Newfoundland English: phonology

The vernacular speech of the North Atlantic island of Newfoundland has always been highly distinct from that of most of mainland North America. It does however share a number of structural characteristics with varieties spoken in the neighbouring Canadian Maritime provinces, as well as in other early-settled areas of the New World, including the Caribbean. The reasons for this distinctiveness can be traced to several sources – notably, the settlement history of the area, coupled with its relative geographical isolation at the eastern periphery of North America.

Along with its continental portion, Labrador, Newfoundland did not become a province of Canada until 1949; prior to that, as “Britain’s oldest colony”, the island constituted an independent British dominion. Newfoundland’s association with Britain dates back to the 16th century. The island was officially claimed by the British crown in 1583, to ensure that British interests dominated in the European exploitation of the region’s rich fisheries resources. Though it did not see its major influx of immigrants until the first decades of the 19th century, Newfoundland was one of the earliest British-settled areas of the New World, with continuous settlement from the beginning of the 17th century.

The European founder population of Newfoundland and coastal Labrador – henceforth referred to simply as Newfoundland – was quite distinct from that of much of mainland English-speaking Canada, the early population base of which consisted largely of British loyalists who migrated northward after the American War of Independence. Until the 20^th century, settlers to Newfoundland were drawn almost exclusively from two principal, and highly circumscribed, geographical sources. These were the southwest (SW) counties of England, where the Dorset city of Poole served as the chief port of embarkation; and the southeast (SE) counties of Ireland, where the port of Waterford played a similar role. The extremely localized nature of its immigrant population sets Newfoundland apart from much of mainland North America.

The peripheral geographical location of the area has also proven a defining factor in the history and development of Newfoundland English (NfldE). Hand in hand with this go socioeconomic factors: the vagaries of the region’s resource-based economy, in which the fishery has played a central role, resulted in lack of substantial in-migration after the mid-19^th century. Throughout Newfoundland’s history, many of the island’s residents have been scattered in small rural coastal “outport” fishing communities, most of which were highly endocentric in that they displayed dense local networks, yet loose connections outside the local area. The overall population of the region has remained small: the province currently has a total of just over half a million residents, almost a third of whom reside in or near the capital city, St. John’s. The population also remains remarkably homogeneous: over 90% of present-day residents were born within Newfoundland. From a linguistic perspective, these geographical, socioeconomic and demographic factors have had a conservative effect. Until fairly recently, NfldE was little influenced by the varieties spoken in mainland North America; rather, its dominant characteristic was retention of features which characterized its source varieties in SW England and SE Ireland. Though many of these features are recessive today, they are still sufficiently strong to maintain the general distinctiveness of the Newfoundland accent.

Since World War II and union with Canada, Newfoundland’s links with North America have expanded in all spheres: economic, social and cultural. NfldE has increasingly come under the influence of mainland North American models. While many present-day Newfoundlanders profess pride in their distinct ethnic and cultural identity, others – particularly younger and more educated residents of the province – view this heritage in anything but a positive light. Their negative feelings towards NfldE are compounded by the attitudes of mainland Canadians, who on the whole tend to disparage the province’s distinctive dialects as symbolic of Newfoundland’s “backwardness” and lack of economic prosperity. In spite of the economic opportunities offered by recent discoveries of offshore oil and gas, the almost total collapse of the cod fishery has resulted in increasing outmigration to the Canadian mainland, and the Newfoundland population is currently on the decline.

At present, there is a considerable range of dialect diversity within Newfoundland, which correlates with both social and regional factors, as well as speech register. At one extremity are upwardly mobile younger urban speakers, whose increasingly exocentric orientation is reflected in the fact that their accent is coming more and more to approximate standard mainland Canadian English (CanE). At the other are older, working-class and primarily rural speakers, whose more conservative phonological systems continue to display many traces of the regional British and Irish varieties brought to the province several centuries ago. Because of settlement patterns within Newfoundland, linguistic distinctions between the two principal founder groups – the SW English and the SE Irish – continue to be much in evidence. The Irish population is concentrated in the southeast corner of the island, in the southern part of the Avalon peninsula; the city of St. John’s, situated towards the northern extremity of the Irish-settled Avalon, displays a number of characteristic southern Irish features, even in its more standard subvarieties. Outside the Avalon, settlement was overwhelmingly from SW England, with two notable exceptions – the southwest corner of the island, a mixed area of French, Scottish and Irish settlement; and the mainland portion of the province, Labrador, with its aboriginal substratum. Though both traditional “English” and “Irish” dialects of the province share certain conservative features (e.g. monophthongal pronunciations of the vowels of FACE and GOAT), they also maintain a number of inherited distinctions, including the articulation of /h/ and postvocalic /l/. Among younger rural speakers throughout the province, however, competition from more standard supralocal varieties is resulting in increasing loss of local variants, particularly in formal speech styles. A number of features that were the norm in rural fishing communities two or three generations ago are now highly recessive.

Though space does not permit full referencing for individual features, the following descriptions of the phonology of NfldE draw on a wide range of sources, among them Seary, Story and Kirwin (1968); Noseworthy (1971); Paddock (1981); Colbourne (1982); Story, Kirwin and Widdowson ([1982] 1990); Clarke (1991, fc.); Lanari (1994); and Halpert and Widdowson (1996). A number of observations also derive from transcriptions of recordings of conservative speakers held by the Memorial University Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA).