Why is Canadian English unique?

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150820-why-is-canadian-english-unique

by kareemm • 11 years ago

37 51 11 years ago

> Though English-speaking Canadians remain loyal to the Queen, they aren’t truly interested in being British or sounding British; they’re just interested in using the British connection to assert their independence from the independent United States, which they left because they didn’t want to leave.

What horrible highschool textbook is this from? When did Canada separate from the US? And to say english Canadians are "loyal" to the queen, and by necessary implication that french-canadians are not, is downright silly. The queen is a total irrelevance in Canada.

Canada does not take from Britain in some sort of protest against American culture. American culture IS canadian. Music, television, film, comedy ... canadians are everywhere in the US entertainment industry. But look to the UK, to the BBC, and you won't find any.

> ...poutine, Nanaimo bars, and butter tarts for three of Canada’s great culinary gifts to the world if the world would but accept them

WTF? Maple syrup doesn't make the list? What other country has a strategic syrup reserve.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/a-look-inside-q...

dang• 11 years ago

Aw, that's a bit rough. It's a decent article. It talks a lot about the Loyalists, so that's probably what that first passage you object to was referencing.

WTF? Maple syrup doesn't make the list?

This must be the first maple syrup WTF on Hacker News, though I bet many were uttered after the great maple syrup heist a few years ago.

gjm11• 11 years ago

the first maple-syrup WTF on Hacker News

I actually checked and yes, if Google can be trusted then it is.

BlackFly• 11 years ago

I think the sentence is actually making a reference back to the loyalists which it mentions near the beginning of the article as well. It is talking about Canadians and not Canada. The loyalists did indeed leave what was then known as the 12 colonies so that they could remain loyal to the crown. The sentence is ignoring nuance (like the fact that Canada is made up of more than just loyalists) so it can make a rhetorically amusing point.

pmelendez5• 11 years ago

The queen is a total irrelevance in Canada.

Maybe, but new Canadians still have to swear loyalty to the Queen in the citizenship ceremony.

arethuza• 11 years ago

What about the Canadian armed forces?

jasonlotito2• 11 years ago

http://canadiancrown.gc.ca/eng/1332788662861/1332788724918

branchless3• 11 years ago

I'm a Brit who moved to Canada and I find it _amazing_ that anyone here supports the queen.

You moved to a new land where you were not serfs. Where you could live free and your children could escape a suffocating class structure. To a land where you elected your own leaders.

Do you want oppression back?

ckcheng• 11 years ago

It was a light-hearted article, but the maple syrup issue made me wonder, so I (unbelievably) did some checking.

The quote about "poutine, Nanaimo bars, and butter tarts" was in the context of "Some words refer to things Americans don’t seem to have:".

But apparently Americans do have maple syrup: "Vermont is the largest producer in the United States, generating about 5.5 percent of the global supply" [1]. Vermont apparently produces more maple syrup than Ontario [2].

Anyway, the majority of maple syrup comes from Quebec, but does it really count as a culinary gift of Canada? Apparently maple syrup is a First Nations' culinary gift that existed before Europeans settlers arrived [3].

On the other hand, recipes for poutine and Nanaimo bars date only as far back as the 1950s, and butter tarts to 1900 (says Wikipedia). For context, consider that Canada became a country in 1867.

So I guess it does make some sense for maple syrup not to make the list.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_syrup [2] http://www.maplesyrupworld.com/pages/Top-Regions-Producers-o... [3] https://www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage-minutes/syru...

colomon• 11 years ago

Right, maple syrup goes back to colonial times, and we still make enough in Michigan that with a little effort you can always buy locally produced.

At least some Michiganders say "eh", too -- my impression is it is especially common in the UP. It's not at all surprising, the border here has been pretty porous for centuries. When I was a kid, we'd have to cross over to Canada for Chinese food or hard-packed ice cream cones...

duncanawoods• 11 years ago

> But look to the UK, to the BBC, and you won't find any

I see a few. Comedians Stewart Francis and Katherine Ryan are regulars on panel shows and DJs Heidi and B-traits present shows on BBC Radio 1. It may not be that many but I enjoy the ones that are here!

jordigh3• 11 years ago

The queen is a total irrelevance in Canada

Not to everyone:

http://www.monarchist.ca/

Although you are right that many people do not care for the Queen, there are still pockets here and there who do, and she's obviously acknowledged everywhere in government, as a tour of Parliament Hill will attest. Newspapers report the prosecution of a criminal trial as "the Crown", and land that belongs to the government is called Crown property.

I have yet to meet a Francophone who has any love for the Queen, though. Some must exist somewhere.

georges_sand2• 11 years ago

I do not see what you speaking of...

https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/trudeaus-pirou...

;)

ZanyProgrammer• 11 years ago

I've always figured that the reason why even NDP-ites in Toronto (people who I'm thinking of as the most leftist Canadians) aren't republicans is a desire to stay different from the US in some way. Its simply a way to retain a different Canadian identity.

sdm3• 11 years ago

American culture IS canadian.

Yeah right, buddy.

But look to the UK, to the BBC, and you won't find any.

