by Aiden Hickey
April 17, 2024
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.
One of the causal explanations for the linguistic differences between the varieties of English spoken in Cape Breton and Newfoundland amounts to the divergent histories of migration to each island from, roughly speaking, the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas the ethnolinguistic ancestors of contemporary Cape Breton English speakers immigrated predominantly from the Scottish Highlands and, to a notable though lesser extent, Ireland (north and south), those who migrated to Newfoundland, as Sandra Clarke points out, arrived “directly from two very localised sources”, and almost in equal measures. These sources were composed of the “southwest counties of England—in particular Dorset, Devon, Somerset and Hampshire—and southeast counties of Ireland—specifically, the southern portions of Waterford, Wexford, Carlow, Kilkenny, Tipperary and Cork”. As a result, the variance of European settlement on the island’s of Cape Breton and Newfoundland reflects some of the grammatical features distinctive to speakers of each region.
Following are a couple of examples. (Explanations of grammatical features in Newfoundland English have been derived or directly attributed to Clarke. Explanations of grammatical features in Cape Breton English, along with all sentence examples, are my own.)
Gender assignment of inanimates
In both Cape Breton and Newfoundland, speakers tend quite persistently to forgo the typical practice of referring to inanimate objects with the pronoun "it" (i.e., “It [vehicle] won’t run!”), preferring instead to assign gender(s) to inanimate objects and, sometimes, to much less identifiable, abstract entities (i.e., “She’s [the world, presumably] goin’ to hell in a handbasket!”). But whereas a good deal of speakers in Newfoundland refer to inanimate objects with masculine pronouns, speakers in Cape Breton assign feminine pronouns to inanimate objects. More specifically, Clarke has noted that because of the influence of immigrants who arrived in Newfoundland from the southwest regions of England, contemporary speakers in “those areas of NL settled by migrants from southwest England” have continued to use masculine pronouns to refer to inanimate objects, encompassing such items as “tools, clothing, food, body parts, plants and beyond”:
❖ If you’re goin’ out to shovel, he’s [snow shovel] out back in the barn.
❖ That phone that Julia’s got, what’s he called?
❖ Nevermind lookin’ in the cushions, I found him [television remote] upstairs.
The very opposite is the case in Cape Breton—possibly though not definitively attributable to the influence of the Scottish and Irish immigrants who initially settled on the island—as speakers from both locations were known, and are still known, for favouring the use of "she/her/hers" pronouns when referring to the same items mentioned above:
❖ We might have to buy something new, as Bill was sayin’ that she’s [vehicle] on the fritz.
❖ Ever since I jammed her [finger] in the cupboard she’s been right swollen.
❖ When’s she [pie] gonna be done cookin’?
The -s suffix and tense
In virtually all varieties of Canadian English, speakers will indicate only the present tense with an -s suffix in the third-person singular (i.e., “It [vehicle] finally runs!”, “He thinks it will break down again”, etc.). However, as Clarke has uncovered in her research, the “use of the -s suffix throughout the present paradigm is incredibly robust” in Newfoundland, as many speakers use the -s suffix to serve as “generalised non-past tense marker with all subjects of lexical (full) verbs”:
❖ The kids only comes home long enough to eat.
❖ I always goes over to Paul’s place on Friday.
❖ When Danny plays with the dog, he likes to throws the ball around.
While the use of the -s suffix to indicate the present tense is much less common in Cape Breton English, speakers on the island tend, conversely, to indicate the past tense with their use of the -s suffix, especially so amongst the older, working-class generation of contemporary Cape Breton:
❖ Yes, I minds [remember] when they laughs at you for saying that.
❖ We drinks plenty on our trip down south.
❖ I goes to Tarana [Toronto] to see Daniel at college, and I reads his fancy papers but couldn’t make head or tails of em’.
I’ve included a video from the “Newfoundland and Labrador Language Lessons” series on Youtube to provide you with an upbeat example of how, at least in this case, Newfoudlanders attach the -s suffix to the word “die” to serve as a compliment in the present tense. Take a look! It might be worth adopting as part of your own lexicon, and afterwards you’ll be able to show off your knowledge of “Newfinese”!
This piece is part of the series Englishes from the Maritimes.
Reference
Clarke, Sandra. (2010). Dialects of English: Newfoundland and Labrador English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.