Talking Canadian

Canadians spell words differently Canadians definitely talk differently while all Oh Kate was too loud too ocean the Fosters are both taking our citizens it's a boot not censoring aha some think our language is a corrupt dialogue so I was walking down a three day it's all a little confusing yeah we're talking Canadian hey you guys are on my first day of school I'm Green Knight and like all I kilts were like oh sometimes to be absolutely Frank Canadians do sound a bit America I have the leeches like what to wear like everything these teenagers are in Toronto they could be somewhere in LA or on Mars then you just get weird looks at school if you show up a skirt cuz basically anywhere around here if you show up in a skirt people give you red light so my reason for speaking to you about the monarchy the highest institution of our society but that's Canadian to an obsolete form spoken by our first Canadian born Governor General Vincent Massey week up slow pace of human events we don't sound like that now although some of it is stuck and this evening I want to talk to you about a very special part of present-day Canada the monarchy you hear just a hint of it here and there the skirmishes in a centuries-old battle between American English and English English we're in the middle talking Canadian polyester leisure suit leisure leisure it's definitely laser I guarantee you it's leisure harassment cherishment no it's harassment schedule schedule the proper pronunciation is scheduled rocky here Viet Lackey either either yeah these Vancouver teenagers can't decide now that's talking Canadian but there's more to it than that for one thing what it means to talk Canadian is constantly changing and nobody completely understands how or why Jack chambers is a linguist he spent decades hunting trapping tagging and dissecting Canadian English that thing he's sitting on for example Canadians used to call it a Chesterfield after an eminent British nobleman what Chesterfield was it the Great Canadian ISM because it originated in England but as the name for a very special piece of furniture a monstrous divan sati Davenport then the word came to Canada for the name of any piece of furniture that was upholstered and stuffed and held two or three or four people it has been supplanted by a since the 1950s by the word couch first there's little ripple in favor of sofa and then that died away and couch became the standard term and is now almost exclusively the term that's known by teenagers and people in their twenties across Canada the Americans won the couch war but when push came to shove Canadians preferred the British for this it's a tap the Americans call it a faucet and this luggage yeah like a champ in Dallas it's baggage --lines --lines yeah in Detroit their shades but when it comes to this the British elastic seems to be losing its grip because when there's a choice we usually choose American take words to do with cars do you think you'd hear this in Moose Jaw I took a diversion off the motorway looking for some petrol at the pump the fit bloke took a spanner under my bonnet to check my gearbox fluid and sparking plugs when he was satisfied he took his chamois to my windscreen you wouldn't because English English and American English started going in different directions well before cars and car words were invented and Canadian English is basically American English imported by english-speaking American loyalists who moved to Canada to get away from the revolution this was in the late 1700s they sounded a lot like this I've been fixed a little cutting my field here Leon ten days Abijah uh huh guess you better sally out and before your limbs get considerable tired from standing there certainly it's not quite young and bluer but it's the foundation of Canadian English and it's Yankee scarce ever was a good feel to didn't get cut uh-huh the loyalists are brought with them the accent and dialect of the Midland United States which was different by then from the accent and dialect that was spoken in England not only because of changes that had happened in North America but also because of cataclysmic changes that had happened in England at the same period in the 1700s England became Arliss for one thing so English people say car and caught where we say car and cart with an R in them car caught car cart there were also vowel changes branch and France and Don's words like that which have an awesome where we have branch and France and dance and a sound and the difference is although it's only a small vowel difference makes a real impression on our ears that also is a change that took place in England after the colonization of North America the Loyalists set up the school systems in Upper Canada their children talked and spelled American lieutenant XYZ honor H oh and O our and used American terms instead of British ones wagon for what the British called a carriage fix when the British said mend store instead of shop this worried the British governors who still ran Canada especially after the Americans invaded in 1812 they brought in a million people direct from Britain with