New-Dialect Formation in Canada

Dollinger, Stefan

doi:10.1075/slcs.97

Cited by 53 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Avis 1954, 1955, 1956; Lovell 1955; Scargill 1955), with some of the more recent work following this tradition (e.g. Chambers 1995; Boberg 2000; 2005a; Burnett 2006; Dollinger 2008). This work, of course, was never concerned with the speech of Newfoundland as such.…”

Section: Linguistic Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The historical study of language attitudes must, however, be complemented with the historical study of the development of CanE in real‐time – a field which, though much in its infancy (see e.g. Dollinger 2008: 53–61), would contribute crucial pieces of evidence to the discussion of autonomy in CanE.…”

Section: Linguistic Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The culprit behind the “vulgar innovations” was American English (AmE), and (Geikie 2010[1857]: 44) suggests that “Canada inevitably partakes of the same influences”. Geikie wrote in the prescriptive tradition and was too biased – see Considine (2003: 251), who poignantly characterizes Geikie as “triply remote from the norms of the metropolitan elite”– to see the variation he witnessed in what may already have become a focused variety of CanE (Dollinger 2008: 282–3). What Geikie shares with the more sophisticated dialectologist perspectives of Lighthall (1889) and Chamberlain (1890), however, is the theme of linguistic heteronomy, or lack of linguistic autonomy: CanE, in its varieties, is seen as not to differ “to a very marked extent” (Chamberlain 1890: 46) from adjacent US border varieties.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the autonomy and homogeneity of Canadian English

Dollinger¹,

Clarke²

2012

World Englishes

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This introduction to the symposium approaches the themes of autonomy and homogeneity in Canadian English from a historical perspective. We trace the debates on these topics back to the late 19th century and relate them to changing public attitudes toward Canadian linguistic autonomy over time. We review the scholarly evidence on autonomy and homogeneity and outline the evolving interpretations of these themes from earlier research to that of the present day. While much linguistic research in the 1980s and 1990s approached linguistic change in Canadian English in terms of "Americanization", subsequent work has shown that a more nuanced interpretation is in order. We end with a brief review of the six papers in this symposium, in terms of our two themes: four deal with questions of homogeneity and heterogeneity, while two primarily address issues of linguistic autonomy and heteronomy. These papers reveal both common ground and diverging assessment of the data, which attests to a lively field of inquiry.

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Section: Linguistic Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Linguistic Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the autonomy and homogeneity of Canadian English

Dollinger¹,

Clarke²

2012

World Englishes

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“…Boberg (2010) in his excellent book, for instance, just says that StCanE is ‘a uniform type of Canadian English spoken over most of the country by the majority of anglophone Canadians’ (p. 107). Claims of uniformity in CanE have been made for vast parts of the country since at least 1951 (Dollinger, 2008: 12), and have been prominent in sociolinguistic research (e.g. Avis, 1973; Chambers and Hardwick, 1986).…”

Section: The Canadian Standard: a Definitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Academic and public attitudes to the notion of ‘standard’ Canadian English

Dollinger¹

2011

English Today

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This paper reflects on ‘standards’ in Canadian English in scholarly research and the public debate about English in Canada from a number of viewpoints. The goals of these reflections are three-fold. First, I aim to characterize the chasm between scholarly and public debates about a language ‘standard’ in Canadian English (CanE). While this debate is not new (e.g. Kretzschmar, 2009: 1–5 for a recent example), its application in the Canadian context is a desideratum. Second, I aim to characterize the standard in CanE from a demographic point of view: what is this standard and, above all, which Canadians (and, more importantly, how many) presently speak it? And third, what can linguists who research Canadian English offer to the public, and how can the perceived gap in knowledge be bridged?

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“…From the earliest investigations of CanE, homogeneity (at least among urban, middle-class speakers from Ontario to British Columbia) has been an enduring feature of dialectological work (e.g., Scargill 1957). Early evidence for homogeneity focussed on lexical and phonological features (e.g., Gregg 1957, Scargill and Warkentyne 1972), but more recent sociolinguistic research has found evidence for homogeneity at the grammatical and discourse-pragmatic level in corpora of vernacular speech (e.g., Dollinger 2008, Tagliamonte and Denis 2014, Denis and D'Arcy 2019). At the same time, some of this recent work has suggested that contemporary homogeneity at the discourse-pragmatic level may have been emergent (Denis and D'Arcy 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Canadian was eh? A baseline investigation of usage and ideology

Denis

2020

Can. J. Linguist.

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for a lexicographical history of eh. 3 These early works tend to contextualize the Canadian-ness of eh to particular uses, primarily in variation with pardon. However, its standalone use as a Peircean index of Canada in popular headlines and titles, such as Orkin's (1973) humour book Canajan, Eh? (see also Gold and Tremblay 2006: 260 and Dollinger and Fee's 2017 entry for eh, sense 5) and in the commodification of the lexeme on mugs, t-shirts, and magnets since at least the 1990s (Denis 2013) suggest that from a non-linguist's perspective, the locus of this stereotype was (and is) not within eh in discourse context, but rather within the lexeme. Indeed, even early popular metadiscourse discusses eh outside of the 'pardon' function, such as in Moore's (1967) review of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles: "both the English and the Americans can spot a Canadian from his 'eh?' at the end of a sentence: 'It's hot, eh?"' (cited in Avis 1972: 89). Indeed, Wiltschko et al. (2018) argue that the different 'discourse functions' of eh that have been described in the literature are reducible to a core confirmational function of the lexeme.

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New-Dialect Formation in Canada

Cited by 53 publications

References 0 publications

On the autonomy and homogeneity of Canadian English

On the autonomy and homogeneity of Canadian English

Academic and public attitudes to the notion of ‘standard’ Canadian English

How Canadian was eh? A baseline investigation of usage and ideology

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