Canadian English

Canadian English (CaE) is a variety of English used in Canada. More than 25 million Canadians (85 percent of the population) have some knowledge of English (2001 census [2]). Canadian spelling contains elements of British and American English; Canadian vocabulary, although similar to American vocabulary, also features many British terms, several distinctive Canadianisms, French influence in many areas, and notable local variations.

History

The term "Canadian English" is first attested in a speech by the Reverend A. Constable Geikie in an address to the Canadian Institute in 1857. Geikie, a Scottish-born Canadian, reflected the Anglocentric attitude prevalent in Canada for the next hundred years when he referred to the language as "a corrupt dialect," in comparison to what he considered the proper English spoken by immigrants from Britain.

Canadian English is the product of four waves of immigration and settlement over a period of almost two centuries. The first large wave of permanent English-speaking settlement in Canada, and linguistically the most important, was the influx of British Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, chiefly from the middle Atlantic states. The second wave from Britain and Ireland was encouraged to settle in Canada after the War of 1812 by the governors of Canada, who were worried about anti-English sentiment among its citizens. Waves of immigration from around the globe peaking in 1910 and 1960 had a lesser influence, but they did make Canada a multicultural country, ready to accept linguistic change from around the world during the current period of globalization. The languages of Canadian Aboriginal peoples started to influence European languages used in Canada even before widespread settlement took place, and the French of Lower Canada provided vocabulary to the English of Upper Canada.

Spelling

Canadian spelling of the English language combines British and American rules. Most notably, French-derived words that in American English end with -or and -er, such as color or center, usually retain British spellings (colour and centre), although American spellings are not uncommon. Also, while the U.S. uses the Anglo-French spelling defense (noun), Canada uses the British spelling defence. (Note that defensive is universal.) In other cases, Canadians and Americans stand at odds with British spelling such as in the case of nouns like tire and curb, which in British English are spelled tyre and kerb.

Like American English, Canadian English prefers -ize endings whenever British usage allows both -ise (the Cambridge model) and -ize spellings (the Oxford model) (e.g. realize, recognize). However, some of the technical parts of the Air section of Transport Canada, e.g., Air Policy,[3] use a compromised Cambridge model; e.g., tires instead of tyres, but organisational rather than organizational.

Canadian spelling rules can be partly explained by Canada's trade history. For instance, the British spelling of the word cheque probably relates to Canada's once-important ties to British financial institutions. Canada's automobile industry, on the other hand, has been dominated by American firms from its inception, explaining why Canadians use the American spelling of tire and American terminology for the parts of automobiles.

A contemporary reference for formal Canadian spelling is the spelling used for Hansard transcripts of the Parliament of Canada. Many Canadian editors, though, use the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004), often along with the chapter on spelling in Editing Canadian English, and, where necessary (depending on context) one or more other references. (See the section "Further reading.")

Phonology and Pronunciation

Although there is no single linguistic definition that includes Canada as a whole, a fairly homogeneous dialect exists in Western and Central Canada. William Labov identifies an inland region that concentrates all of the defining features of the dialect centred on the Prairies, with periphery areas with more variable patterns including the metropolitan areas of Vancouver and Toronto.

The following features distinguish Canadian English from a phonologically conservative Northern U.S. accent:

• Canadian raising: Diphthongs are "raised" before voiceless consonants. For example, IPA /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ become [əɪ] and [əʊ], respectively, before [p], [t], [k], [s], [f]. It is found throughout Canada, including much of the Atlantic Provinces. It is the strongest in the Inland region, and is receding in younger speakers in Lower Mainland British Columbia, as well as certain parts of Ontario. Many Canadians do not possess this feature, and defining the dialect by this would exclude parts of Atlantic Canada and include some adjacent portions of the U.S.
• Cot-caught merger: Speakers do not distinguish between the open-mid back rounded vowel [ɔ] and open back unrounded vowel [ɑ].
• Canadian Shift: It is the defining feature of all of Canada except the Atlantic Provinces. It is a chain shift triggered by the cot-caught merger. The vowels in the words cot and caught merge to [kɔt]. The /æ/ of bat is retracted to [a], the /ɛ/ of bet shifts to [æ], the /ɪ/ in bit then shifts to the [ɛ] in bet. The Canadian shift is absent from the U.S., except for some speakers scattered throughout the far West, although the California vowel shift contains similar features.
• Traditionally diphthongal vowels such as /oʊ/ (as in boat) and /eɪ/ (as in bait) have qualities much closer to monophthongs in some speakers especially in the Inland region.
• /o/ and /aʊ/ are pronounced back.
• /u/ is fronted after coronals.
• /æ/ is tense before velar stops.
• Words such as borrow, sorry or tomorrow are realized as [-ɔr-], rather than [-ɑr-].

