Geographical information

CONTEST

CONTEST.. 2

INTRODUCTION.. 3

BACKGROUND, INCLUDING DEMOGRAPHIC AND GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION.. 4

1.1. Geographical information. 4

1.2 The British and Irish arrivals after 1812. 5

1.2 Linguistic influence of British and Irish immigrants. 6

PHONOLOGY.. 8

VOCABULARY.. 8

SYNTAX.. 9

SEMANTICS. 9

MEDIA USE OF ENGLISH.. 10

CONCLUSION.. 11

REFERENCES. 13

INTRODUCTION

Canadian English is one of the oldest varieties of colonial English. Because Canada is due west of England, it was one of the first discoveries in the European quest for a sea route to the Orient. The English first laid claim to Newfoundland, Canada?s easternmost province and thus the nearest land mass on the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, in 1497, just five years after Columbus made his historic landing to the south. Newfoundland?s discoverer was a Venetian, John Cabot, but he sailed from Bristol in England under the authority of the English king, Henry VII (Chadwick 1967).

The English language came to be spoken in Canada because of the English aptitude for warfare. In the Middle Ages, the English people themselves had narrowly escaped becoming colonials dominated by the Normans, and in extricating themselves they inadvertently developed the political and military strengths that would eventually lead to the global spread of their language. Protracted wars against Normandy in particular and France in general, especially the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), developed military prowess and a readiness for aggression. Defending the surrounding seas required the English to develop navigational skills and sea-faring prowess. As a result, when the era of New World exploration dawned in 1492, the English were well equipped to compete with their rivals from France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland.

BACKGROUND, INCLUDING DEMOGRAPHIC AND GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Geographical information

Canada is the second largest nation in the world, after Russia, occupying almost ten million square kilometers. 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.

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. 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.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 185