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  #2001  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 4:30 AM
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The St. Lawrence is just a beast of a river. It's scale is such that it almost seems to have its own category. Picture the view to Quebec looking upstream... even the Mississippi becomes the placid Danube in comparison.

But for European rivers, the Rhine is a lively one. It has a real power and flow you can feel when you're on it, particularly at Basel.
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  #2002  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 5:12 AM
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That's not what the map indicates though. There are 3 subdialects listed for English in Canada. One is "Irish Newfoundland" and one is "Atlantic".

In any case it's very American-centric, as you say. I think they collect a lot more data from, say New York City than they do from small villages in Atlantic Canada.
Canadian English hasn't been studied nearly as extensively as American English. Where it has been studied, work has tended to focus on known regional variations (Newfoundland, Cape Breton, Lunenburg, &c.). There's a general assumption that everything West of Quebec constitutes one Standard or Inland Canadian English.

That doesn't necessarily mean we all speak alike. There are variations in any regional dialect. Sound changes don't occur at a uniform speed: rural and remote areas tend to be more conservative while linguistic innovation tends to happen in large cities and spread outward. As long as we're all moving in the same direction (say, if a 10 year-old in Timmins speaks the same way a 40 year-old speaks in Toronto) then we're all one dialect. IIRC, there is some evidence that Inland Canadian is starting to break up - the Canadian shift may be moving in slightly different ways across the country, for example.

There are some big omissions from that map. The Ottawa Valley still has its twang, parts of BC do their own thing and, well, no one's going to be confusing a native English speaker from Kitchener with a native English speaker from a Northern reserve (Aboriginal Englishes have barely been studied at all).
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  #2003  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 5:55 AM
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Originally Posted by kwoldtimer View Post
I actually thought it sounded less than full-on hoser, except maybe for the chap Mike - I'd need to hear a bit more from him. I also thought they spoke a bit more slowly than I would expect of Ontarians, although that might be because they were being recorded. To me it sounded fairly "normal", completely normal in the case of the women, althought they didn't really say much.
I live in Northern Ontario and it certainly sounds like the way quite a few people here talk. I do know that most people in Northern Ontario speak more slowly than in Southern Ontario on average.

And those guys who went beneath the ice are insane!
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  #2004  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 4:10 PM
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Originally Posted by kool maudit View Post
The St. Lawrence is just a beast of a river. It's scale is such that it almost seems to have its own category. Picture the view to Quebec looking upstream... even the Mississippi becomes the placid Danube in comparison.

But for European rivers, the Rhine is a lively one. It has a real power and flow you can feel when you're on it, particularly at Basel.
Another point is that in French there are two words for river: "rivière" and "fleuve".

A "fleuve" is generally more substantial than a "rivière".

You can tell which is which by which article ("le" or "la") is used when the generic is dropped.

For example:

la Seine (rivière)
le Rhin (fleuve)
le Rhône (fleuve)
la Meuse (rivière)
le Mississippi (fleuve)
le St-Laurent (fleuve)

Generally speaking, in French-speaking Canada, "le fleuve" means the St. Lawrence. Although usage drops somewhat as you move away from the St. Lawrence valley. For example, the Saguenay River is also a "fleuve" and is referred to in the masculine as "le Saguenay".

But if you're listening to national francophone media and they refer to "le fleuve", everyone knows they are talking about the St. Lawrence.
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  #2005  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 4:20 PM
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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
Yeah, I guess I can see the Toronto/Hamilton POV of the "still" lake, but in the original Canada (), the St. Lawrence was THE travel artery, and it had two directions, upbound, and downbound. The cities and villages (Quebec, Trois-Rivières, Sorel, Montreal, etc.) were all along this single axis, so you'd go up to some and down to others, depending on the direction you're going. Again, ordinary people didn't have maps handy all around them, so the most tangible way to speak of travel direction was up and down.

This is still in the daily speech patterns here. For example, for Xmas my gf and I are going "down to the Gaspé" (which is north of here). I don't know anyone who'd say it differently.
Yippers. Even my Acadian family members say "on monte à Montréal" (going up to Montréal). On monte à Quebec, On monte à Ottawa. On descend au Nouveau-Brunswick, On descend en Gaspésie.

My mom refers to "down east" as "par-en-bas" which almost literally means "down below" but likely means "down the river" or "downstream".

"Il vient de par-en-bas." (He's from down home.)
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  #2006  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 4:23 PM
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Originally Posted by rousseau View Post
You know, Canada needs more people who are curious about these things doing TV shows on obscure points of interest the way the Brits and the Americans do.

Because I'd love it if someone could do a poll of a thousand people on these kinds of issues, and then go around the country asking people on camera about them too, both regular types on the street and those with some professional knowledge.