The island of Newfoundland has a distinctive dialect of English known as Newfoundland English; many in the Maritime provinces – Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island – have an accent that sounds more like Scottish English and, in some places, Irish English than General American. There is also some French influence in pronunciation for some English-speaking Canadians who live near, and especially work with, French-Canadians.

The phonology of Maritimer English has some unique features:

• Pre-consonantal [ɹ] sounds are sometimes removed.
• The flapping of intervocalic /t/ and /d/ to alveolar tap [ɾ] between vowels, as well as pronouncing it as a glottal stop [ʔ], is less common in the Maritimes. Therefore, battery is pronounced as [ˈbætɹi] instead of [ˈbæɾ(ə)ɹi].

Northern Canada is, according to Labov, a dialect region in formation.

Phonemic incidence

• Canadians side with the British on the pronunciation of lieutenant /lɛf'tɛnənt/, shone /ʃɒn/, lever /'livɚ/, and several other words; been is pronounced by many speakers as /bin/ rather than /bɪn/.
• Words such as fragile, fertile, and mobile are pronounced as /fɹædʒaɪl/, /fɝtaɪl/, and /mobaɪl/. The American pronunciation of fertile as /fɝɾl/ is also becoming somewhat common in Canada, even though /fɹædʒaɪl/ remains dominant.
• Words like semi, anti, and multi tend to be pronounced as /sɛmi/, /ænti/, and /mʌlti/ rather than /sɛmaɪ/, /æntaɪ/, and /mʌltaɪ/. Often, a Canadian will use the former in general use, but the latter in order to add emphasis.
• Schedule can be either /'ʃɛdʒul/ or /'skɛdʒul/; process can be either /'prosɛs/ or /'prɒsɛs/.
• The /ɑ/ of foreign loanwords (such as pasta) is pronounced as /æ/.
• The word premier "leader of a provincial or territorial government" is commonly pronounced /ˈpɹi.mjiɹ/, with /ˈpɹɛ.mjɛɹ/ and /ˈpɹi.mjɛɹ/ being rare variants.
• The herb and given masculine name basil is usually pronounced /ˈbæzəl/ rather than /ˈbezəl/.
• Many Canadians pronounce asphalt as "ash-falt" /ˈæʃ.fɒlt/. This pronunciation is also common in Australian English, but not quite so in General American English or British English.

Vocabulary

Comparison of Canadian, British, and American lexicons

Where Canadian English shares vocabulary with other English dialects, it tends to share most with American English; many terms in standard Canadian English are, however, shared with Britain, but not with the majority of American speakers. In some cases the British and the American term coexist, to various extents; a classic example is holiday, often used interchangeably with vacation. In addition, the vocabulary of Canadian English also features words that are seldom (if ever) found elsewhere.

As a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, Canada shares many items of institutional terminology with the countries of the former British Empire – e.g., constable, for a police officer of the lowest rank, and chartered accountant.

Education

The term college, which refers to post-secondary education in general in the U.S., refers in Canada to either a post-secondary technical or vocational institution, or to one of the colleges that exist as federated schools within some Canadian universities. Most often, a college is a community college, not a university. It may also refer to a CEGEP in Quebec. In Canada, college student might denote someone obtaining a diploma in business management while university student is the term for someone earning a bachelor's degree. For that reason, going to college does not have the same meaning as going to university, unless the speaker clarifies the specific level of post-secondary education that is meant.

Canadian universities publish calendars or schedules, not catalogs as in the U.S. Students write exams, they do not take or sit them. Those who supervise students during an exam are generally called invigilators as in Britain, or sometimes proctors as in the U.S.; usage may depend on the region or even the individual institution.

