Origins of The Canadian English Accent - Part 2

most people think of the beginnings of Canadian English as has rooted in the loyalist immigration to Canada so after the American Revolution the loyalists were the American colonists who were opposed to the Revolution and fought on the British side and in the war and so when the war ended and the peace terms were very favorable to the revolutionaries the the loyalists realized that they had to get out and one of the ways in which the British government said thank you to oilless for their loyal service was to guarantee them passage out of New York City which was the last bastion of British defense in the war to Canada they didn't all go to Canada but many of them did and particularly those from the Midland and New England colonies so there were large numbers of loyalists about 45,000 by general estimation that went to Canada some of them went directly by sea to Nova Scotia and and also to what was then the western part of Nova Scotia which then became New Brunswick and others went by an inland route basically up along like Lake Champlain into what is today Quebec but the governor of Quebec realized that settling large numbers of english-speaking loyalists among the French Canadian population so shortly after the British conquest would not be politically wise and so most of those loyalists were resettled further west and what were called the of the western townships which became ontario but many people assumed that one of the reasons why Canadian English today is a fundamentally North American variety unlike say Australian English or New Zealand English which have much more in common with British English it's because of that loyalist influences that created a common origin with American English because the first english-speaking Canadians at least the first substantially large group of english-speaking Canadians were actually X Americans there was a huge migration of people directly from Britain following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the peak of that emigration was the Irish potato famine of 1847 the immigrants began coming right at the end of the of the war and that immigration continued up to the middle of the 19th century and was much larger than a loyalist immigration probably talking about something close to a million people who came directly from parts of Britain to Canada and they came from all over Britain so they were the most numerous were Irish people from both northern and southern Ireland but there were also a lot of English people and they tended to come from the West country of England from northern England and Scottish people as well so it was a mixture of different British regional origins but then they would have spoken regional types of British English not the kind of thing we think of as British English today which is based on the London regional accent that became standard British English they would have spoken yorkshire dialects and west country dialects and Irish and Scottish dialects and these people moved into most of eastern Canada from Ontario through to Newfoundland and would have mixed in with the population that was already there so whether the modern features of Canadian English are due more to the original loyalists or more to the British settlers that came in the nineteenth century or to some combination of those of those influences and but somehow out of that mixture came a fairly homogeneous kind of Canadian English by the time of Canada's Confederation in 1867 that was basically North American and character so where Canadians have much more in common at almost every level with American English speakers done with British English speakers following the establishment of a pretty homogeneous kind of Canadian English in Ontario by the end of the 19th century the western part of the country was opened up for settlement and that was of course a long historical process but it fundamentally began with the arrival of the railway mile flicking a Pacific Railway in the West which allowed the opening up of most of Western Canada to settlement and that settlement came from four different regions that were continued emigration of British people there was also the beginning of substantial number of Europeans arriving so Germans and Scandinavians and the Ukrainians and poles and then also Americans who came up basically United States was also expanding westward and as American settlers ran out of new good farmland in the United States many them began crossing over into Canada to take up homesteads on the prairies but the largest group both numerically and the most influential at in a social sense were Canadian or in people who moved west and the largest group of those was Ontarians who would have brought their Ontario English with them and that Ontario English in a slightly modified form became the main historical input to the development of Western Canadian English and that accounts for why we have such a high degree of homogeneity across Canada all the way from Vancouver to Ottawa I was out and about Lots in the dark I was out in the boat lost in the dark I was out and about lost in the dark I was out in a boat lost in the dark anxiously pacing alone in the park anxiously pacing alone in the park plagued by a memory vaguely in sight plagued by a memory vaguely in sight plagued by a memory vaguely in sight

Channel: Jimiticus

Views: 21,992

Rating: 4.8859649 out of 5

Keywords: jimiticus, canadian accent, canadian english accent, history of canadian accent, origin of the canadian accent, canada, linguistics, phonology, morphology, etymology, charles boberg, loyalists, united empire loyalists, canadian immigrant, irish canadian, scottish canadian, upper canada, lower canada

Id: A5Vat3ndyeA

Length: 5min 37sec (337 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 09 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/fedoracat]

Not sure if that's a lady or a gent, but either way, great beard.

[u/jimiticus]

Last month I shared part 1 of this series, which goes into detail about the various regional accents of Canadian English across the country. You can watch Part 1 here;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrTCDi3xbTw

The sources I used was the research by the linguist professor Dr. Charles Boberg from McGill University in Montreal.

His book Regional Phonetic Differentiation in Standard Canadian English by Dr. Charles Boberg -https://www.amazon.ca/English-Language-Canada-Comparative-Analysis/dp/1107688140/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462216617&sr=8-1&keywords=charles+boberg

His published paper The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative Analysis by Dr. Charles Boberg -http://eng.sagepub.com/content/36/2/129.refs

[u/[deleted]]

Nothing on the etymology of "eh" :-/

[u/[deleted]]

I once had a friendly argument with an English friend about whether Canadians are more like the Brits or the yanks. I felt I won the argument when I said "they say "soccer" and they don't give a fuck about it."

[u/ThuviaofMars]

That did not explain "why Canadians have a similar accent to Americans."

[u/LancePodstrong]

Super interesting, thanks for sharing. I love linguistics. Keep making more!

[u/Richard_II]

The Canadian "accent" sounds more American than many American accents. Why do we need a documentary to explain it (in two parts no less). The Minnesota accent is stranger than the Canadian accent. What we need is a documentary explaining the Canadian tendency for documentaries on boring/odd topics.