no adulterating stopovers in the united states allowed some of them the more delicate blossoms were appalled by the American isms that assailed their refined and discriminating ears the Reverend a constable geeky put it to the Canadian Institute in brutal terms the local language was a corrupt dialogue full of lawless and vulgar innovations that threatens to produce the language as unlike our noble mother tongue as the Negro Quechua or the Chinese pidgin English geeky considered his language had been ravished not just by wagon and store but boss instead of master and bug for any kind of insect to call a firefly a lightning bug is not only an abuse of language but a breach of good taste which it might be thought no person of refinement could ever perpetrate well yes something had to be done a battalion of Scottish schoolmasters was deployed to things back to rates left tenon X Y Zed honor h o n you are in the same spirit our first Prime Minister John a McDonald decreed that British oh you are spellings be official in Canada no course and stubby Yankee ORS but in spite of the Scots the students still talked like Yankees and before you knew it the British kids sounded just like them hello paper paper yes would you loosen paid her thank you thanks and thanks to her Canadians yet unborn would say thanks sometimes instead of thank you and so with their children and their children and so will ours or most of them West is West and East is East and never the twain shall sound the same American English was winning Upper Canada but by God the British held Newfoundland most settlers came here directly from West Country England and eastern Ireland in the isolated out ports they handed down their language pure and whole and colorful and people were very inventive that telling stories and there were expressions like having a good cover you know where people would get together and tell exaggerated stories and so on this bottom row says you can either clean shave my paws had a bruised face people were expected to entertain one another if you if you couldn't entertain verbally really you were sort of ostracized people didn't want to see you if you if you couldn't entertain them verbally Newfoundlanders now and then can still entertain verbally this is a jihad this is a holy war the snow keeps coming Frank the back deck has been crushed we haven't seen the dogs in weeks and they're charging five dollars for a head of rotten lettuce up to solve ease when Newfoundland linguist Harold paddock is in town he talks like what Newfoundlanders call a townie but when he's back on his North Shore Island he talks North Shore just like his great-grandparents well well me cousin Howard write it however Steelman pretty good guy I I suppose the castle walks so fast he cooks gas I don't want passion a little tough to follow if you come from a way which may not be accidental all yeah the Sheep had all the bows he doffed what a social signal to leave our war sent yeah and he made us Mac out me back handy journal like that and he wrapped right around me there huh Oh took off every take a skin where he shocked Newfoundland talk is slightly fading now it's a little more like mainland speech it's that Confederation and in the grammar you know the suppression of the after perfect look what you're after doing now this would give way to look what you've done now we'd sound so weak and feeble and look what you're after doing now look what you're after doing all right you know it's you know just so much more punchy you find distinct accents in Atlantic Canada in places the middle colony loyalists didn't get to first the sounds of Gaelic can be heard in the English of Cape Breton oh when the dance would be over sometimes the some of them would start thirsty and there's a rich mix of other sounds from black loyalists English two traces of French and German in the West it's mostly Yankee loyalists straight from Ontario Ottawa cent Ontario settlers west to balance and absorb the French and matey the Ukrainians came later and the poles and all the rest but the common accent was loyalist the vocabulary though was homemade fixed up on the spot old words spiffed up and put to work for completely new things black blizzard for a dust storm bluff for a grove of trees and they borrowed words from the French and matey Cooley for a small ravine and Prairie itself from the French for meadow there was even a local language called Bungay a fusion of French English and Cree then another strong shot of American as tens of thousands of settlers moved north across the border they brought along Spanish ranching words from the American Southwest Bronco Canyon rodeo Stampede lassoo and ranch from the Spanish Rancho from American gold seekers in the Yukon and Fraser Valley came hitting paydirt panning out and striking it rich from loggers up and down the west coast skid Road and flunky and from Chinook jargon another mixture of native languages with French in English came hi muck amuck for bigshot Skookum for grand or strong and Chinook for warm wind there were Chinook jargon dictionaries to help the tenderfeet pick up the