Portfolio 1.0.

This document discusses the origins and characteristics of Canadian English. It notes that Canadian English has developed distinct features due to Canada's history of influence from both British and American English. Canadian English is considered a separate variety from other forms of English with its own dictionaries and style guides. However, it also maintains some ambivalence due to Canada's roots in both British colonialism and American settlers who remained loyal to Britain after the American Revolution.

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Portfolio 1.0.

Uploaded by

Ederson Villareal

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ENGLISH (Grupo 8 a 11, Lunes a Viernes )

PORTFOLIO
EDERSON REYES
VILLARREAL

Professor Kienzle Quesada

BRAINSTORM,
SKIMMING AND
SCANNING.
Is there such a thing as Canadian English? If so, what is it?

The standard stereotype among Americans is that Canadians are like

Americans, except they say ‘eh’ a lot and pronounce ‘out and about’ as ‘oot and
aboot’. Many Canadians, on the other hand, will tell you that Canadian English is
more like British English, and as proof will hold aloft the spellings colour and centre
and the name zed for the letter Z.

Canadian does exist as a separate variety of British English, with subtly

distinctive features of pronunciation and vocabulary. It has its own dictionaries; the
Canadian Press has its own style guide; the Editors’ Association of Canada has
just released a second edition of Editing Canadian English. But an emblematic
feature of Editing Canadian English is comparison tables of American versus
British spellings so the Canadian editor can come to a reasonable decision on
which to use… on each occasion. The core of Canadian English is a pervasive
ambivalence.

Canadian history helps to explain this. In the beginning there were the
indigenous people, with far more linguistic and cultural variety than Europe.
They’re still there, but Canadian English, like Canadian Anglophone society in
general, gives them little more than desultory token nods. Fights between
European settlers shaped Canadian English more. The French, starting in the
1600s, colonised the St Lawrence River region and the Atlantic coast south of it. In
the mid-1700s, England got into a war with France, concluding with the Treaty of
Paris in 1763, which ceded ‘New France’ to England. The English allowed any
French to stay who were willing to become subjects of the English King.

At the time of the Treaty of Paris, however, there were very few English
speakers in Canada. The American Revolution changed that. The founding
English-speaking people of Canada were United Empire Loyalists – people who
fled American independence and were rewarded with land in Canada. Thus
Canadian English was, from its very beginning, both American – because its
speakers had come from the American colonies – and not American, because they
rejected the newly independent nation.

Just as the Americans sought to have a truly distinct, independent American

version of English, the loyalists sought to remain more like England… sort of.
These were people whose variety of English was already diverging from the British
and vice versa: when the residents of London and its environs began to drop their
r’s and change some of their vowels people in certain parts of the United States
adopted some of these changes, but Canadians did not.
Needs more analysis