History and status of Canadian English

Origins: Settlement and influences

Apart from Newfoundland, which is the oldest English-speaking colony in North America (founded 1583), the earliest substantial European settlement of what is today Canada was dominated by French rather than English colonists. French colonies were well established in eastern Canada by the mid-17^th century, a period when the region was practically empty of English speakers. In the mid-18^th century, however, the outcome of the struggle between France and England for control of North America was decided in favor of England, and the former French territories became British possessions by the Treaty of Paris (1763). English-speaking settlement followed, leading to the bilingual status of modern Canada, with two official languages. By the 19^th century, English-speakers outnumbered French, and the dominance of English in Canada has continued to increase ever since. Today, of the Canadian population of 30 million people, French speakers account for less than a quarter, and these are mostly found in the province of Quebec, which is 81% French-speaking. Outside Quebec – and neighboring parts of New Brunswick and eastern Ontario, which are bilingual – Canada is generally English-speaking.

The important exception to this is the large cities, where, as in the United States, the English-speaking population has been augmented by immigrants whose mother tongues come from every corner of the world. The four and a half million people of Toronto, for example, are about 59 per cent English-speaking, one per cent French-speaking, and 40 per cent native speakers of other languages, like Chinese (8%), Italian (4%), and Portuguese (2%). Vancouver, with close to two million people, is 61 per cent English-speaking, one per cent French-speaking, and 38 per cent ‘other’, with Chinese (15%) and Punjabi (5%) accounting for the biggest non-English groups. Montreal’s 400,000 English-speakers (12% of the population) are outnumbered not only by speakers of French, the majority language (69%), but also by speakers of non-official languages, who now account for 19 per cent of the population. In total, only 59 per cent of Canadians – some 17 million people –are native speakers of English (Statistics Canada 2001). On the other hand, Canadian English is generally not divided like American English along racial lines; with a few local exceptions, all native speakers of English in Canada share a common variety.

Two inescapable facts have dominated previous discussions of Canadian English. The first is that, in spite of Canada’s being a British colony until 1867 and enjoying close cultural ties with Britain for many decades thereafter, Canadian English is fundamentally a North American variety. The second is that, with the obvious exception of Newfoundland, which was a separate British colony until 1949 and remains to this day linguistically distinct from the rest of Canada, Canadian English is remarkably homogeneous from one end of the country to the other. This is particularly true in the broad stretch of territory extending almost 3,000 miles (4,500 km) from Ottawa and Kingston, Ontario, in the east, to Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia, in the west, including all the major cities of central and western Canada. While traditional enclaves remain in a few places, modern, urban Canada does not exhibit anything approaching the dialect diversity of the United States, let alone that of Britain. Instead, one type of English, with minor regional variations, is spoken across most of the country, and central and western Canadians are generally incapable of guessing each other’s regional origins on the basis of accent or dialect. These two facts have been explained in terms of Canada’s settlement history, which comprises three distinct stages.

The first major English-speaking settlement of Canada came not directly from Britain but from the British colonies in what are today the United States (Avis 1973: 44–47). First to arrive were thousands of migrants from Eastern New England in the early 1760s, who took up land in Nova Scotia that had been abandoned by French-speaking Acadians expelled by the British government. Next came thousands of “United Empire Loyalists”, known as “Tories” in the United States: American colonists loyal to the British crown in the American Revolution. The Loyalists joined the New Englanders in Nova Scotia and became the first large and permanent group of English-speaking settlers in three other regions: New Brunswick (especially the city of Saint John); the “Eastern Townships” of Quebec (south of the St. Lawrence River); and Ontario (the Kingston and Niagara regions on either end of Lake Ontario). “Late Loyalist” migration from the U.S. to Canada continued for several decades after the Revolution, so that by 1812, when Britain and the U.S. fought their last territorial conflict, Ontario (then called Upper Canada) had a population of around 100,000 that was predominantly American; people who had immigrated directly from Britain constituted a small minority of about 5,000 (Avis 1973: 46). In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Americans also played a major role in settling Western Canada, along with other groups (Avis 1973: 48–49). The result was that, in almost every region of Canada except Newfoundland, Americans predominated or were an important element among the earliest settlers and must have had a significant influence on what later emerged as local speech.

Avis (1954: 14) and Bloomfield (1948: 62) argue that these facts explain the overwhelmingly North American sound of Canadian English, despite large-scale subsequent immigration from Britain and elsewhere: American speech patterns were already in place when the British settlers arrived. The recent arrivals, like immigrants elsewhere and in other times, found themselves adapting to these patterns rather than imposing new ones from abroad. The exceptions to this development are the areas where new settlements were made by relatively homogeneous groups of immigrants arriving directly from Britain in large numbers and in specific locations in the 19th century. These survive today as the traditional enclaves of regional speech referred to above: Newfoundland; Cape Breton (northern Nova Scotia); and the Ottawa Valley of eastern Ontario.

A different view of the origins of Canadian English is advanced by Scargill (1957), who chooses to emphasize the importance of the second major stage in the settlement of Canada: direct immigration from Britain, which reached a peak in the mid-19th century. Scargill points out that Bloomfield’s “Loyalist theory” of the origins of Canadian English is flawed in two crucial respects (1957: 611–612). First, it ignores the numerical superiority of British over American settlement. British immigration is measured not in the tens but in the hundreds of thousands. Scargill finds it improbable that these much greater numbers could all have adapted their speech perfectly to a rigid model laid down by a comparatively small number of original American settlers. Second, Scargill warns against using comparisons between Canadian English and modern standard Southern British English (Received Pronunciation) as evidence of the American character of Canadian English, since this was not the variety spoken by the majority of British immigrants to Canada. He points out that many of the features of Canadian English that the incautious observer might automatically attribute to American influence could just as well have their origins in the regional speech of Northern or Western Britain, which predominated among 19th century British immigrants.

If we grant that Loyalist speech had at least some influence on the future development of English in Canada, this settlement history lends to the study of Canadian English an additional interest to scholars of American English, since Canadian speech may preserve features of colonial American English that have since been erased by subsequent linguistic change in the U.S. (Bloomfield 1948: 65–66). In Nova Scotia, American settlement came mostly from Eastern New England. In New Brunswick and Ontario, by contrast, it came mostly from Vermont, New York State, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania (Avis 1973: 46). American settlement in western Canada came from a much wider range of places, including the American Midwest; moreover, some of these settlers were recent European immigrants to the U.S., so that the extent to which they carried identifiable regional American dialects into Canada is questionable.

The third stage in the settlement of Canada came largely from non-English-speaking countries, producing the linguistic diversity in major cities referred to above. This wave of immigration began in the late 19th century and peaked in the decades after the Second World War, drawing mostly on southern, central, and eastern Europe. It continues today, though in recent decades its sources have shifted increasingly away from Europe to Asia and Latin America. Apart from the contribution of loan words, this last stage of immigration has had little effect on Canadian English, except where large, linguistically homogeneous concentrations of immigrants live in relatively segregated communities where they predominate numerically. Examples of the latter would be religiously-based communities of German-speakers in the rural West, like Mennonites in southern Manitoba, and certain ethnic enclaves in large cities, like Italians and Jews in Montreal and Toronto; in these cases, immigrant language substrates may be heard to varying degrees in the local varieties of Canadian English.