As other have pointed out you find a few there. However this is more easily explained by two things: (1) for Canadians working in the US is hell of a lot easier than working in the UK, (2) For acting, the US pays far more than the UK.

gyardley• 11 years ago

The Queen was and is a big thing in the part of Canada I grew up in. People descended from United Empire Loyalists sometimes write 'U.E.L.' after their names, you see a lot of Queen Elizabeth memorabilia in shops, tourists go on 'loyalist tours', and the biggest bit of pomp and circumstance from my childhood was when the Queen's local representative, the lieutenant-governor of Ontario, visited town. I wasn't particularly impressed and made the mistake of sarcastically saying 'wow, what an honor' when one of the local farmboys was going on about the handshake he'd received from 'the Queen's representative'. He backhanded me hard enough to knock my glasses thirty feet.

Canada, like the United States, is a little too large and varied to easily generalize about.

goodcanadian4• 11 years ago

There are some errors in the article. May two four is a distinctly Eastern Canada slang. In western Canada, it is simply May long weekend.

Two four to refer to 24 beer is also Eastern Canada. In western Canada, you call it a flat.

Finally, as a Canadian who has lived outside of Canada for a long time, Canadians really do use eh a lot. It is just that it is a subconscious element of the language that we are not aware of. For the record, Americans use huh a lot in similar contexts and I'll bet they are similarly unaware.

dljsjr• 11 years ago

I'm from Manitoba and we say two-four all the time…

thrusong• 11 years ago

Same here. I don't think I've heard anyone ever call it a flat.

sdm3• 11 years ago

Grew up in Northern AB and have lived the past 10 years in BC, While "flat" is sometimes used, it's far more common to call them "two fours" here.

goodcanadian4• 11 years ago

Grew up in Alberta and never heard two-four until I went to university and met some people from Ontario. It was actually a bit of a meme that they could tell where you were from based on whether you said flat or two-four. As I said elsewhere, it may be generational, but two four definitely started in the East.

johan_larson• 11 years ago

"24 beer"

Is that usage (the plural "beer") a Canadian thing? I've heard it in Canada but never in the States.

goodcanadian4• 11 years ago

I guess so; I've never really thought about it.

ironlady• 11 years ago

As an Eastern / Atlantic Canadian, I have always herd it "24 of beer" never "24 beer"or more common people ignore the "beer" part, for example "I'm going to get a 24 for the weekend".

edit: added a usage example

ZoeZoeBee2• 11 years ago

Say what ever you want to say, but Eh is one of the best words out there. It allows you to create a question out of a sentence without having to change inflection.

jordigh3• 11 years ago

It's not always a dangling question. It can be eh in the middle of an assertion for emphasis. I rather like that usage too.

One thing about Canadian vowel raising that I hear is that "bagel" is pronounced "baggle" (not really, there is still a diphthong, but it's so slight as to sound lost to my ears).

pmelendez5• 11 years ago

Say what ever you want to say, but Eh is one of the best words out there. It allows you to create a question out of a sentence without having to change inflection.

I agree but I would argue that "huh" and "right" do the trick too :)

ZoeZoeBee2• 11 years ago

Huh and right do too, though they lack the panache of a well placed Eh

loceng• 11 years ago

I'm sorry about how Canadian this thread has become..

sdm3• 11 years ago

I'm surprised they missed one of the biggest ones that comes up in day-to-day life dealing with Americans: the use of verb "to table" in meetings.

In American English if you say you want to table something in a meeting it means you want to stop talking about it. Ex. Let's table this discussion for later.

In Canadian English if you say you want to table something in a meeting it means you want to raise it up and discuss it -- the exact opposite. Ex. I want to table to this report, has everyone had a chance to read it?

allannienhuis• 11 years ago

I have't heard that exact phrasing used, but the idea is that you're putting a topic 'on the table' to be looked at by everyone and discussed. I've used and heard the term used both ways without too much confusion just based on context.

scholia• 11 years ago

One factor is publishing rights. Traditionally, English language publishers negotiated for two main sets of rights: American (sometimes North American) rights, and British and Commonwealth rights. The latter resulted in the same books (with English spelling conventions) appearing in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc.

There have been attempts to change this. To quote from a Guardian article from 2008:

"We are all struggling to free ourselves from the proprietorial attitudes of the US and UK that continue to dominate the publishing world," said Juliet Rogers, chief of one of Australia's largest independent publishers Murdoch Books, and former president of the Australian Publishers Association. "The UK fails to grasp that the Empire is dead and that Commonwealth markets are no longer theirs by right [and] the US views Canadian rights as an automatic extension of their territory, even though they frequently have no intention of responsibly exercising those rights."

"Because British or American publishers get first dibs and insist on British Commonwealth rights, Australia, New Zealand and Canada are not getting a look in," added Andrew Wilkins, director of Australian publisher Wilkins Farago. This is to the disadvantage of authors, he explained, as exported copies of books are sold at reduced royalty rates, "so in theory the author could be making three to four times more money by having a local publisher – it makes no sense."

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/17/canada-australi...

turar• 11 years ago

To me, the surest sign of a Canadian is when they need to use a "washroom".

Why is Canadian English unique?

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