Strathy Language Unit
Queen's University- Strathy Blog
The Strathy Blog
News about the Strathy Language Unit and Canadian English studies
Canadian Spelling
Date: March 25, 2013 | Category: In the Media
Frustrated when your American spell checker rejects your Canadian spellings? So is this student writer in SAIT's The Weal:
Color me bad - colour me right - Canadian spelling matters
http://www.theweal.com/2013/03/25/color-me-bad-colour-me-right-canadian-spelling-matters/
Bluenoser
Date: March 21, 2013 | Category: In the Media
Jian Ghomeshi talks about the recent addition of “bluenoser” (a native or inhabitant of Nova Scotia) to the Oxford English Dictionary and about other regional Canadianisms, in the opening segment of Monday’s Q. You can listen to the segment here (scroll down to the episode from 3/18/2013): http://www.cbc.ca/q/episodes/. (At the end of the episode, around the 59 minute mark, author Andrew Kaufman talks about creating new words.)
More Canadianisms
Date: March 15, 2013 | Category: In the Media
The following article from The Week highlights a few interesting Canadianisms in honour of the DCHP's new online presence (see two entries below).
24 Canadianisms way more interesting than 'eh'
http://theweek.com/article/index/241321/24-canadianisms-way-more-interesting-than-eh
Strathy Working Papers Online
Date: March 14, 2013 | Category: News
All eight volumes of the Strathy Undergraduate Working Papers on Canadian English, which ran from 2000 to 2010, are now available online. You can download the volumes from our publications page. Our new version of the series, Strathy Student Working Papers on Canadian English, is available at our QSpace site.
DCHP Online
Date: March 12, 2013 | Category: News
The first edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles is now online. Published in 1967, this historical work documents the changing meanings of words over time. You can access the DCHP here: http://dchp.ca/DCHP-1/Browse/welcome/1.
Canadian Quirks
Date: March 11, 2013 | Category: In the Media
The Huffington Post put up a slideshow today highlighting a few Canadianisms - familiar spelling issues and lexical items. Check it out here: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/03/11/canadian-english-differen_n_2853947.html.
Toronto English
Date: March 7, 2013 | Category: In the Media
The evolution of English in Toronto is an ongoing project of University of Toronto linguist Sali Tagliamonte. Her research is being highlighted in the media today, as in the following article from the Toronto Star:
Like whatever, eh? U of T prof tracks evolution of Canadian English across generations
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/03/07/like_whatever_eh_u_of_t_prof_tracks_
evolution_of_canadian_english_across_generations.html
BC vs. BCE
Date: March 5, 2013 | Category: In the Media
The Canadian Museum of Civilization will revert to using BC (“before Christ”) and AD (“anno Domini” – Latin for "in the year of the Lord") when describing dates, abandoning use of BCE (“before the common era”) and CE (“common era”). The issue is covered in this article from the National Post:
Funding for Students
Date: March 4, 2013 | Category: News
The Strathy Unit is pleased to offer conference grants and research grants again this year to Queen’s students pursuing work on Canadian English. Applications are welcome from both undergraduate and graduate students!
Montreal’s Language Mosaic
Date: February 19, 2013 | Category: News
The Montreal Gazette’s Frenglish site has been updated to include an interactive map of French and English speakers in the city, a Montreal dictionary, new articles and other features. Click here to visit the homepage.
Bibliography
Date: February 12, 2013 | Category: News
We recently updated the Strathy Bibliography of Canadian English with sources from 2012. The bibliography currently contains citations for over 2200 books, academic papers, newspaper articles and other materials that examine some aspect of Canadian English. Click here to access the bibliography.
Talk at U Vic
Date: February 11, 2013 | Category: News
The following talk may be of interest to Strathy Blog readers:
Canadian eh? from a cross-linguistics perspective: Towards a formal typology of confirmationals
Martina Wiltschko (UBC) and Strang Burton (Stó:lō Nation)
Friday, February 15 at 3:30
Clearihue C112, 3800 Finnerty Road, University of Victoria, British Columbia
Click here to visit the University of Victoria Department of Linguistics seminars page.
Dreamed or Dreamt?
Date: February 5, 2013 | Category: News
The latest article in the Strathy Student Working Papers on Canadian English is now available on QSpace. Tara Glickman's paper "Past tense formation with irregular lexical verbs in Canadian English" explores the variation in past tense for a set of verbs including dreamed/dreamt, learned/learnt and spilled/spilt.
