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Speech Differences along the Ontario-United States Border

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2017

Walter S. Avis
Walter S. Avis*
Affiliation:
R.M.C., Kingston
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Extract

In the first article of this series I pointed out the great similarity between the speech habits of Ontarioans and those of their American neighbours across the line: both speak a variety of North American English. This state of affairs should not be surprising in view of the early settlement history of the borderlands and of subsequent cultural and social contact along the border.

There are, nevertheless, many linguistic features not shared by speakers of English on both sides of the border. In terms of vocabularly I have already illustrated a number of such differences, indicating that, in the main, they probably result from the generalization in Ontario of words current in British English—the speech of thousands of immigrants who have come to Canada during the past century or so.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 1 , Issue R1 , March 1955 , pp. 14 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association. 1955

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References

1 “Speech Differences, etc.. I Vocabulary”, JCLA. I (Oct. 1954 ) 13-8

2 E. Bagby Atwood. A Survey of Verb Forms In the Eastern United Stales {Ann Arbor, 1953). Raven I. McDavid, Jr., has shown that usage with prepositions also varies from region to region, in “The Habitat of Prepositions”, a paper read to the American Dialect Society in New York. Dec. 28. 1954. With his permission, I have drawn freely from this study.

3 Atwood. op. cit., p. 11.

4 See Walter S. Avis. “The Part Participle ‘Drank’ Standard American Usage”, American Speech. XXVII (May, 1953). 106-11. In this article I included the Linguistic Atlas data for Ontario; of five cultured Informants, four used drunk, and one used either. The present study suggests that Ontarians follow northern American practice more

5 Professor Henry Alexander's Maritime field records (Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada) show that of is occasionally heard in New Brunswick and, rarely, in Nova Scotia. Till, a Scots variant seems to have some currency among older informants on Cape Breton Island.

6 Raven I. McDavid. Jr., “Midland and Canadian Words in Upstate New York”, American speech, XXVI (Dec., 1951), 248-56. See also my article referred to in f.n. 1 above