundland to explore in this piece, all in hopes of providing you with the flavor of “Newfinese”.
A fair number of words presented below I have recently discovered in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English. But there are a few others which I had the pleasure of discovering a few summers ago through the much less “bookish” process of “experiential learning”. As it happened, one of my best friends and I engaged in what might be called a form of cultural exchange, of sorts, over the course of two summers.
Summer Office Location
Date: May 2, 2024 | Category: News
The Strathy Unit offices in Kingston Hall will be closed from May to August while the building is under construction. Meanwhile, you can find us in our temporary space in Mackintosh-Corry D512.
News of the New Dictionary
Date: April 18, 2024 | Category: In the Media
An article in today's Quill & Quire describes the new Canadian English dictionary project—of which the Strathy Language Unit is a proud partner!
Cape Breton vs. Newfoundland: Grammatical Features, b'y!
Date: April 17, 2024 | Category: Guest Column
Author: Aiden Hickey
[This piece is the third in our series: Englishes from the Maritimes.]
Whattaya at, b’y? ↔ How are you doing? / Hello!
As with Cape Breton English, discussed in my two previous pieces, Newfoundland English is recognized as a constituent—alongside New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island—of Atlantic Canadian English. These regional varieties are received and understood, at least in the popular imagination, in a conflated, mock-documentary form by North American and even international audiences through the highly successful comedy series, The Trailer Park Boys. The grouping of these East Coast, Maritime regions is meant, in one respect, to indicate the somewhat dramatic degree to which the English spoken in these regions departs from the more common varieties of English that one notices increasingly when traveling inward to the Canadian “mainland” provinces.
There are, however, some important distinctions to establish between the English(es) spoken, for instance, in Cape Breton and Newfoundland. The joke is often made, as I mentioned in my last piece, that because speakers of each island share a similar accent, Cape Bretoners are simply Newfoundlanders who took the wrong turn (or ran out of money!) on their way to Toronto. But Cape Bretoners and Newfoundlanders alike—the latter known colloquially as “Newfies” who speak “Newfinese”—don’t always take kindly to the cultural and linguistic flattening enacted by the joke, as there exist regionally defined differences, however small, which transcend any notion of the two regions sharing an identical accent or language more generally.
Solar Eclipse
Date: April 8, 2024 | Category: News
The Strathy Unit was in the zone of totality for today's solar eclipse!
Bai, b'y?
Date: April 1, 2024 | Category: In the Media
"She has always felt like people outside her home of Banbridge, Northern Ireland, need subtitles to decipher her accent and slang. So it has been strange and delightful to discover . . . that in Newfoundland and Labrador, people understand her just fine."
Woman in Northern Ireland finds people who can understand her — in Newfoundland (Toronto Star, March 30, 2024)
11 Cape Bretonisms
Date: March 13, 2024 | Category: Guest Column
Author: Aiden Hickey
[This piece is the second in our new series: Englishes from the Maritimes.]
Cape Bretoner, wha? ⟷ Canadian, eh?
In my last piece, I touched briefly upon the unique accent associated with English speakers in and from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, along with how the migration of Gaelic speakers from Ireland and the Scottish Highlands—who began settling on the Island throughout the mid-nineteenth century—played a critical role in shaping the phonetic characteristics of the Cape Breton accent. In this piece I turn to the innovative vocabulary of Cape Breton English. With the fairly recent publication of Mackinnon and William’s Dictionary of Cape Breton English (DCBE) comes a good opportunity to explore how Cape Bretoners alter the meaning of standard English words and even invent their own!
Along with innumerable people who grew up in Canada, I spent a great deal of my time playing and watching hockey. As a consequence, a word like “puck”, for instance, became an essential part of my everyday lexicon, used inside and outside of the house: at hockey practice, at Halifax Moosehead games, the local pond, and the living room, of course. Phrases such as “Shoot the puck”, “Pass the puck”, “Dump the puck”, and (usually before early-morning practice) “Where are the pucks?”, reflected my early stock in trade.
It was only later on, during a weekend visit at my grandparents home in North Sydney, Cape Breton, when I learned that the word “puck”—crystallized in my mind’s eye as a hockey puck—could also be used as a verb. My grandfather had been telling me stories of the childhood roughhousing that used to go on between my mother and uncles when I began to realize the genuine distinctiveness of Cape Breton English . . . “I still mind pullin’ in the driveway and seein’ Jimmy puck Jennifer right in the mouf,” my grandfather said. At this point, around the age of sixteen or seventeen, I had gotten familiar with my grandparents' tendency to drop the "th" sound. But what did “puck” mean in this context, and what about “mind”?
A New Dictionary of Canadian English
Date: February 29, 2024 | Category: News
The Strathy Language Unit is excited to be part of a collaborative initiative to produce a new dictionary of Canadian English. Working with our partners at Editors Canada and UBC's Canadian English Lab, we are creating the first dictionary of Canadian English in over twenty years. Our aim is not only to provide an updated resource but one that reflects the diversity of Canada today. Read more about this exciting project — as well as how you might be involved — in today's announcement from Editors Canada.
The Cape Breton Accent
Date: February 28, 2024 | Category: Guest Column
Author: Aiden Hickey
[This piece is the first in our new series: Englishes from the Maritimes.]
How’s she goin’, b’y?
Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, like Newfoundland and other Maritime provinces, is known for its distinctive accent, along with its wonderfully innovative deviations and manipulations of the English language. In this way, Cape Breton English is a unique and regionally defined category of Canadian English, academically established by William John Davey and John P. Mackinnon’s recently published Dictionary of Cape Breton English. Or, put somewhat differently, Cape Breton English, known in the Canadian cultural imagination as an oftentimes humorous, dialectically inflected language filled with what have come to be known as Cape Bretonisms, can be understood to constitute a subset of regional, localized, vernacular language under the national umbrella of Canadian English.
Phrases and usages, however, are not always confined to the Island, of course, as transmission routinely escapes its territorial bounds. Speakers from Cape Breton and Newfoundland, for instance, are often conflated by more metropolitan (or “mainland”) Canadians because of the distinctive yet similar sounding accents. A common quip within the Maritimes, for instance, is that a Cape Bretoner is just a Newfoundlander who took the wrong turn on their way to Toronto.
New Strathy Corpus Access
Date: February 12, 2024 | Category: News
A full version of the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English is now hosted by Borealis: The Canadian Dataverse Repository. Researchers interested in downloading the corpus can request access through the site.
Ya Knows I Loves Ya
Date: January 22, 2024 | Category: In the Media
"These Newfoundland English features, they may be going through periods of decline, but through quoted voices and through narrative storytelling, speakers are actually holding on to them ... They're not being lost. They're being used in very creative ways."
Are N.L. accents dying? No b'y - but they are changing (CBC, Jan. 20, 2024)
And the Winner is...
Date: January 15, 2024 | Category: In the Media
Enshittification! At their January meeting, American Dialect Society members voted on their Word of the Year for 2023. Read all about enshittifcation and the other contenders.