vocabulary in the century since then the brawny new language has crowded out the British forms the way Canadian nationalism crowded out the Empire looking at it closely you will find that it does so in a number of way farewell then to vincent Massey's location the form linguists call canadian dainty canadian dainty was finished off by the huge waves of immigrants who came after world war ii most of them not from britain the current governor-general Adrienne Clarkson came with her family from Hong Kong she doesn't sound very much like Vincent Massey is a pleasure to greet you in the Jubilee year of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the second it's clear clean central Canada speech with no across the pond to it at all we will continue to speak out in every forum for the values of pluralism freedom and democracy in fact if you search the archives you'll find her saying things that would give a constable geeky the pip a discount store pioneer Fisher is a hard-line Union boss a happy-go-lucky Canadian a Spelling still counts of course you'll remember Sir John a McDonald declared oh you are to be the proper Canadian way he thought it was British and maybe it was back then but Katherine barber who edits the Canadian Oxford Dictionary says it's just Canadian now not long ago her dictionary listed labor under oh you are and that changed the game across the country when we were researching the Canadian oats for dictionary the Canadian Press style was to spell oh you are words with an O R and it had been their style for a very long time and the Canadian Press has a very strong influence on printed matter in Canada on newspapers and magazines what has happened subsequently since the dictionary came out the Canadian Press has switched to oh your Spelling's so there's actually been an increase you know you are Spelling's Oh you are Kanaka way yeah if you're under 20 the Oxford Canadian Dictionary usage is preferred because that's how I learned it and it's like Canadian and I don't like when Americans always think they're right okay I'm going to try some before fall over maybe these Vancouver kids spell like Canadians but don't they talk like Californians what are you gonna wear with your shirt on the like I don't know well no not exactly we talked to other Canadians more than we talked to Americans and that means some things about the way we talk are distinct but why doesn't television rule the universe why can't it change the way we talk no it doesn't make you look fat look bad if you try Entertainment Tonight came down like well sure Americans make most of our TV and Americans on TV speak American so we speak American actually no we use expressions from movies and TV but a totally amazing excellent discovery not but 20 years of watching all in the family wouldn't change your grammar or sentence structure or make you sound like Archie yeah sure let me tell you something when a first break that breaks into this house these are all painted me and Halle do something you know what I'm gonna do television doesn't do that it's talking to other people that does at Niagara Falls there's a few hundred meters of river between Canadians and Americans Syria honey brown kay get that little honey brown something like that that's all but listen to the table talk in Niagara Falls New York originally I was going to be but then it was then it was out of hand there would've been 150 people there sir that doesn't sound Canadian how come according to Edmonton drama professor David Lee it's partly the rhythm of our speech that musical quality called intonation Lee says that Canadians tend to end each sentence by moving their tone of voice slightly upward unlike Americans I think generally if most Americans they go up early in a sentence stress wise and then it come down hard at the end so I'm very happy to be here today where's Canadian has a very gentle drifting out pattern I'm very happy to be here today would you pass me that book would you like to go out for some dinner okay so what I'm gonna ask you to do it's gonna do these one at a time the first thing I want you to do these acting students need to learn that American pattern if they're going to do American accents let's do the next one Dale okay my house is down the street good try lifting a house up even a little bit more my house is down the street good there we go you know that sounds much more American doesn't it okay let's do the next one goodnight would you like to go out for some dinner good dinner even harder dinner yeah again would you like to go for some dinner would you like to go out for some dinner good better apart from intonation what makes us different from Americans has mostly to do with how we pronounce vowels for example Canadians pronounce the words caught and caught the same listen again caught caught for most Americans they're different hot caught catch that cut clot the same goes for stalking and stalking Canadians say them the same Americans don't stalking stalking we say both and about Americans say house and about and here what we say as something like who's and Abood and they think we're hilarious