I don't fully trust my own intuition on this. I understand the reasoning that "going down to Halifax" makes sense, but it still really does sound wrong to my ears. Saying "up" or "down" for anything in a Canadian context outside of Calgary-Edmonton or Regina-Saskatoon sounds wrong to me unless you're going to the Arctic Circle or Ohio or Florida. Or Windsor up to Toronto. or "up to Muskoka." I'd venture to say that water transport resonates very little to your average person in these parts, and in the Prairies as well.

My neighbour down the street did a lovely book of the history of the Grand River, complete with drawings, that took him and his sister three years to complete, but I'm afraid it's a niche book that will sell very few copies or elicit much interest in the general public.

http://www.therecord.com/living-stor...iver-revealed/

P.S. Unlike the Ottawa Valley, the Valley of the Grand does not, to the best of my knowledge, have an accent distinct from that of the surrounding areas of Southwestern Ontario.

"Water at work" just doesn't loom large in our consciousness. Nothing like with the mythical rivers of the world: the Thames, the Seine, the Danube, the Yellow River, the Mississippi, the Amazon. Except that in French I'm assuming that the St. Lawrence does indeed occupy that kind of space in Quebec?
Coincidentally, today's Globe and Mail has an interesting piece about the history, challenges and "comeback" of the Grand River and its watershed. I don't think this kind of thing is much known beyond the watershed itself, although names like Joseph Brant, Pauline Johnson, and Homer Watson probably resonate more widely. As I understand it, the Grand is the most intensely managed watershed in Canada.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...ticle27890648/
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  #2007  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 4:30 PM
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Originally Posted by rousseau View Post

"Water at work" just doesn't loom large in our consciousness. Nothing like with the mythical rivers of the world: the Thames, the Seine, the Danube, the Yellow River, the Mississippi, the Amazon. Except that in French I'm assuming that the St. Lawrence does indeed occupy that kind of space in Quebec?
I'd say the St. Lawrence is definitely a big deal. It's there in the literature, songs, movies, TV shows, folklore, etc.

In general, francophone Canadian culture is much more "geographically rooted" than anglophone Canadian culture.

It's one of the biggest things I noticed when I had my personal "awakening" when as a young adult I transitioned from a primarily anglophone Canadian identity to a francophone Québécois one.
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  #2008  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 4:37 PM
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Originally Posted by wg_flamip View Post
Canadian English hasn't been studied nearly as extensively as American English. Where it has been studied, work has tended to focus on known regional variations (Newfoundland, Cape Breton, Lunenburg, &c.). There's a general assumption that everything West of Quebec constitutes one Standard or Inland Canadian English.

That doesn't necessarily mean we all speak alike. There are variations in any regional dialect. Sound changes don't occur at a uniform speed: rural and remote areas tend to be more conservative while linguistic innovation tends to happen in large cities and spread outward. As long as we're all moving in the same direction (say, if a 10 year-old in Timmins speaks the same way a 40 year-old speaks in Toronto) then we're all one dialect. IIRC, there is some evidence that Inland Canadian is starting to break up - the Canadian shift may be moving in slightly different ways across the country, for example.

There are some big omissions from that map. The Ottawa Valley still has its twang, parts of BC do their own thing and, well, no one's going to be confusing a native English speaker from Kitchener with a native English speaker from a Northern reserve (Aboriginal Englishes have barely been studied at all).
I think a lot of these differences depend on where you stand.

For the average English-speaking person in the world there is a pretty good accent consistency from the Ottawa River to the Pacific Ocean. And this accent is also increasingly the dominant one in the non-Acadian areas of the Maritimes (especially in urban areas).

This accent also sounds to most people quite similar to the neutral American accent spoken by tens of millions of people in the U.S.

Just to give a parallel example. To many Frenchmen (with little experience in Canadian accents), a Québécois and an Acadien sound very similar. Whereas to Québécois and Acadiens the difference is obvious.

And to most Québécois, most Acadiens sound pretty much the same. Whereas Acadiens themselves can tell difference between an NB Acadien and a NS Acadien, or a PEI Acadien. Or even a difference between a NE NB Acadien and a SE NB Acadien, or between a SW NS Acadien and a Cape Breton Acadien.

I am actually pretty good with Canadian francophone accents.

But I am sure to a lot of people they really sound the same.

And it's sometimes hard for me to tell a Belgian francophone or Swiss francophone apart from a Frenchman. Unless they use certain specific words.
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  #2009  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 4:41 PM
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Still with the St. Lawrence...

