Canadian English Links

Some external links about Canadian English:

• Jack Chambers, a professor emeritus in the Linguistics Department at the University of Toronto, has created a survey of linguistic features traditionally characterizing the English of Canadians as well as a way to map retention or loss of these features. See this introduction to his website Dialect Topography.


• The Language Samples Project at the University of Arizona offers audio samples and comparative descriptions of various English dialects. The history and phonology of Canadian English are well described on this website.


• The Strathy Language Unit has been a partner in the revision and updating of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (1967), centered at the English Department of the University of British Columbia.


• The CBC hosts a webpage entitled Words: Wonder and Woe, in which Blair Shewchuk fields questions from the Canadian public about the usage they hear on the CBC.


• CBC Radio One, in 2006 and 2007, aired a weekly show on the English language hosted by Russell Smith and Jane Farrow. The program was called And Sometimes Y, and portions of these broadcasts are still available online.


• The International Corpus of English (ICE) contains corpora from 20 varieties of English, including a corpus of Canadian English.  The corpora are freely available for non-commercial academic research and may be downloaded under license from the site.


• A wonderful source for information on lexical items in the Newfoundland variety of English is the 1982 Dictionary of Newfoundland English by G.M. Story, W.J. Kirwin, and J.D.A. Widdowson, now available on-line.  The dictionary, and the research materials that went into its creation, are discussed in a blog called Twig which is hosted by the English Language Research Centre at Memorial University. 
  

• Wikipedia contains a continually evolving and somewhat disputed linguistic description of Canadian English.