look at the American movie South Park public an editor basta I hereby condemn the actions taken by macca and apprehending towns and fellas we don't know what all the fuss is about the fuss is about taking our citizens it's a boot not censoring on what so goddamn funny nothing nothing ah could you tell us again what your argument is all about this is not a boot DePalma say this is a boot dignity respect we say sorry they say sorry when they say it because we really need to get to something it's a little closer to what East Indian women wear right sorry it's closer to sorry right this is what I hear more than any other word from actors who've worked on a you know who gone to the states have worked with Americans you know that's the thing they get ribbed for your what you're sorry because of course they're sorry we're gonna have any travel problems for the better part of tomorrow and of course all this can change at a century's notice for example something the Americans have that we don't the northern cities shift which has been going on in places like Niagara Falls New York for 50 years what's happening in Rochester and Syracuse Buffalo Cleveland Detroit Chicago all the way to Minneapolis and it is a movement of the vowel sounds in American English so when we say top and box they say tap and Bax where we say an and family they say an and family anymore would you write it on an index card it's important because it shows the strength of the canadian-us border as a linguistic divide that northern city shift that's happening in all those big American cities has not touched any part of Canada there is no trace of it in any of the Canadian border cities or anywhere else in Canada how's it going eh oh yeah eh everybody knows eh eh although nobody's really sure where I came from only that for Canadians it's a Swiss Army knife of a word with a million handy uses so I was walking down a three day I had a couple of beers I was feeling pretty good when all of a sudden I noticed this really big guy he must have weighed like 220 pounds eh I mean I could see him real far off he was a real big guy me I'm just minding my own business here and this guy's taking up the whole side walkie so when he got close I just stepped down in the gutter eh he went right on by I give up here what do you do Donnie then there are Canadian words our private stock for our consumption only the Canadian Oxford Dictionary team spent five years tracking them down reading everything from newspapers to Tim Hortons coffee cups to flyers from Canadian Tire here's what they found some familiar Canadian foods like cottage rolls date squares and butter tarts of course believe it or not nobody else eats these and food that's known by names that only Canadians use some of them really obscure we call this free la no cheese but everyone else calls it montage cheese and they found some uniquely Canadian Spelling's for everyday foods like yogurt whoo but Canadians would spell it like this it works in French and English in all they found 2,000 words we use and nobody else does what's amazing is the ordinariness of the words that we find to be Canadian isms that we never realized that other people didn't use you know we're like a fish boat firm and eavestrough and and things like that even Friulano cheese you know bar gasbar yeah if you've grown up with those words you think everyone uses them my favorite was I grew up in Winnipeg and I've always called the jelly filled donut a jam Buster and I thought everyone in the world called them jam Buster's and why would you call them anything else and it wasn't actually until I started working on this dictionary that I discovered that really only Manitobans used an bus or maybe a few people you know going towards Regina and Thunder Bay but mostly it's a Manitoba thing dipsy-doodle is pretty good in Canada if you're trying to stick handle your way through bureaucracy like me Dipsy doodles all right okay yeah in Thunder Bay and I fit careful with this one yes we do especially when in advertising we found in Thunder Bay Area's seems to be the only part of the country and possibly the only part nor that any place in North America that uses the word shag to refer to a combined shower and stag party so it's interesting to see advertisements from Thunder Bay for Saginaw all yeah all available for Shack but that's the kind of regional quirky Canadian ism that makes a language interesting and here are some other words that only Canadians use words to do with politics bagman sprung lockup bear pit session riding words about our national pastime the liquid one that is due for bush by gunky Molson muscle even a bunch of words that all have the same subject underwear we just can't agree what to call it got cheese gods ditch and here's one for reverend geeky Canadians love expressions that have to do with barnyards rear ends and the products thereof there's cat's ass disturber and pinch of and one we borrowed from England Canadians long to be happy as a pig in your aunt in Montreal wouldn't say that but you should hear what she puts her coat on a hangar besides Canadian words in places