T.K. Pratt called Canadians ‘among the most broad-minded people writing English today’

How closely does Canada resemble the United States? In some critical ways, our cultures correspond with striking kinship. We watch American movies and American television in Canada; we read American literature, listen to American podcasts, scroll through American tweets. We have long shared the vernacular of its popular culture, and have heard almost as much American English spoken as we have heard from our neighbours, our families and our friends. The regional dialect of, say, The Simpsons will, of course, be a dialect we often speak and almost always understand.

At the same time, as much as we have learned and continue to learn from our contemporaries to the south, we have also been inculcated by our forebears across the ocean — a cultural superforce that still exerts dominance over our language even as its influence increasingly wanes. We are a British colony. As such, we retain a great many hallmarks of English as it is written and spoken in the United Kingdom. One need only compare a Canadian newspaper such as this one to a newspaper from below the border to observe “nett,” and “recognise,” too.

“It may seem almost incredible to outsiders that a country having English as its major, national, mother-tongue language for many generations cannot agree on some of that language’s quite ordinary norms in anything close to the degree that these are agreed on in the British Isles, the older Commonwealth, or the United States,” writes the academic T.K. Pratt.

Pratt has written extensively about just how slippery Canadian English seems. In the mid-’80s, he attended an academic conference at Queen’s University, held by the Strathy Language Unit, whose purpose was to “stimulate interest in Canadian English usage and to publish successive editions of a guide to written and spoken communication.” Some attendees, Pratt explains, “stood on guard against a perceived decline in educated usage.” Others, meanwhile, “took the position that what we were searching for was the Canadian norm.”

“To no one’s surprise, the conference came to no conclusion on either point,” Pratt writes. Even when the papers delivered at the conference were eventually compiled and published as a manu- draw the blinds and they will be confused until you clarify the shades. Our washroom “taps” are American “faucets;” our restaurant “serviettes” are merely “napkins.” On your head is not a “beanie.” It is a “toque.”

These are what linguists and lexicographers call “Canadianisms:” words we use here that are not used, or are not used the same way, in other parts of the world. The historical Canadian dictionary project identifies four distinct types of Canadianism: 1) Words that originate in Canada; 2) Words preserved uniquely in Canada; 3) Words that have undergone semantic change in Canada; and 4) Words that are culturally significant to this country particularly. The first edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles lists more than 10,000 Canadianisms running up to the middle of the 1960s. A new revised edition has been updated to include such Canadian-specific terminology as “grow-op,” “small packet” and, most simply, “eh.”

But the familiarity of the most notable Canadianisms suggests a uniformity of speech and writing across Canada that doesn’t accurately account for how our such a vast array of different dialects. Consider where we are exactly. Canada is the secondlargest country in the world. It spans 10 million square kilometres. It includes six different time zones and touches three different oceanic coasts. Our climate, our topography and our terrain differs so wildly between one part of the country and another that two people living in two different areas are as unlikely to share life experiences as two people living on different continents. We have an entire province of French-speaking Canadians, stuck between two sides of an otherwise English-speaking nation; we have a province with deep ties to Britain that only joined the Confederation half a century ago. What’s more, our population is uniquely, almost histories of Valley communities refer to the ‘Ottawa Valley irish’ and to their English as the ‘Ottawa Valley brogue.’”

This kind of variation based on settlement history — of a dialect emerging from the first peoples to immigrate to the area and remain there over time — is consistent across the country, and accounts for huge pockets of discrete, historically significant variations in the national language.

German settlers in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia have left their mark on the dialect of the region: residents continue to pronounce w’s as v’s and th’s as d’s, and use lost-in-translation Germanic phrases like “get awake” for “wake up.” The Pacific West Coast bears traces of the Californian tongue; in Quebec, not surprisingly, many French