Linguistic influence of British and Irish immigrants.

Linguistically, the long-term influence of the British immigrants was highly restricted. Most of the immigrants settled, naturally, in the towns and villages founded by the Loyalists, and, predictably, their Canadian-born children grew up speaking not like their parents but like the children who became their schoolmates and playmates. The essential Loyalist character of CE persisted. In two accidental senses, the British accents and dialects of the 19th century immigrants made a direct and indisputable impression on Canadian speech. First, in relatively isolated regions where the immigrants became the founding population, their speech formed the basis of the local accent. To this day, one can discern the Scots roots of rural speech in Cape Breton, Pictou and Antigonish counties in Nova Scotia, the Ottawa Valley, Peterborough county, the West Lorne district on the north shore of Lake Erie, and other places. Since Newfoundland joined the Confederation, Canada has come to encompass a large and influential enclave where the speech descends from Irish ancestors. The second impression was made at the opposite pole, so to speak. Though the English immigrants could not impose their speech sounds on their offspring, they often did succeed in imposing norms of propriety and correctness on them, and on the community in general. Many English immigrants frankly promulgated their linguistic superiority to the benighted natives. Thus Susanna Moodie, whose snide and snobbish account of her immigrant experience, Roughing It in the Bush (1852), greatly amused the Victorian gentlefolk she left behind in England, described the first Canadian dialect she ever heard, that of the immigration recruiter, by saying he ?had a shocking delivery, a drawling vulgar voice; and he spoke with such a twang that I could not bear to look at him or listen to him. He made such grammatical blunders that my sides ached laughing at him.? English immigrants took it upon themselves to try and change linguistic practices that differed from their own. In almost all cases, these practices differed because they were based on American rather than British models. The first schoolteachers in inland Canada were Loyalists or descendants of them, and they used the pedagogical tools they were familiar with. Noah Webster?s spelling-book, for instance, was almost universally used in Upper Canada schools. It included spellings like color, neighbor, center, meter, and connection instead of colour, neighbour, centre, metre, and connexion, and it included pronunciations like secretARY, reNAIssance, lootenant (for lieutenant), eether (for either), and zee, instead of SECret'ry, renaissANCE, leftenant, eyether, and zed.

One result of the belated intervention on language standards by the English immigrants is the Canadian double standard in many matters of spelling and pronunciation. Wherever British and American practices differ from one another, Canadians usually tolerate both. For instance, many Canadians freely vary their pronunciation of either and neither without noticing any discrepancy or raising any controversy, and different regions sometimes maintain different norms, as when, for instance, Ontarians prefer the spellings colour and neighbour but Albertans prefer color and neighbor.These double standards are the linguistic legacy of the first two mass immigrations in Canadian history.

Another result, much less obvious but no less real, was attitudinal. In the second half of the 19th century, Canadians came to regard British standards as superior, whether or not they were the ones in common use. This attitude insinuated itself into the Canadian ethos politically as well as linguistically. At many points in Canadian history, being patriotically Canadian has defined itself as being anti-American, either mildly or vituperatively, and in decades past?though probably not since the 1940s?it often also entailed being pro-British.

PHONOLOGY

Canadian English forms one branch of North American English, with historical affinities to the speech of Midland and Northern United States (Bloomfield 1948). The primary bough in the family tree for world Englishes splits the North American branch from the others, usually known as the British branch.

North America received its first permanent settlers more than a century before Britain?s southern hemisphere colonies, with the result that the starting-point in the two regions was essentially different. The differences were maximized because in the 18th century, after the North American settlement, the English spoken in the motherland underwent several changes. For one thing, it became largely r-less, so that the r sound was no longer pronounced in words like bark [bA:k], bar [bA:], and barber [ˈbA:b@]. For another thing, the vowel in words like laugh, bath, chant, and dance came to be pronounced long and usually farther back as [A:]: thus [lA:f], [bA:T], [tSA:nt], and [dA:ns].10 Most Canadian and American varieties lack these features, and most Australian, New Zealand and South African varieties have them. The presence of these and other similar features in the southern hemisphere varieties link them more closely to the accents of England.

VOCABULARY

Even before Canada had a significant and widespread population, many distinctive features of the Canadian vocabulary came into being. Explorers and adventurers learned the names of all the places they visited from the natives, and in many cases the native names stuck. Canadian place-names resound with words from the native language stocks: from east to west, Pugwash, Buctouche, Miscouche, Kejimkujik, Chicoutimi, Saguenay, Temagami, Napanee, Ottawa, Moosonee, Coboconck, Oshawa, Mississauga, Kakabecka, Wawa, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Ponoka, Wetaskiwin, Squamish, Esquimault, Nanaimo, and in the north, Tuktoyaktuk and Iqaluit, to cite just a few. Other place-names, scarcely less exotic, translate native names: Medicine Hat, Moose Jaw, Red Deer, Kicking Horse Pass, Yellowknife, Whitehorse, among them. Some places had more than one name because the indigenous name contended with an imperial one: Toronto was called York after the nondescript duke who was George III‟s second son, but in the end?since 1834?the Mohawk name, Toronto, meaning ?trees standing in water, ? prevailed.

SYNTAX

In matters of syntax, CE generally conforms to world-wide standards. Most regional variants are traceable to Old World sources. For example, the Hibernian completive construction after + present participle is heard in Newfoundland and in rural areas around Port Hawkesbury, Ottawa, Peterborough, and no doubt other Canadian-Irish enclaves (Chambers 1986: 8-9). Sentences such as Mary?s after telling us about it, meaning that Mary has recently finished telling us, are exotic to most Canadians, though not to all.

One construction that occurs in standard Canadian syntax and also in some parts of the United States, perhaps all, is the ever exclamation, in constructions like Does John ever drive fast! and Is John ever stupid! The meaning is highly emphatic, signifying, in these instances, that John drives incredibly fast and that he is astoundingly stupid. The ever in the exclamations has or once had the meaning ?habitually, at all times‟ as in forever ?for all time‟. The syntax, oddly, is the same as for Yes/No questions, requiring auxiliary inversion or do-support, but the intonation is falling, not rising, and there is no sense of interrogation implied.

SEMANTICS

Apart from the meanings associated with the grammatical constructions described above, CE offers little of linguistic interest in terms of indigenous semantics. In most respects, peculiar Canadian meanings share their peculiarities with America at large, thus underlining again the global split between North American and British varieties.

Most such Americanisms are well known: words like store, sick, fix and guess have generalized their meanings to include what the British mean by shop, ill, repair and suppose. Regional meanings are abundant in Newfoundland, as might be expected, with fish for cod, ballicatter for the icy fringe on a shoreline, fiddler for someone who plays the accordion, horse‟s fart for a puffball, and dozens more, all beautifully documented in Story, Kirwin and Widdowson.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 170