like Montreal there are new Canadian dialects beginning to turn up Charles Beaubourg studies the language of Montreal's Italian and Jewish communities especially where they are close-knit and independent he's finding pronunciations like coat hanger hanging on there so I'd like you to just read the first column on this page and the Jo to Celino was born in Montreal and grew up in an Italian neighborhood he's one of the Italian Montreal errs Beaubourg has been studying bar sit file student collar to Cellino has kept more of his parents language in his speech than most Canadian born children of immigrants school food stone house hanger when you were growing up in the East in a material do you have any experience with non Italians with with people outside the Italian community no until maybe I went to college non Italians as far as white 90 teens never really saw anyway many times Faubourg thinks these patterns might be the beginning of lasting local dialects the kind that tend to appear as countries get older he thinks they're more likely to develop in Montreal than in other multicultural Canadian cities in Toronto even though certain people grow up in ethnic in communities where most of the people around them are from their own ethnic group they nevertheless get exposure to English as the ambient language in the community in Montreal however the children of immigrants have generally gone to French school in fact now go to French school by law so there's a very little opportunity to you to learn standard Canadian English it's fun that's the thing about the movie like it said Joe to Cellino spends his spare time with other Italian Montreal errs exact listen for the hard T's at the end of words and the G's in words like wedding on the Friday night you bet still continue were in a high-class restaurant I worked there for six months I never did that yeah good all Fridays the first part became about Saturday night yes I don't forget because anybody knocks and I had you don't have to be Italian to use those G's and teens they minded the waiters look upset no schandle Rothman David Suh Luciano and Jack root Nicky all grew up in the mostly Jewish cut st. Luke area of Montreal bring a picnic picnic supper bring the lawn chairs in the and a book and Montreal Jews share some habits with Montreal Italians but they have some little twists of their own all of them drawn from Yiddish and Jewish speakers for instance are remarkable for pronouncing the avowal the I sound and a word like hi or time further back in the mouth than other people do so it sounds something like hi or time when you hear someone saying hi and time they're most likely going to be a Jewish Montrealer the Italians on the other hand a remarkable for not participating in a change that is sweeping most of North America which is the vowel ooh in a word like do or two tends to be pronounced much further forward in the mouth now especially by young North Americans so you hear italians saying things like two and two which really marks them office as being different yeah because that's what I do in a speech yeah yeah not to say Joe and his friends speak a separate language they use the new words we all use words that are emerging from technology the Industrial Revolution produced petrol and bonnet on one side of the Atlantic and gas and hood on the other but today's revolutions are producing shared new terms Giga Byte PMS fats pork autoimmunity and foreign foods that once seemed exotic are now known everywhere sushi cappuccino dim sum salsa shish kebab and there has been a little sanding down of our English particularly among Canadians under 30 pronunciations are changing to match changes in English elsewhere for example we used to say news and Tuesday now that Y sound is gone and it's news and Tuesday we used to say which and whether now that H sound is gone and wit and weather are becoming the rule almost everywhere and if you think the past tense of dive is dived and of sneak is sneaked as it used to be they sneaked one past you well there is some division and snuck and douve are part of what seems to be a standardization process that is happening in all the english's of the world so snuck and douve will be or appear to be the verb forms for those verbs everywhere English is spoken is sometime in the next 20 or 30 years no it's still cheaper than like how um the cheapest one they would like you to know then there's this new speech pattern which is growing like an unwanted weed among teenagers it's this thing where you make every sentence sound like a question drives the geezers crazy it's called up talk and it's turning up everywhere English is spoken and I like we left and then we didn't end up seeing each other after but then for some reason at the Finch pick up place he was there but then my friend was already coming to make me up so then he started talking to me and then I was kind of like trying to look away cuz no longer was there like a group of people there is just like me him and like some other guy I'm just like okay and ya know he just like and then there's like Sally Tagliamonte a like all linguists