Successive years of school are often, if not usually, referred to as grade one, grade two, and so on. (Compare American first grade, second grade, sporadically found in Canada, and British Year 1, Year 2.) In the U.S., the four years of high school are termed the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years (terms also used for college years); in Canada, these are simply grade 9 through 12. As for higher education, only the term freshman (usually reduced to frosh) has some currency in Canada. The specific high-school grades and university years are therefore stated and individualized; for example, the grade 12s failed to graduate; John is in his second year at McMaster.

Canadian students use the term marks (more common in England) or grades to refer to their results; usage is very mixed.

Units of measurement

Use of metric units is more advanced in Canada than in the U.S. as a result of the national adoption of the Metric System during the late 1970s by the government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Official measurements are given in metric, including highway speeds and distances, fuel volume and consumption, and weather measurements (with temperatures in degrees Celsius). However, it is not uncommon for Canadians to use Imperial units such as pounds, feet, and inches to measure their bodies; cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons in the kitchen; and (with older generations) miles for distances. The term klicks is sometimes used interchangeably with kilometres.

Transportation

• Although Canadian lexicon features both railway and railroad, railway is the usual term, at least in naming (witness Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway); most rail terminology in Canada, however, follows American usage (e.g., ties and cars rather than sleepers and wagons, although railway employees themselves say sleeper).
• A two-way ticket can be either a round-trip (American term) or a return (British term).
• The terms highway (e.g. Trans-Canada Highway), expressway (Central Canada, as in the Gardiner Expressway) and freeway are used to describe a high speed, limited access road. Generally, but not exclusively, highway refers to a provincially funded road, and expressway to a municipally funded road. Quebec speakers may call this an autoroute. The British term motorway is not used.

Politics

• To table a document in Canada is to present it (as in Britain), whereas in the U.S. it means to withdraw it from consideration.
• Several political terms are more in use in Canada than elsewhere, including riding (as a general term for a parliamentary constituency or electoral district).
• The term Tory, used in Britain with a similar meaning, denotes a supporter of the federal Conservative Party of Canada, the historic Progressive Conservative Party of Canada or a provincial Progressive Conservative party. The term Red Tory is also occasionally used. The U.S. use of Tory to mean the Loyalists in the time of the American Revolution is unknown in Canada, where they are called United Empire Loyalists.
• Members of the Liberal Party of Canada or a provincial Liberal party are sometimes referred to as Grits. Members of the Bloc Québécois are sometimes referred to as Bloquistes. At the purely provincial level, members of Quebec's Parti Québécois are sometime referred to as Péquistes, and members of the Quebec provincial Action démocratique du Québec as Adéquistes.

Law

Lawyers in all parts of Canada, except Quebec, which has its own civil law system, are called "barristers and solicitors" because any lawyer licensed in any of the common law provinces and territories is permitted to engage in two specific types of legal practice which are separated in other common-law jurisdictions such as England, Wales, and Ireland. Yet the words lawyer or counsel (not counsellor) predominates in everyday contexts, though the American term attorney is sometimes encountered.

As in England, the equivalent of an American district attorney is called a crown attorney (in Ontario), crown counsel (in British Columbia), crown prosecutor or the crown.

The words advocate and notary – two distinct professions in civil law Quebec – are used to refer to that province's equivalent of barrister and solicitor, respectively. In Canada's common law provinces and territories, the word notary means strictly a notary public.

Within the Canadian legal community itself, the word solicitor is often used to refer to any Canadian lawyer in general (much like the way the word attorney is used in the United States to refer to any American lawyer in general). Despite the conceptual distinction between barrister and solicitor, Canadian court documents would contain a phrase such as "John Smith, solicitor for the Plaintiff" even though "John Smith" may well himself be the barrister who argues the case in court. In a letter introducing him/herself to an opposing lawyer, a Canadian lawyer normally writes something like "I am the solicitor for Mr. Tom Jones."

The word litigator is also used by lawyers to refer to a fellow lawyer who specializes in lawsuits even though the more traditional word barrister is still employed to denote the same specialization.

