The study Canadian English as an independent variery - a recent endeavor

Prévia do material em texto

The study Canadian English as an independent variety: a recent endeavor
The study of Canadian English as an independent, autonomous national variety of English is relatively recent: the first scholarly works focusing on this specific subject are from the mid-19th century. This is mainly attributed to the massive influence and power of Canada’s only neighboring country – i.e., the United States –, whose broad scope encompasses even the Canadian school system, in addition to many other aspects of Canadian culture and society, for which reason Canadian English is often seen as, confused with and/or compared to American dialects – even by scholars, especially outsiders.[1: DOLLINGER, Stefan. English in Canada. https://www.academia.edu/14933782/English_in_Canada]
The term “Canadian English” was first documented in 1857 by Reverend Geikie, a Scottish pastor living in Ontario who qualified Canadian innovations – such as, e.g., the use of dove instead of dived, or of to loan instead of to lend, among others – as deviations from the British standard and thus considered what he now called as Canadian English as a defective form of English.[2: Please see http://dchp.ca/DCHP-1/Entries/view/Canadian%20English.]
“These and a thousand other examples which might be produced, fully justify the use of the term ‘Canadian English,’ as expressive of a corrupt dialect growing up amongst our population” (Geikie 2010 [1857]: 52)
This statement is a clear illustration of the low standing of Canadian English at that time (i.e., mid-19th century). In fact, it was only after World War I that things started to change, and some more systematic approaches to this theme started to appear (e.g., AHREND, Evelyn R. 1934. Ontario speech. American Speech 9: 136‐139; The Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, a project initiated in 1939; among others). However, these studies did not receive the deserved attention at the time. It was not until the mid-1950s that research in dialect geography really started to take shape and develop in Canada, mostly by means of written questionnaires (an “indirect method” for obtaining data on regional and social linguistic variation, different from more “direct” methods based on field research, such as interviews and the like). Not by chance, the Canadian Linguistic Association was also founded in that same decade, in the year of 1954.
Also, many lexicographical studies were undertaken during the 20th century, which constituted a very important factor in this process of growing awareness regarding Canadian English as an independent variety of the English language, and gave rise to a series of Canadianized dictionaries such as the Gage Canadian Dictionary (first published in 1967) and A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (edited by AVIS, Walter S. and others, first published in 1967 as well), among others.[3: The online version of the DCHP is available at http://dchp.ca/DCHP-1/.]
As of the 1970s, a remarkable number of sociolinguistic studies on Canadian English has been and still is being produced, focusing especially on varationist linguistics, although some important corpus linguistic works have been published in the last decade as well. [4: Such as Tagliamonte & Denis 2014, Childs & Van Herk 2010, Clarke 2006, Roeder 2012, Hoffman & Walker 2010, Boberg 2005b, Boberg 2012, among others.][5: Such as Geeraert & Newman 2011, Clumbus 2010, Brinton Inpess, 2008: passim, Dollinger 2008b), among others. ]
Today, the Strathy Bibliography of Canadian English – a searchable on-line bibliography of books, articles and other resources related to the study of Canadian English, according to its own website – lists more than 2,800 publications related to the study of this specific variation of the English language.[6: The bibliography is availaboe online at http://queensu.ca/strathy/apps/exhibit.html.]
Still, there is a lot yet to be done. Research on second-language speakers of Canadian English, for instance, as well as on the speech of rural and northern areas of the country are still scarce, and the studies on the diachronic development of the Canadian English still lack strong real-time historical data. 
SOURCES:
DOLLINGER, Stefan (2011). Academic and public attitudes to the notion of ‘standard’ Canadian English. English Today, 27, pp 3-9. doi:10.1017/S0266078411000472. 
______________. Canadian English. Last accessed on June 05, 2016 at: http://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-use/canadian-english/
______________. English in Canada. Last accessed on June 05, 2016 at: https://www.academia.edu/14933782/English_in_Canada
______________. Varieties of English: Canadian English in real-time perspective. Last accessed on June 05, 2016 at: https://www.academia.edu/4001676/Varieties_of_English_Canadian_English_in_real-time_perspective 
DOLLINGER, S. and CLARKE, S. (2012), On the autonomy and homogeneity of Canadian English. World Englishes, 31: 449–466. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-971X.2012.01773.x