Vowel Shift
Date: February 4, 2013 | Category: News
Jack Chambers was interviewed about the Great Vowel Shift on CBC's Sunday Edition. Towards the end of the interview, he mentions Canadian Raising.
Evolving Words
Date: January 28, 2013 | Category: In the Media
As language changes, some words shift in meaning or form. In the following two articles, writer Mark Abley discusses aspects of change (and those who resist it!) in the case of several words in Canadian English:
Some things are not 'awesome'
http://www2.canada.com/montrealgazette/columnists/story.html?id=69a41fc5-a651-4eb4-a335-278652421b0e&p=1
There's open space in meaning of 'flat'
http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Watchwords+There+open+space+meaning+flat/7603411/story.html
Becoming Hybrid
Date: January 21, 2013 | Category: In the Media
A British immigrant to British Columbia reflects on the "hybrid" nature of his English after five years in Canada:
http://www.unionjacknews.com/blogs/blog-of-a-brit-in-bc/becoming-hybrid/
Strathy Corpus Now Online!
Date: January 14, 2013 | Category: News
The Strathy Corpus of Canadian English is now online! Over the past few months, we have been working with Mark Davies of Brigham Young University to create a searchable online version of our corpus. It is now available on Davies’ corpus website which also hosts the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus, among others. We are excited to bring the corpus to a new and larger audience and to help facilitate research on Canadian English. Please check out the corpus and send us your feedback!
Canadian English Dialects in Fiction
Date: January 13, 2013 | Category: News
Author:
Kaela Starkman
[Editor’s Note: Kaela Starkman is a master’s student in the Department of English at Queen’s. She did an internship at the Strathy Unit during the fall 2012 term. The focus of the internship was to begin to create a database of samples of Canadian English dialogue in fiction. We hope that the database will ultimately be used to study how Canadian dialects are represented in literature. Below, Kaela describes her work.]
Throughout my internship I both read and recorded instances of idiomatic Canadian English and dialectical idiosyncrasies in twentieth and twenty-first century Canadian prose fiction. My internship began as a double negotiation, as I sifted through the Canadian literary canon in order to decide which books to read, while simultaneously attempting to arbitrate what I believed to be instances of dialectical idiosyncrasies within those books. Although I started my search by focusing on First Nations literature such as Robert Arthur Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls and Drew Haydon Taylor’s Motorcycles & Sweetgrass, my focus quickly shifted to the Maritimes, the constant throughout being a focus on dialogue.
As the Maritime provinces are known for their various regional dialects, easily lending themselves to this type of work, I decided that Maritime literature would make a good jumping-off point for my search. Finding precedent for my project in Professor George ‘Tony’ Tilly’s (1980) doctorate thesis, Canadian English in the Novels of the 1970s, I began to categorize the dialogue I had recorded under four broad headings including: Urban/Rural, Generational, Social Class, and Ethnicity. Although the divisions were subject to my discretion and thus subjective and provisional, I found it useful to provide a basic outline of what the dialectical variations both reflected about the characters and demonstrated to the reader. Having decided to focus on fiction hailing from Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland & Labrador, and New Brunswick, I was faced with the task of acquiring a large sample of work not only written by Maritime authors, but also set in the Maritime provinces. As I had relatively little knowledge of this aspect of Canadian literature before beginning my internship, this proved to be one of the most rewarding aspects of my placement. I began my search with an online tutorial, courtesy of the Halifax Public Libraries system, which provided a detailed overview of classic Maritime authors from Nova Scotia (Hugh MacLennan, Frank Parker Day, Evelyn Richardson and Will R. Bird), as well as contemporary favorites and up and coming writers from across the Maritimes (Ann-Marie MacDonald, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Lynn Coady, and Wayne Curtis). As I combined this resource with a printout of both the nominees and winners of Atlantic Book Awards dating back to 2007, I ensured that I had a representative sample of writers across all the desired Eastern provinces.
As I came into my Master’s degree hoping to focus on Canadian literature in preparation for my Doctoral dissertation, this internship provided me with a breadth of knowledge that I believe will be invaluable to my future studies. After being exposed to such a wonderful wealth of contemporary Maritime literature, I now plan to focus on this region as I continue my graduate studies.
Be Sk(c)eptical about Canadian Spelling
Date: January 8, 2013 | Category: In the Media
The ever popular topic of Canadian English spelling is explored in this piece from Troy Media:
http://www.troymedia.com/2013/01/05/be-skceptical-about-canadian-spelling/