The word attorney is ordinarily used in Canada to mean:

• a person who has been granted power of attorney;
• a lawyer who prosecutes criminal cases on behalf of the government, i.e. crown attorney;
• an American lawyer with whom a Canadian lawyer is interacting regarding a cross-border transaction or legal case; or
• an American lawyer who works in Canada and advises Canadian clients on issues of American law.

As in England, a serious crime is called an indictable offence, while a less-serious crime is called a summary offence. The older words felony and misdemeanour, which are still used in the United States, are not used in Canada's current Criminal Code (R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46) or by today's Canadian legal system. As noted throughout the Criminal Code, a person accused of a crime is called the accused and not the defendant, a term used instead in civil lawsuits.

Household items

Terms common in Canada, Britain, and Ireland but less frequent or nonexistent in the U.S. are:

• Tin (as in tin of tuna), for can, especially among older speakers. Among younger speakers, can is more common, with tin referring to a can which is wider than it is tall.
• Cutlery, for silverware or flatware.
• Serviette, for a table napkin, though this is fast being changed to the latter.
• Tap, conspicuously more common than faucet in everyday usage.

Food and beverage

• Most Canadians as well as Americans in the Northwest, North Central, and Inland North prefer pop over soda to refer to a carbonated beverage (but neither term is dominant in British English; see further at Soft drink naming conventions).
• What Americans call Canadian bacon is named back bacon or, if it is coated in cornmeal or ground peas, peameal bacon in Canada.
• What most Americans call a candy bar is usually known as a chocolate bar (as in the UK).
• Even though the word "French Fries" is used by Canadians some older speakers use the word chips.

Colloquialisms

A rubber in the U.S. and Canada is slang for a condom; however, in Canada it is sometimes another term for eraser (as it is in the United Kingdom) and, in the plural, for overshoes or galoshes. The terms booter and soaker refer to getting water in one's shoe. The former is generally more common in the prairies, the latter in the rest of Canada.

The word bum can refer either to the buttocks (as in Britain), or, derogatorily, to a homeless person (as in the U.S.). However, the "buttocks" sense does not have the indecent character it retains in British and Australasian use, as it is commonly used as a polite or childish euphemism for ruder words such as butt, arse (commonly used in Atlantic Canada and among older people in Ontario and to the west), or ass.

The term Take off in Canadian English is an exclamation that can also mean the speaker disbelieves what has just been stated or is annoyed and wishes for someone to leave.("Take off you hoser")

Grammar

• The name of the letter Z is normally the Anglo-European (and French) zed; the American zee is not unknown in Canada, but it is often stigmatized.
• When writing, Canadians will start a sentence with As well, in the sense of "in addition."
• Canadian and British English share idioms like in hospital and to university [4], while in American English the definite article is mandatory; to/in the hospital is also common in Canadian speech.

Miscellaneous

• The code appended to mail addresses (the equivalent of the British postcode and the American ZIP code) is called a postal code.

Words used mainly in Canadian English - (Canadian slang)

Canadian English has words or expressions not found, or not widely used, in other variants of English. Additionally, like other dialects of English that exist in proximity to francophones, French loanwords have entered Canadian English.