"Un St-Laurent frappé"... a glass of tap water (usually with ice)
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  #2010  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 4:48 PM
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Originally Posted by kool maudit View Post
But for European rivers, the Rhine is a lively one. It has a real power and flow you can feel when you're on it, particularly at Basel.
I've been on the Rhine. It's a truly impressive river, especially with the gorge, all the boat traffic and the rail traffic on the parallel tracks along the edge of the river. Having said this though, the Rhine is truly no wider than the lower Saint John River (below Fredericton) in NB.
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  #2011  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 6:08 PM
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Originally Posted by MonctonRad View Post
I've been on the Rhine. It's a truly impressive river, especially with the gorge, all the boat traffic and the rail traffic on the parallel tracks along the edge of the river. Having said this though, the Rhine is truly no wider than the lower Saint John River (below Fredericton) in NB.
As I've learned from my postcard collection, the number of passenger steamships on the Saint John a century ago was impressive. I have one steamship postcard whose caption refers to the Saint John as "The Rhine of North America". It seems to have been part of the grand tour that upper middle class New Englanders would do of the Maritimes - they would disembark at Yarmouth, visit sites relating to Evangeline (who was the Anne of Green Gables of her day) and also see Halifax, the tidal bore and Saint John, including a cruise on the river. P.E.I. also did its best to attract visitors with images of its bucolic beauty that would already have seemed quaint to someone from the Boston of 1910.
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  #2012  
Old Posted Dec 21, 2015, 6:54 PM
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As I've learned from my postcard collection, the number of passenger steamships on the Saint John a century ago was impressive. I have one steamship postcard whose caption refers to the Saint John as "The Rhine of North America". It seems to have been part of the grand tour that upper middle class New Englanders would do of the Maritimes - they would disembark at Yarmouth, visit sites relating to Evangeline (who was the Anne of Green Gables of her day) and also see Halifax, the tidal bore and Saint John, including a cruise on the river. P.E.I. also did its best to attract visitors with images of its bucolic beauty that would already have seemed quaint to someone from the Boston of 1910.
It's true that in some stretches the steep bank of the Saint John are covered in fields tamed for agricultural uses, kind of like the steep banks of the Rhine.

Except it's potato plants instead of wine grapes!
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  #2013  
Old Posted Jan 17, 2016, 2:16 PM
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I learned something new about the pronunciation of Newfoundland today - or, rather, specific dates.

Until the early 1900s, the pronunciation varied but most people fully pronounced "found" and put the emphasis on "land". So "New-found-laaaaaaand". Lots of old people still say it that way.

The Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland (our pre-Confederation equivalent of CBC) standard was that all syllables should be given equal weight but a slight emphasis on "land" was permissible.

It was Joey Smallwood who tried to popularize Nyoo-fn'land. The "Nyoo" never caught on broadly, but the "fn'land" did.

And weirdest thing was I read it a few days ago in the National Post and went to the Rooms to check it out. They had it almost right. And I never knew these timelines.

And even though the pronunciation has become mostly homogenous across the island, people who were born in the 1940s and earlier tend to still put way more emphasis on "land" than younger people. For them, land is longer than the other two syllables combined.
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  #2014  
Old Posted Jan 17, 2016, 2:55 PM
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I love when Americans say New FOUND LAND - sounds so wrong, and forced
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  #2015  
Old Posted Jan 17, 2016, 3:31 PM
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"Land" is O.K., as long as it's not "lund". They actually had a funny quote about it in the National Post story:

Quote:
But among warring camps, the only undisputed sin is when the “land” is degraded into “lund”— a form most commonly spoken by Americans and small pockets of British Columbians.

“In all the documentation and living memory reports we have, ‘lund’ has always been an incorrect pronunciation,” said Hiscock.

“You can say almost anything in the first two syllables, but that last syllable has to have an ‘and’ in it,” he added.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/ca...n-the-old-west
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  #2016  
Old Posted Jan 17, 2016, 4:20 PM
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I learned something new about the pronunciation of Newfoundland today - or, rather, specific dates.

Until the early 1900s, the pronunciation varied but most people fully pronounced "found" and put the emphasis on "land". So "New-found-laaaaaaand". Lots of old people still say it that way.

The Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland (our pre-Confederation equivalent of CBC) standard was that all syllables should be given equal weight but a slight emphasis on "land" was permissible.

It was Joey Smallwood who tried to popularize Nyoo-fn'land. The "Nyoo" never caught on broadly, but the "fn'land" did.

And weirdest thing was I read it a few days ago in the National Post and went to the Rooms to check it out. They had it almost right. And I never knew these timelines.

