Candian English according to 'Canuck'*, Joe Clark

commentary

On Lingua Franca (ABC Radio National), Joe Clark from Toronto, journalist and author of an eBook on Canadian English, talks about Canadian English.

    According to Joe, the spoken language is a dialect that comes from the United States, i.e. it is classified today as American English. However, the accent is exceedingly neutral and one struggles to tell where a Canadian speaker might be from. Which is not true of English in the US, whose accents more readily denote a speaker's region, be it Texan, Jewish New Yorker, African American, northern, southern, eastern, western. The letter Z is pronounced 'zed' in Canadian English unlike the 'zee' of the US. The lexicon yields a few hundred uniquely Canadian words.

      Orthographically, there is a mix between American and British Englishes. Canadian English utilises Z in the spellings of suffixes -ise, -yse: organize, realize, paralyze, utilize. Whereas words that end in -our, 'honour', 'colour', 'ardour', 'fervour', and which end in -re, as in 'centre', 'theatre', 'litre' follow the British convention. Lexical sets are again shared between American and British Englishes and one can see that many words used for technology, trade and physical objects are of American English. For example: tire (tyre), curb (kerb), carburator (carburettor), truck (lorry), gasoline (petrol), trunk (boot). Whereas financial vocabulary, for example 'cheque' (not check), also follows the British convention. As do 'practise', the verb, and, 'practice', the noun. Likewise, 'licence' and 'license'. Double your consonants in 'travelled', not traveled, 'controllable', not controlable, 'counselling', not counseling. 

Why so?

     After the Revolutionary War when the yet-to-be United States declared independence from the United Kingdom, and when those remaining loyal to the British Crown were persecuted, belongings and land confiscated, refuge was sought in the remaining British colonies in the north of the continent. These Loyalists** brought with them their dialect, the American English of that time, an influenced British English, whose most influential feature was its post-vocalic Rs and a few vowel sounds. Owing to proximity, trade, television and more, for over two centuries Canadian and Northern American accents merged somewhat,  in affect diluting the British qualities of the language.
      In 1998, Oxford University Press, after five years of research, produced The Oxford Canadian Dictionary. Remarkably, it sold about 400, 000 copies and enjoyed 'best-seller' status, as did the second edition for several months. It helped Canadians to settle many arguments and to unify on issues related to spellings, pronunciation and language identity. 


      According to a survey by Joe, Canada's orthography is today largely consistent across Canada.

*Canuck: colloquialism for 'Canadian' 

**Loyalist: a colonist of the American revolutionary period who supported the British cause