This just in: Canada exists

There really is such a thing as Canadian English. You might half-believe that already.

Think for a moment about how Canadians sound when they speak English. In approximate terms, we sound like Americans – perhaps not like Louisianans, probably not like New York Jews, possibly not like gay contestants on Project Runway, and maybe not like black Texans, but certainly like newscasters and reporters on American TV networks. We sound like Ohioans, Mainers, Washingtonians.

There’s a reason for all that: Canadian English is American English – in spoken form, at least. Our spoken accents descend directly from the influx of 50,000 United Empire Loyalists circa 1783. They rejected American independence and moved to a country whose residents were already loyal to the royal family and likely to stay that way.

The historical fact of the United Empire Loyalists is just that cut and dried and just that easy to retell. If you grew up in Canada, you learned about the Loyalists in history class, but you probably forgot about them. What you probably never learned about is their pivotal and overwhelming role in the evolution of the Canadian accent.

If the Loyalists had not emigrated here, we might not exactly sound British today, but we might have ended up using the mid-Atlantic Canadian dainty accent spoken by the upper classes in the early 20th century, like former governor-general Vincent Massey. (The accent sounds like a twee old man – an ascot-wearing codger who really likes opera and lacy placemats – straining to talk like a Brit.)

As it stands, the Canadian accent isn’t dainty or broad or anything else. It’s pleasingly neutral, at least to Americans, which explains why so many Canadian broadcast journalists and actors have sought, and secured, gainful employment in the U.S. (That’s why we sound like U.S. newscasters – lots of them are Canadian.)We sound like Americans whose hometowns a listener cannot quite place. Actually, we sound like Americans whose hometowns are so noncontroversial they aren’t even worth thinking about.

The Canadian accent is not the Ottawa Valley accent frequently mocked by American comedians. That mockery is a tiresome old trope reminiscent of Borscht Belt standup routines. It reached its apotheosis in the English dialect spoken by “the Canadian minister of movies” in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. When they aren’t making fun of the way we “all” say about, Americans pretend we end every sentence with eh?

It seems the last thing Americans ever bother to notice is how much we sound like them. They don’t quite notice that we’re speaking their language.

Now, Canadians certainly have not stayed ignorant of our own dialect. Only in Canada could a dictionary become a best-seller, and that’s exactly what happened with the Canadian Oxford Dictionary in 1998. That was not the first dictionary in living memory to treat Canadian English: Two others, by Gage and by Nelson, were published at almost the same time. The Oxford dictionaries were, however, better – and were relentlessly promoted in Canada’s middlebrow media by their editor, the jolly mediævalist Katherine Barber.

(Importantly, this book uses the Canadian Oxford Dictionary [Second Edition, 2004] as its reference source: With almost no exceptions, I consider a spelling listed in that book to be correct – first headwords only, not alternate or variant spellings.)

From Barber and the Oxford dictionaries, and from Barber’s later books, we learned that Canadians have a wealth of terminology that’s all our own. It ranges from the obvious (political terms like sovereignty-association and MLA) to much more common terms that, true to form, we never really noticed are Canadianisms (like cash for cash register or bachelor as a kind of apartment). We’ve learned a lot about our own English.

But Canadians, ever open to duality and contradiction, inhabit multiple states simultaneously. We’re happy to make a dictionary a bestseller, thereby lionizing Canadian English, but we focus on pronunciations and unusual word choices, not spellings. That has left us confused about Canadian spelling – ironic given that the book we made a bestseller offers solid advice on spelling.

Still, if push came to shove, many of us would use across-the-board British spellings, since the last thing we’d ever want to be mistaken for is Americans. Indeed, Canadian English has been used as a thin plank of Canadian nationalism for decades. But few of us managed to notice that we were asserting Canadian independence by spelling like Brits and talking like Americans.

To be more precise about it, when it comes to spelling, Canadians fall into three camps.

  1. At the top of the heap are a few nitpicking ultra-perfectionists who have the rules down pat and write fluent Canadian English. On good days, I’m in this group.
  2. Many more Canadians are confused and unsure about the whole issue and let their computer correct their spelling for them.
  3. Then there are the most troublesome group of all – a few other nitpicking ultra-perfectionists who also are confused and unsure about the whole issue. They’re like an amalam of the other two groups with an added dash of snobbery. These writers believe there is no agreement on Canadian spelling. They are hungry for a quick fix, and the one they settle on is the across-the-board use of British spelling. Obviously the citizens of this country aren’t anything as lowly and commonplace as Americans, so it is surely out of the question to standardize on American spellings. And who really knows what Canadian spelling is anyway?

Oxford knows. I do. And, by the time you’re finished with this book, you will too.

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