And even though the pronunciation has become mostly homogenous across the island, people who were born in the 1940s and earlier tend to still put way more emphasis on "land" than younger people. For them, land is longer than the other two syllables combined.
Nyoo-fund-land is how I say it, although I' m inconsistent about putting the emphasis on the first or last syllable.
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  #2017  
Old Posted Feb 19, 2016, 11:09 PM
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I found this data looking at the 1931 census:

Canadian-born, Canadian parentage:

Ontario 49%
Manitoba 26%
Saskatchewan 24%
Alberta 20%
BC 19%

British Isles birth or parentage:

Ontario 36%
Manitoba 33%
Saskatchewan 24%
Alberta 28%
BC 50%

I didn't jot down the figures for Quebec or the Maritimes, where the vast majority of the population would have had multi-generational Canadian roots.

Also they didn't have parentage figures beyond "Canadian", "British" and "foreign."

What's striking is how British British Columbia really is. Note that at the time it actually had a smaller population than any of the Prairie provinces and since that time it along with Alberta were the provinces most impacted by internal migration.

Today whatever difference between BC and Ontario exists is extremely subtle, but I wonder if there was any difference in BC pre-1940 or if those born in BC sounded more "British" then.
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  #2018  
Old Posted Feb 20, 2016, 5:23 AM
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I found this data looking at the 1931 census:

Canadian-born, Canadian parentage:

Ontario 49%
Manitoba 26%
Saskatchewan 24%
Alberta 20%
BC 19%

British Isles birth or parentage:

Ontario 36%
Manitoba 33%
Saskatchewan 24%
Alberta 28%
BC 50%

I didn't jot down the figures for Quebec or the Maritimes, where the vast majority of the population would have had multi-generational Canadian roots.

Also they didn't have parentage figures beyond "Canadian", "British" and "foreign."

What's striking is how British British Columbia really is. Note that at the time it actually had a smaller population than any of the Prairie provinces and since that time it along with Alberta were the provinces most impacted by internal migration.

Today whatever difference between BC and Ontario exists is extremely subtle, but I wonder if there was any difference in BC pre-1940 or if those born in BC sounded more "British" then.
My Grandfather was born in 1918 in Kamloops, BC and raised that area. His accent was exactly the same as mine and my Father's. Same as an English speaking Ontarian. He was of Dutch, Aboriginal and Scottish heritage and only ever spoke English.
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  #2019  
Old Posted Apr 25, 2016, 6:01 PM
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A new entry in the ongoing investigations of what a Canadian accent is:

Video Link


I saw this somewhere a few days ago and totally assumed it was American, but then saw a news story about this indicating that he lives in St. Thomas Ontario, and I thought: wow, are things changing? Do people there really sound like that?

Because both he and the manager he calls, presumably also in St. Thomas (though she could be in London) sound almost exactly like "neutral-sounding" Americans (aka Ohio, maybe the mountain states, though definitely not Michigan or Chicago).

At 1:46 he says "it's just so nice out" exactly like an American, no Canadian raising-style "oat in a boat" about it at all. You will not hear anyone in Toronto sounding like this, and Hamilton and points southwest might be closer to it, but we still do the hoserific "oat in a boat" thing.

But this guy is completely bereft of what we normally think of as a Canadian accent. He actually sounds almost exactly like my sister's husband, who grew up in non-redneck Florida.

This is amazing to me. I've never heard anyone in Ontario speak like him ever, not even in Chatham or Windsor (much less the rest of Canada, especially the west). I wonder if he's representative of that area, or is he an anomaly? He's really laying on the "whiny Millennial" act pretty thick, so maybe that explains it?

I'm confounded.
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  #2020  
Old Posted Apr 25, 2016, 7:45 PM
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A new entry in the ongoing investigations of what a Canadian accent is:

Video Link


I saw this somewhere a few days ago and totally assumed it was American, but then saw a news story about this indicating that he lives in St. Thomas Ontario, and I thought: wow, are things changing? Do people there really sound like that?

Because both he and the manager he calls, presumably also in St. Thomas (though she could be in London) sound almost exactly like "neutral-sounding" Americans (aka Ohio, maybe the mountain states, though definitely not Michigan or Chicago).

At 1:46 he says "it's just so nice out" exactly like an American, no Canadian raising-style "oat in a boat" about it at all. You will not hear anyone in Toronto sounding like this, and Hamilton and points southwest might be closer to it, but we still do the hoserific "oat in a boat" thing.

But this guy is completely bereft of what we normally think of as a Canadian accent. He actually sounds almost exactly like my sister's husband, who grew up in non-redneck Florida.

This is amazing to me. I've never heard anyone in Ontario speak like him ever, not even in Chatham or Windsor (much less the rest of Canada, especially the west). I wonder if he's representative of that area, or is he an anomaly? He's really laying on the "whiny Millennial" act pretty thick, so maybe that explains it?

I'm confounded.
I dunno. These things are often both subtle and variable.

He didn't say much that would lead me to believe that he couldn't be Canadian.
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