hears things in everyday speech the rest of us miss she noticed that her daughters and her students were saying like a lot but saying it in particular ways she studied it and found like use has grown dramatically since it first showed up about 60 years ago nobody's quite sure where and it's become much more than the all-purpose filler most of us assumed does like occur just anywhere absolutely not it does not just occur anywhere if you look and you isolate exactly where teenagers and tweens and university students are using like they're using it in three very specific locations they're using it at the beginning of a sentence like if you got a mall and a skirt people like well they're using it before a noun phrase oh boy look at jean skirt oh my ideas grand maybe a half top and they're using it before a verb I think it's better now that we saw gone to this by cuz so now we can like see more people we're always like just together that's on top of the so-called quote ative like he's like with me and she's like yeah she's all I got was I'm like after though I'm the one that's spreading fastest even to isolated parts of the globe is this hardly a book and I'm like no it isn't laughing and the carbons like when we thought you should have said yes nice no but he was like yeah I forgot my speech I was like oh I don't know how much more racy I'm talented and she's so skinny she was like where I have me it's like one of our girls oh yeah oh my mom says it and and proper - like old times so Egypt so take it when I say like just like I mean yeah get used to it parents it all adds up to something that might be like a permanent part of the language when you find a feature of language being used in a very specific location way more than any other place then that gives us clues that something is actually happening in the language itself and in the case of like the fact that it is so frequently used in a specific location for example before a noun makes us suspect that something might be really going on in the grammar and as for so instead of really or very that could stick around - I think they're so cute like they're like and they don't even have a zipper they're so comfy you might say that's very interesting but someone else might say that's so not true is that a grammatical error well so not true is maybe not part of the grammatical rules today but maybe it will be in the future atonia is going out with since when do they go out you know atonia yeah hey Jennifer's going out with Max Weber this is Canadian English is not English English it's not American English it's us it's changing to match changes happening around the world but does that mean it's fading no the more we pick up from other English speakers the harder we try to keep whatever we think defines us as Canadian anyway so we'll keep on doing that as long as we can and and then when some of those disappear or get swallowed up in a kind of a broader spectrum we'll come up with other markers that mark us in the same way maybe when everybody in the United States merges the vowels in caught and caught then we'll have to find something else to be very Canadian about he wants Goldust and 1/3 year and the same applies to local differences in the way we talk they may become much more pronounced it could be Edmonton Calgary will become quite different Toronto in Ottawa Victoria and Vancouver if we could come back in a hundred years you might be able to instantly recognize that the persons from Ottawa instead of Toronto and that should be so I mean if you're from the national capital you should sound better than somebody from Hogtown right in fact after a hundred and fifty years or so of observation and contemplation of listening to the wonderful blunt poetry of our language even the Reverend a constable Kiki might join the rest of us in talking Canadian I've had the biscuit with going sneaky about all these Canadian words bug store boss loony toony pogey they're all pretty good Canadian words I'm learning to talk an agent a overwhelming numbers people pleased to meet you pleased to meet you meet you and then we'll go to a hockey game is that what we do here and a beer store you

Channel: Jeff Barrett

Views: 326,966

Rating: 4.8563676 out of 5

Keywords: documentary, canadian, english, accent, pronunciation, american

Id: eIoTpkM5N64

Length: 43min 33sec (2613 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/RyanGBaker]

But what about "chooch"?

[u/nolotusnotes]

Well, look at that.

[u/troubleondemand]

Yup. Used to camp at Skookumchuck Hot Springs a lot years ago. That and Meagre Creek are two of the most beautiful places around.

[u/briarandvine]

Hehe, they said warm wind. Channel your inner RCR and head to Brown Town.

[u/GhostofHaroldSakata]

It's more of a PNW thing than just Canadian. A few decades ago, the name was on some of the better local-market jam products here in Orygun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skookumchuck

edit: add location for clarity.

[u/PM_ME_HOT_DADS]

What is the origin of this subreddit and it using skookum as a name?

[u/Ignitus]

But what does BOLTR stand for?