1. History

Linguistic historians usually cannot identify a single event or period of time as the beginning of a particular dialect. This is so because there are normally many conditions needed for a speech variety to emerge as a distinct homegeneous form. We can attribute the unique characteristics of a dialect not only to the geographical or social isolation of its speakers, but to the speech of the various populations from which it descends or with whom it has had contact.

One (perhaps oversimplistic) way of characterizing Canadian English is as a hybrid of British and American Englishes. It would certainly seem that way to the initiate: Canadians drive trucks, not lorries, but a Canadian who is pissed is intoxicated, and not (necessarily) angry. Canadians use British spellings like labour, colour, and cheque, but American spellings like plow, draft, and program. Although spelling habits don't really say anything about dialect speech patterns, they may be exploited by the cynic who says there is no Canadian spelling. There are also always the anecdotes of Canadians also 'sounding' halfway between the other two, but the lay-person's means of describing dialect differences rarely can quantify that kind of judgement.

The idea that a dialect is a hybrid often implies that it is not a distinct variety. Coupled with a collective sensitivity about their own identity, English Canadians will bristle at the suggestion that their speech is half-American, half-British, and not at all their own. This need not be the case: a dialect can be seen as a hybrid in terms of its history, but as a distinct form in terms of its current usage. That is, Canadians can claim to speak a distinct variety of English that has the English of both Americans and British as its predecessors.

We can tie the dualistic background of Canadian English directly to the dualistic background of the settlement of English Canada. Following the seizing of the French colony of Quebec in 1761, all of eastern North America was under the control of the British Empire. The thirteen American colonies had already been densely settled, and the dialects of the eastern seaboard had begun to emerge. Maritime Canada had also seen settlement, which is part of why Maritime English remains distinct today.

However, Upper Canada, the region that was to become Ontario, now Canada's most populous province, was at that time sparsely settled. Migration of Europeans to Ontario lagged behind that of the eastern colonies for several reasons, notably among them the harshness of the winter and its distance from ocean ports. Following the American Revolution, however, settlement of Ontario increased in pace, both with the continuing arrival of Europeans, but more significantly with the migration of Loyalists (or "Tories") who fled the United States.

Chambers (1993, 1997) claims it is the speech of the first wave of Loyalists, who arrived in southern Ontario from Pennsylvania and Virginia in the 1780's, that forms the basis of early Canadian English. Later waves of New England loyalists and Scottish and Irish immigrants in the mid 19th century are thought to have had little effect on the dialect, except where their numbers were too large to have simply been absorbed into the settled population.

The social conditions of the time both allowed for Canadian English to diverge from other American dialects, and arguably may have encouraged it to do so. It was able to diverge because it was spoken in an area both geographically and politically separated from the eastern United States. Although the introduction of steam power and railroads (and ultimately, air travel) reduces the effect of geographical distance, the political border between Canada and the US has remained a factor in maintaining the relative isolation of Canadian English from its southern neighbour.

One can also imagine how the sentiments of Loyalists and British Canadians may have encouraged them, perhaps not even consciously, to try to avoid using American-sounding speech. Whether they were successful is debatable, but it is certainly clear that British English was beyond revival in North America. Chambers provides an overview of how writers of the time tended to decry the vernacular of Upper Canada. Amid such testimonials is evidence that the English of Upper Canada had become a homogeneous variety by the 1860's: the historian William Canniff noted in 1852 that the speech of those born as Canadians was quite uniform despite the diversity of accents spoken by their parents.

This homogeneity of Upper Canadian speech provides an explanation of why modern Canadian English is so uniform across the entire country. In the late 19th century, the settlement of western Canada saw a surge in migration of Ontarians, who eventually outnumbered the French-speaking and aboriginal communities of the Prairies to such an extent that later waves of immigration assimilated to the English-speaking population. As a result, the phonological differences among the English spoken today in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto are minimal.

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Language and Identity

In light of the continuing contact between Canada and Britain in the 19th century, Canadians no doubt had ideas of what sounded British and what sounded American. As a young, emerging nation, they may have had a harder time trying to figure out what sounded Canadian and whether it should resemble either of the other varieties. It is likely, however, that they were more conscious of word-choice than of sound patterns.

Thus, a trait of Canadian speech that survives to this day is the occasional preference for perceived British vocabulary as a means for speakers to mark their speech as non-American. In fact, a survey by Lipski (1976) uncovers a tendency among Canadians to use American lexical choice and spelling in unguarded moments, but to use British forms in situations where nationalism is an issue. Never, however, do Canadians try to adopt British phonology for the same purpose; rather, they adhere strictly to Canadian phonology.

A famous recent example is seen in Molson's Joe Canadian advertisement, a patriotic monologue in which the protagonist spiritedly proclaims his dedication to the words chesterfield for couch and zed for zee. The word chesterfield is an example of a British word whose use, according to Chambers, is disappearing from Canadian English, but Molson's Joe clings to it as a non-American word. In the same spot, Joe avers that he never says about as "aboot" (an exaggeration assigned to cinematic stock Canadians), but his emphatic correction features a very Canadian (and un-British) diphthong .

This should not be taken to imply that Canadian English has evolved into a variety whose only unique trait is its pronunciation. While there is indeed plenty to say about Canadian phonology, you will find in this site a discussion of other aspects of Canadian English as well, including its lexical and syntactic properties.