JAMES MCLEOD HAS BEEN IN LOVE WITH THE NEWFOUNDLAND ACCENT FOR THE LAST 10 YEARS. BUT IN HIS ODE TO THE NEWFOUNDLAND LANGUAGE, HE WARNS THAT IT CAN BE BOTH SLIPPERY AND POLITICAL.
“Whaddayat?”
I just sat in the back seat of the cab and stared blankly at the driver.
“Whaddayat, buddy?” the driver said again, cheerfully.
To this day, whenever a friend asks me for advice about visiting Newfoundland and Labrador, one of my best suggestions is to always take cabs. If you want to get a taste of real, thick, honest Newfoundland accents, there’s nothing better than hopping into a car, sitting in the front seat and making conversation along the ride.
But back in 2008, I was a cub journalist fresh out of school, starting out my first gig writing for a real newspaper. I just wanted to get back to the office and scramble to make deadline. The last thing I wanted to worry about was deciphering a foreign language. But the cab I was in, wasn’t going anywhere.
“Whatta ye at, buddy?” the cabbie said again, more slowly and deliberately.
Oh.
My little Torontonian brain clicked when I heard “at” and I relaxed. “At” is a preposition associated with location, and I was in a taxi. He was just asking me where I was going.
“I’m going to The Telegram office, on Columbus Drive?”
“No, no, no b’y, whaddayat?” The Wayne and Shuster routine went on for another minute or two, before the driver explained that in Newfoundland and Labrador, “What are you at?” is like saying “How’s it going?” or “What’s happening?” This frequently gets further truncated to just, “You at?” or even “Yat?”
The most common response is a shrugging, “This is it.”
In the nearly 10 years I lived in Newfoundland and Labrador since that first experience, I fell in love with the local language — but it’s a slippery thing. Early on, after moving to St. John’s, I bought myself a copy of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, an 847-page tome that turned out to be fairly useless. Most Newfoundlanders and Labradorians don’t know the obscure words and phrases meticulously catalogued in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English.
For instance, the dictionary is silent on “moreish,” a word that a co-worker used to describe a plate of brownies — the sort of food where you can’t help yourself from having more. A bit of Googling suggests that moreish has its origins in Britain, so it makes sense to hear it in Newfoundland and Labrador — a colony of the British Empire until 1949.
In the names of places throughout the province, you can hear the centuries of history, the English influences and the legacy of Irish settlement, especially on the Southern Shore of the Avalon Peninsula. You can see the vestiges of French settlement in place names like Bay d’espoir — literally translating to “bay of hope” but pronounced “bay despair” by the locals.
There is little to despair at the bars in downtown St. John’s, however, where they’ll let you kiss a cod and become an honorary Newfoundlander. Almost certainly, your screech-in ceremony will include some silly phrase of Newfoundland English. “Is ye a screecher?” the officiant will bellow, as though this is a real shibboleth of real Newfoundlanders. “Deed I is, me old cock, and long may your big jib draw,” the tourists are instructed to reply, though I never actually heard an actual Newfoundlander utter those words in any other context. Maybe somewhere, in some little pocket of Newfoundland, it’s an actual thing people once said.
The language is political, too. Outsiders quickly learn that fishermen harvest “harp seal pups” in the spring of the year. “Baby seal” is seen as an inflammatory propaganda term used by animal rights activists.
After all, we eat lamb, veal and suckling pig, and we don’t eat baby sheep, baby cows or baby pigs. And speaking of inflammatory terms with a lot of political baggage, unless you’ve lived there long enough to understand the sensitivities, don’t ever, ever say “Newfie.” People from the island are Newfoundlanders, and “Newfie” is a slur. It carries connotations tied up with nasty stereotypes of Newfoundlanders.
Many Newfoundlanders will tell you about the 1990s when they were told to suppress the accent and talk like Upper Canadians if they wanted to get anywhere in life. For the same reason, if you meet a Newfoundlander today it might be best to avoid asking, “How come you don’t have an accent?” Sadly, it’s likely a question they’ve been asked far too many times already.
Of course, there really isn’t one Newfoundland accent, but rather, hundreds of them. In St. John’s, the Townie cornerboy accent is entirely different from the accent that lawyers and politicians use. A keen ear can hear distinctive differences between the accents of the Bonavista and Burin peninsulas.
A friend once wistfully said to me, “The Newfoundland accent hasn’t been the same since the baymen got cable TV.” (Baymen, for the uninitiated, are Newfoundlanders who live in the outports, as compared to Townies who live in and around St. John’s.) It might be apocryphal. Aside from the fact that my friend grew up on the Bonavista Peninsula before they had cable TV, I’ve never seen any proof that TV watered down the accent.
But as I wrote before: the Newfoundland dialect is a slippery thing.
In the days before roads and electricity — well into the 20th century for many parts of the province — communities a few kilometres apart would only be connected by boat in the summer or dogsled in the winter. Beyond accents or terminology, what makes the langue distinctive and charming is the fact that when Newfoundlanders and Labradorians speak, you can hear echoes of the past.