Queue up, folks, and lemme tell you a story. My pal Doug pulls out of the parkade this morning, dekes between the neighbour’s dogs, does a Trudeau Stop at the 4-way and he’s on the 401 before sunup. He’s guzzling double-doubles to stay awake, just givin’ ‘er, puts like 50 clicks under him before Tom Allen comes on, and the only thing that slows him is now he has to go to the washroom.
If all of that gave you a warm feeling right down to your runners—or if you even understood it all—You. Are. Canadian.
See, we speak our own language up here. It’s not just the words we say, but the way we say ‘em. Canadian-ese isn’t just a mash-up of British and American English. It’s its own thing. Lexicographer Stefan Dollinger compares Canadian English to, say, the snow that the Olympic skiers recently found at Whistler, BC. Looks like Sierra Nevada snow, feels like Salt Lake City snow, but it isn’t. It’s unique.
Dollinger, who teaches in the English department at the University of British Columbia, is the go-to guy for Canadianisms. (Also the history of English-language development up here north of the 49th.) He’s heading up a project to create a new dictionary of Canadian English: 10,000-plus distinctly Canadian words and their pedigrees. It’s an update of the bible of Canadianisms, which is almost 45 years old and woefully out of date, eh? Promises to be lively chesterfield-reading.
The whole enterprise proves something cool about Lingua Canadiana. As you’d expect in a country so huge, there are regional dialects, sure. “She’s some lop on da pond, buddy what?” (If you understood that, you must be from Newfoundland and Labrador). But there’s also this…uniformity in Canadian English from coast to coast to coast. And the great thing is, it endures. Canadian English isn’t getting crushed—even though we’ve been sleeping with an elephant for a century and a half.
And by the way, it’s no slur to call us “Canucks.” It’s what we call ourselves.
Talk like a Canadian:
- Toonie n. the Canadian two-dollar coin. The one with “the queen on front with a bear behind.”
- Pop n. soda
- Jacked adj. excited
- Keener n. an enthusiastic person. That is, someone who is jacked about something.
- Timbit n. a little kid. After the doughnut-hole snack popularized by Tim Hortons—the coffee chain that sponsors many minor-league sports programs. (Little soccer-playing kids running around with “Timbits” on their back are gradually becoming known as timbits themselves.)
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