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Canada has always faced several obstacles in defining itself to the outside world. For one, it’s a thinly populated country of 35 million all too easily overshadowed by its neighbour, a hugely powerful country of 319 million with economic clout, an enormous film industry and high-quality TV. Then there’s its history, which lacks the grand mythical arc of most other countries. And, more esoterically, there is the conundrum of the Canadian accent: to most people outside of North America, it is almost impossible to distinguish from the typical US accent – to the point that so many foreigners confuse the two when they’re travelling abroad and Canadians feel the need to attach a flag to their backpacks.
By the War of 1812, in which the US invaded Canada and the UK invaded the US, much of Canada’s population consisted of exiles from south of the border. Photo: BBC
But despite some people’s skepticism there is, in fact, a unique Canadian way of speaking and, despite its subtlety, it remains remarkably resilient. Over the last several decades, the increasing interconnectivity of the world has threatened a number of local dialects across the world, but according to Charles Boberg, an associate professor of linguistics at McGill University and the author of
The English Language in Canada
, the Canadian accent is stubbornly persistent: “Canadian linguistic identity is here to stay on the long term.”
While exiled American loyalists to the Crown shaped the English accent in Ontario, the immigrants who settled the Maritime Provinces came from the UK and France. Photo:BBC
The primary reason for Canadians’ hard-to-identify accent is, of course, historical. Canadian English was partly shaped by early immigrants from the UK and Ireland, but it was affected much more by the arrival of about 45,000 loyalists to the British crown during the American Revolutionary War. By the outbreak of the War of 1812 a few decades later, a significant part of the population of Ontario – which had about 100,000 inhabitants – were of US extraction. The result, especially west of Quebec, was an accent lightly shaped by British English, but much more so by 18th Century colonial American English. Since Ontarians were largely responsible for settling Western Canada in the following decades, their Americanised accent spread across the country and eventually became the de facto accent for the majority of Canadians.
The fact that the Canadian accent has survived this long, despite centuries of close physical and cultural proximity with the US, is a testament to people’s attachment to their Canadian national identity. When new immigrants arrive in Canada, they still adopt distinctive Canadian patterns of speech – and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
As Boberg explains, there are two dynamics that generally determine how the members of a contemporary community speak: one is a person’s desire to be “global” and sophisticated, and the other is their desire to sound like a member of their own community. “There’s that conflict of not wanting to sound embarrassingly local, but not wanting to sound snobbishly global,” he says. Because people rarely want to go too far in one direction, this allows accents to evolve without fully disappearing. “Language is one of the few ways we have left of making statements of local belonging since we now all dress the same, we all watch the same movies.” And as long as both of those dynamics remain in play, Canadians will continue to sound like Canadians.
(BBC)
