Canadian English

LING 202, Fall 2007

Dr. Tony Pi

Week 7 - Dialects: Central Canada

Ontario in DT Canada

• Golden Horseshoe (1991)– GTA (Greater Toronto Area) & surroundings

• Golden Horseshoe 2000– only 14-19/20-29 year olds

• Ottawa Valley

– Subregions for GH and OV can be mapped using the DT database

– Border effect

GH (Gotchie-Pull)

Ottawa Valley (Bury)

Irish Heritage of Ottawa Valley

• Folklore about OV– predominantly Irish, with some Scots traits

• Hiberno-English speech

– Ottawa Valley ‘twang’, Ottawa Valley Irish, Ottawa Valley brogue

• “colonial Irish dialect”

• Reality– many different English varieties in OV

Varieties of English in the OV

1. Loyalist dialects• along north shore of St. Lawrence Valley

– different vowel sounds for cot/caught

2. North of Glengarry County• predominantly Gaelic

– gruamach - gloomy, overcast day– devoicing final and initial voiced sounds

» very > ferry; zigzag > sick-sack

• Highlands– in contact with the Loyalists

Scottish Influence in the OV

3. Scottish in Lanark County• Lowland Scots

– ben for living room; rones for eavestroughs

4. Scottish in Renfrew County• McNab settlement (Highland)

– distinct from Glengarry County» English-speaking from beginning» always been in contact with Irish

Other Influences in the OV

5. Germans south and west of Pembroke• mother tongue German, home language German

– Plattdeutsch (Low German) still amongst older residents, but also have knowledge of Hochdeutsch (High German)

– vipple-vopple (teetertotter), lutsch (milking stool)– learned English from Irish settlers in adjacent areas

6. Kashubian Polish settlers• Renfrew County

– bilingual descendants– English learned from adjacent Irish and German settlers

Influence of Irish Phonology

• Intonation, lilt of older Irish speakers• Archaic vowel pronunciations

– /ow/ pronounced higher and further back, and is devoid of any upglide (the w) and sounds like /u/ - [o>]

– strongly fronted /a/ before /r/ at the end of a word or followed by another consonant - [a<]

• Kerp (or Cairp) for Carp

– short u - [ö]• onpolite for unpolite

Irish Consonants in OV Speech

• Palatalization– /r/ is high and front, making it like [i]– /l/ after vowels and in final position are absent– /k/ and /g/, esp. before low front vowel [æ]

• cart > kyart; guard > gyard

• Lenition– slow release of final voiceless stops like /t/

• hat sounds like hats

• /t/ and /d/ before /r/ become interdental affricates– dry > dhry

Irish in OV Vocabulary

• weigh-de-buckedy = teeter-totter• (cow-)byre = cow stable• coil / handshake / handshaking = haycock• moolie = cow without horns• mind (of) = remember• barging = abusive scolding• mitching = playing truant• footer = bungle• fusting = hurrying, bustling

Irish Syntax and Morphology

• the– the Ottawa, the Satan, the Scotch Corners, the Boyd

Settlement, the ‘Prior

• conjoined gerundial construction– used as time adverbial

» “The wasp would come down and sting us there where we were working...and us not touching him (when we weren’t even touching him)

• prepositions (p. 141)– anunder, withouten, again, at, for, on

• for to– “we just seeded the oats there for to cover the alfalfa”

• deletion of subject relative pronouns– “it was generally the younger kids carried the rake”

Agreement

• is and was with plural subjects – e.g., hens is...

• plural subjects with singular verb forms– e.g., they fills

• them as plural demonstrative– I didn’t like them stones, in them days

Ulster vs. Non-Ulster vs Mixed

• Ulster dialect characteristics– Gatineau Valley, eastern Pontiac County

(Quebec)– Carleton County west of Ottawa

• Non-Ulster (southern Irish) characteristics– Carleton County east of Ottawa– westerly parts of Renfrew and Pontiac

Counties

• Mixed

Ethnolectal Diffusion• “In a city like Toronto,

where inner-city ethnic neighbourhoods have been stable for decades, with new waves of Portuguese or Italians or other immigrant groups replacing the acclimatized old wave as it removes itself to the suburbs, and where immigrant languages, abetted by Canadian government incentives, routinely persist to the third generation and later, we are just beginning to come to grips with the dynamics of ethnolectal diffusion.”

‘Sandwich’ in Italo-Canadian

“To take a simple but beguiling example, a shibboleth of Italo-Canadian English is the pronunciation sangwich for ‘sandwich’, with the velar nasal and stop in medial position.

For first-generation Italians learning English, the velarity of the labio-velar approximant /w/ in ‘sandwich’ apparently triggers velarization of the preceding nasal and stop, a transfer from Italian phonotactics, where sequences like [ndw] never occur even across boundaries.

Second-generation and later descendants perpetuate the pronunciation probably because the word is not heard much beyond the kitchen. In fact, it is replaced immediately by the standard English pronunciation as soon as its oddness comes to the attention of young users.”

Italo- and Greek Torontonians“In a sample of 200 Italo-Torontonians representing three

generations, 68.5 percent said sangwich. The incidence was not correlated with sex or age (directly), but was correlated with descent. About 40 percent of third-generation and about 70 percent of second-generation Italo-Torontonians said sangwich, as do all of their parents.

The most striking fact is that no one said sangwich if their parents did not say it.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that some Greek-Canadian teenagers also say sangwich.

The occurrences are reported so far only in one east-end community, where traditional Greek and Italian enclaves co-exist and, in fact, intermingle, and where both ethnicities come together in schools. So sangwich appears to be diffusing beyond the Italians and becoming a community feature.”