• ABM, bank machine: synonymous with ATM (which is also used).
• allophone: a resident whose first language is one other than English or French. Used only by linguists in other English-speaking countries, this word has come to be used by journalists and broadcasters, and then by the general public, in some parts of Canada.
• bachelor: bachelor apartment ("They have a bachelor for rent").
• baked: killed - especially regarding roadkill, as in "I accidently baked a rabbit on the road last night." See also: cooked.
• bunged up: Messed up ("Terry, my face is all bunged up"). Also a synonym for constipated.
• bunny hug: Saskatchewan term for a hooded sweatshirt with a pouch at waist level. See hoodie.
• Canuck: a slang term for "Canadian" in the U.S. and Canada. It sometimes means "French Canadian" in particular, especially when used in the Northeast of the United States and in Canada. The term was adopted as the name of the National Hockey League team in Vancouver: Vancouver Canucks, and is used as the nickname for the Canada national rugby union team. Sometimes jokingly pronounced can-OOK (not used this way for the hockey team).
• chesterfield: originally British and internationally used (as in classic furnishing terminology) to refer to a sofa whose arms are the same height as the back, it is a common term for any couch or sofa in Canada (and, to some extent, Northern California).[5] [6] The more international terms sofa and couch are also used; among younger generations in the western and central regions, chesterfield is largely in decline.
• chinook: a warm, dry wind experienced along the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. Most common in winter and spring, a chinook wind can result in a rise in temperature of 20 C° (36 F°) in a quarter of an hour. In Alaska, the word is pronounced with an affricate ch instead of the fricative sh sound as used in Canada, and means an extremely wet, warm, constant southwesterly, which actually is the same weather pattern as the drying wind that it becomes when it hits Alberta. The use of the word to mean a wind is from the Chinook Jargon, "i.e., the wind from the direction of the country of the Chinooks" (the lower Columbia River), as transmitted to the Prairies by the francophone employees of the North West Company, hence the Frenchified pronunciation east of the Rockies. A Chinook in BC is also one of the five main varieties of salmon, and can also mean the Chinook Jargon, although this older usage is now very rare (as is the Jargon itself).
• concession road: in southern Ontario and southern Quebec, one of a set of roads laid out by the colonial government as part of the distribution of land in standard lot sizes. The roads were laid out in squares as nearly as possible equal to 1,000 acres (4 km²). Many of the concession roads were known as sidelines, and in Ontario many roads are still called lines or concessions.
• cooked: killed.
• cooked it: something got messed up.
• double-double: a cup of coffee with two creams and two sugars. And by the same token, triple-triple.
• eavestroughs: rain gutters. Also used, especially in the past, in the Northern and Western U.S.; the first recorded usage is in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: "The tails tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d'ye see. Same with cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end eave-troughs [sic], Flask."
• eh: a spoken interjection to ascertain the comprehension, continued interest, agreement, etc., of the person or persons addressed ("That was a good game last night, eh?"). May also be used instead of "huh?" or "what?" meaning "please repeat or say again." Frequently mis-represented by Americans as A, or hey. May have its origins from the French hein, which is pronounced in a very similar fashion.
• fire hall: fire station, firehouse
• garburator: a garbage disposal unit located beneath the drain of a kitchen sink.
• ginch, gitch, gaunch, gautch: underwear.
• gas bar: a [gas station]
• flat: a 24-container case of beer, also called a two-four.
• height of land: a drainage divide. Originally American.
• homo milk: homogenized milk.
• Hoser: An uncouth, beer drinking man. Used extensively in Bob and Doug Mackenzie skits. Term originates from lat 19th and early 20th century hockey matches wherein the losing team was required to hose or flood the ice following a game.
• humidex: measurement used by meteorologists to reflect the combined effect of heat and humidity.
• hydro: a common synonym for electrical service. Many Canadian provincial electric companies generate power from hydroelectricity, and incorporate the term "Hydro" in their names: Toronto Hydro, Hydro Ottawa, etc. Usage: "Manitoba Hydro... It's not just a Power Company anymore."; "How long did you work for Hydro?" "When's Hydro gonna get the lines back up."; "The hydro bill is due on the fifteenth."; "I didn't pay my hydro bill so they shut off my lights." Hence hydrofield, a line of electricity transmission towers, usually in groups cutting across a city, and hydro lines/poles, electrical transmission lines/poles.
• icing sugar: confectioners sugar
• joe job: a low-class, low-paying job. Not to be confused with the American term joe job.
• loonie: Canadian one dollar coin. Derived from the use of the loon on the reverse.
• lumber jacket: A thick flannel jackeolett either red and black or green and black favoured by blue collar workers and heavy metal/grunge aficionados. This apparel is more commonly referred to as a mackinac (pron mackinaw). In parts of British Columbia, it is referred to as a doeskin, and in New Brunswick, it is also called a dinner jacket.
• parkade: a parking garage, especially in the West.
• pencil crayon: coloured pencil origin: bilingual package label Pencil (English) Crayon (French word for pencil).
• pogie: term referring to unemployment insurance, which replaced the word 'stamps'.
• runners: running shoes, sneakers, especially in Central Canada. Also used somewhat in Australian English.
• The Peg: Winnipeg.
• Tims/Timmies: Tim Hortons
• toonie: Canadian two dollar coin. Modelled after loonie (q.v.). Also spelled tooney, twooney, twoonie, twonie, or twoney.
• tuque: a knitted winter hat, often with a pompon on the crown. Sometimes spelled toque.
• two-four: a 24-container case of beer, also called a flat. Increasingly, a two-four only refers to a case of 24 bottled beers, especially in Atlantic Canada, while a flat describes a case of 24 cans of beer, packaged in an open cardboard base sometimes with a shrink wrap covering.
• wank, wanker: Recent adoption of Scottish/British term gaining rapid acceptance and use.
• washroom[7]: the general term for what is normally named public toilet or lavatory in Britain. In the U.S. (where it originated) mostly replaced by restroom in the 20th century. Usage may be affected by U.S. businesses in Canada that often post restroom in place of washroom signs on doors, and (usually ethnic) restaurants that buy signs from U.S. suppliers. Generally used only as a technical or commercial term outside of Canada. The word bathroom is also used.

