If you’ve ever stopped at a “chip wagon” on your way to “cottage country” or sat in a “Muskoka chair” at your “summer cottage,” there’s a good chance you’re a proud Canadian.
On June 30, editors at the University of British Columbia (UBC) published the third edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. The online resource lists 12,000 words that are predominately Canadian. Everything from “eavestrough” to “townie.”
“I think the Canadian way of speaking English is one of the most underestimated cultural values,” says Stefan Dollinger, the dictionary’s chief editor and a professor in the department of English language and literatures at UBC.
Ironically, the dictionary’s first edition was started by an American. Charles Lovell, a lexicographer working out of Chicago, was compiling a dictionary of Americanisms. Throughout his research, he noticed a lot of words from Canada and started keeping a file on them. Lovell died before he was able to complete a Canadianisms dictionary and the project was taken over by Walter Avis, a professor of English at Kingston, Ont.’s Royal Military College. He published the first edition in 1967.
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The second edition wasn’t published until 2017. That’s when Dollinger, Austrian by birth, got involved. “I was working on the development of Canadian English in the 18th and 19th century, doing a PhD in Vienna,” he says. “I went to a grad student conference in 2005, and they had a panel on revising the Dictionary of Canadianisms. I knew about the dictionary but hadn’t paid much attention to it. The panel was basically asking who could do it, what could be done. I was surprised that no local PhD student was rising to the challenge. So, after I graduated, I started working on it. I considered it the most exciting project in that field in this generation.”
One of the biggest changes between the first and second editions was that Dollinger and his team moved the dictionary online. But the code they used to write the second edition became obsolete in 2021. That’s why they decided to publish a third edition this year.
The third edition includes 137 new Canadianisms. Readers can browse the dictionary or look up specific words. Each entry includes the word’s definition, its origin, and references to the word in sources, such as books and newspapers, some dating back to the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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When adding new words to each edition, Dollinger says he and his team start by scouring lists of terms claimed to be Canadian in published dictionaries. They’ll choose ones that seem noteworthy and then investigate the history of the term, ensuring it is predominately Canadian. The other tactic is staying tuned into the culture.
“For example,” Dollinger says, “If we have a feeling that Muskoka chair might be Canadian, we’ll look it up, and we’ll do our methodological comparisons with other varieties of English.”
One of Dollinger’s favourite words from the new edition is quinzhee, an Indigenous term that refers to a shelter constructed out of a large dome-shaped pile of snow with the centre hollowed out. Recently, mountaineering has adopted the term.
After spending so much time studying Canadian English and comparing it to other varieties of English, Dollinger says he’s noticed certain trends in Canadian speech. For one, it tends to be conservative, preserving terms that the U.S. has moved away from, such as pencil crayon. But on the other hand, it’s also innovative, clipping terms. For example, Canadians prefer wait time over waiting time, and sailboat over sailing boat.
“You have this interesting mix between more conservative linguistic behaviour preservation and more innovative uptake that’s quicker than some places, such as the States,” he says.
Canadian English has always been a strange mix of American and British terms and spellings. Since current U.S. relations remain shaky, Dollinger says this project helps ground the Canadian psyche, reminding us that our use of English is distinctly Canadian.
In fact, Canadians seem willing to move further away from their British and American ties. Dollinger and his team surveyed 3,000 people across all 13 provinces and territories about whether they’d want a Canadian English spelling option and 78 per cent said yes.
“A similar percentage says that there is a Canadian way of speaking English,” Dollinger says. “Those are all very important things. And we’re trying to describe it, we’re trying to find out things that often people don’t notice.”
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