Regional vocabularies

Newfoundland

Main article: Newfoundland English

The dialect spoken in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, an autonomous dominion until March 31, 1949, is often considered the most distinctive Canadian dialect. Some Newfoundland English differs in vowel pronunciation, morphology, syntax, and preservation of archaic adverbal-intensifiers. The dialect can vary markedly from community to community, as well as from region to region, reflecting ethnic origin as well as a past in which there were few roads and many communities, and fishing villages in particular remained very isolated.

French influence on English spoken in Quebec

Main article: Quebec English

• A person with English mother tongue and still speaking English as the first language is called an Anglophone. The corresponding term for a French speaker is Francophone and the corresponding term for a person who is neither Anglophone nor Francophone is Allophone. Anglophone and Francophone are used in New Brunswick, an officially bilingual province.
• Quebec Anglophones generally pronounce French street names in Montreal as French words. Pie IX Boulevard is pronounced as in French («pi-neuf»), not as "pie nine." On the other hand, Anglophones do pronounce final Ds, as in Bernard and Bouchard.

Chinook Jargon words in British Columbia, Alberta and The Yukon

Main article: Chinook Jargon in West/Central Canadian English

British Columbia English has several words still in current use borrowed from the Chinook Jargon. Most famous and widely used of these terms are skookum and saltchuck.

Ottawa Valley

Main article: Ottawa Valley Twang

The area to the north and west of Ottawa is heavily influenced by original Scottish, Irish, and German settlers, with many French loanwords. This is frequently referred to as the Valley Accent. This dialect is heavy with slang phrases and terminology.

Toronto

The English spoken in Toronto has some similarities with the English in the Northern U.S. Slang terms used in Toronto are synonymous with those used in other major North American cities. There is also a heavy influx of slang terminology originating from Toronto's many immigrant communities, of which the vast majority speak English only as a second or tertiary language. These terms originate mainly from various European, Asian, and African words. Among youths in ethnically diverse areas, a large number of words borrowed from Jamaican patois can be heard, owing to the large number of Jamaican immigrants in Toronto's urban neighbourhoods.

• Some Torontonians pronounce the name of their city in an elided form as T'rana, T'ronno or Ch'ronno (often with nasal alveolar flap instead of N).

• An abbreviated way of speaking about the city is T.O., which stands for "Toronto, Ontario." Toronto is also referred to as Tdot, which is derived from this abbreviation.

• Hogtown is another slang term for Toronto, deriving from West Toronto's history as a major meatpacking area (especially, of swine).

• The environs of Toronto as well as the surrounding suburbs and cities are often called "The Greater Toronto Area," or GTA.

• The name of the city Etobicoke is pronounced without the final two letters (i.e., "ke").

Dictionaries

The first truly Canadian dictionaries of Canadian English were developed by Gage Ltd. Toronto. The Beginner's Dictionary (1962), the Intermediate Dictionary (1964) and, finally, the Senior Dictionary (1967) were milestones in CanE lexicograpy. Many secondary schools in Canada use these dictionaries. The dictionaries have regularly been updated since, the Senior Dictionary was renamed Gage Canadian Dictionary and exists in what may be called its 5th edition from 1997. Gage was acquired by Thomson Nelson around 2003. Concise versions and paperback version are available.

In 1997, the ITP Nelson Dictionary of the Canadian English Language was another product, but has not been updated since.

In 1998, Oxford University Press produced a Canadian English dictionary, after five years of lexicographical research, entitled The Oxford Canadian Dictionary. A second edition, retitled The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, was published in 2004. Just as the older dictionaries it includes uniquely Canadian words and words borrowed from other languages, and surveyed spellings, such as whether colour or color was the most popular choice in common use. Paperback and concise versions (2005, 2006), with minor updates, are available.

The scholarly Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP) was first published in 1967 by Gage Ltd. It was a partner project of the Senior Dictionary (and appeared only a few weeks apart from each other). The DCHP can be considered the "Canadian OED", as it documents the historical development of Canadian English words that can be classified as "Canadianisms". It therefore includes words such as mukluk, Canuck, bluff and grow op, but does not list common core words such as desk, table or car. It is a specialist, scholarly dictionary, but is not without interest to the general public. On the contrary: if one wishes to find out how a word came into being in Canada, the DCHP is one of your best sources. After more than 40 years, a second edition has been commenced at UBC in Vancouver in 2006 (see www.dchp.ca for details).

References

• Barber, Katherine, editor (2004). The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, second edition. Toronto: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-541816-6.
• Boberg, Charles (2005). "The North American Regional Vocabulary Survey: Renewing the study of lexical variation in North American English." American Speech 80/1.[8]
• Courtney, Rosemary, et al., senior editors (1998). The Gage Canadian Dictionary, second edition. Toronto: Gage Learning Corp. ISBN 0-7715-7399-5.
• Chambers, J.K. (1998). "Canadian English: 250 Years in the Making," in The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd ed., p. xi.
• Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English. Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-016746-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Peters, Pam (2004). The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-62181-X.
• Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward, editors (2006). American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 140, 234–236. ISBN 1-4051-2108-4. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)

Further reading

• Canadian Raising: O'Grady and Dobrovolsky, Contemporary Linguistic Analysis: An Introduction, 3rd ed., pp. 67-68.
• Canadian English: Editors' Association of Canada, Editing Canadian English: The Essential Canadian Guide, 2nd ed. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000).
• Canadian federal government style guide: Public Works and Government Services Canada, The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).
• Canadian newspaper and magazine style guides:
  • J.A. McFarlane and Warren Clements, The Globe and Mail Style Book: A Guide to Language and Usage, 9th ed. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998).
  • The Canadian Press, The Canadian Press Stylebook, 13th ed. and its quick-reference companion CP Caps and Spelling, 16th ed. (both Toronto: Canadian Press, 2004).
• Canadian usage: Margery Fee and Janice McAlpine, Guide to Canadian English Usage (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001).

See also

• North American Regional Phonology
• North American English
• Pacific Northwest English
• Vowel shift
• I Am Canadian
• Quebec French

External links

• Canadian Oxford Dictionaries (Oxford University Press)
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Words: Woe & Wonder
• Dave VE7CNV's Truly Canadian Dictionary of Canadian Spelling - comparisons of Canadian English, American English, British English, French, and Spanish
• Cornerstone's Canadian English Page
• ProperTreatment: BritishVsAmerican
• Proper Treatment: Canadian vs American vs British
• WordWeb Online
• What Does That Mean: user-built lexicon of English idioms, slang, buzz words and catch phrases
• Canadian Glossary, eh! (A list of Canadian words and pronunciations)
• Lexical, grammatical, orthographic and phonetic Canadianisms
• Editors' Association of Canada (EAC)
• Varieties of English: Canadian English from the University of Arizona
• Harmless drudgery – but Canadian - Joe Clark's weblog entry about a recent talk by Canadian Oxford Dictionary editrix Katherine Barber (note that this Joe Clark is not the former Prime Minister of Canada)
• Bad Spellers by Stephen Henighan, an examination of the inconsistencies in Canadian authors' spellings
• Dictionary of Newfoundland English
• Canadian Spell-checking Dictionary