Meanwhile in language news

Oh the complications language can bring. Consider the news from England, Italy and Canada.

In England, a hot profession has become that of the speech tutor. Why? Because in that country, the speaking voice tends to give away the class and region of the speaker, and those with working class or backwater regional accents are worried they will be barred from the best jobs and private schools if they can’t change. So preschoolers are tutored in using posh language, and adults study how to neutralize their accents. It’s all quite enough to make Eliza Doolittle roll over in her grave. Or to make Henry Higgins start singing on key.

At least in Canada, we don’t have as much regional variation in our accents—with exceptions such as the Newfoundland accent and the Ottawa Valley twang. And the same is true with class variations; although according to one website, there is a hoity toity accent called Canadian Dainty, but it is “virtually extinct… except in historical artifacts such as archival CBC Radio recordings and Christopher Plummer.”

Let’s turn to Italy. Scholars have counted as many as 250 different gestures that are used by Italians in day-to-day conversation. This can be a probem for the non-Italian. To Italian speakers, however, gestures are such a part of language that it is difficult to comprehend not integrating gestures with speech.

If the Italians can master 250 gestures, it would’t kill us to develop a few more, would it? For example, instead of just speaking a phrase, such as “What can I say? It’s the Toronto Maple Leafs, who haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967, and always find a way to disappoint you; but despite all of that, I call myself a Leafs fan,” one could supplement or even replace it with a gesture that involved raising the hands, palm upwards, and shrugging. Or a right fist, banged hard down into the left palm, could be taken to mean “That Harper government. I never voted for them. I favour an increase in the GST, rather than regressive tax measures such as income splitting, so that there can be greater wealth redistribution in this country. I hope you didn’t vote for them, either.”

All right then, what’s the Canadian issue? Bluntly put, there is no longer any dictionary of Canadian English. The last edition of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary was published just over 10 years ago, to critical and popular acclaim (“I just think they nailed the definition of ‘and’,” said one swooning reader). A few years later, the research unit of Oxford University Press that monitored changes to the Canadian lexicon was shut down, and there is no sign of the dictionary coming back.

Now, Oxford University Press is not a government and has no obligation to Canadians to produce a Canadian dictionary if it can’t make a buck at it. The head of its US dictionaries department says the company now employs freelance readers to scour books and periodicials, and does “automated filtering of online Canadian material to supply updated glimpses of our distinct national phrasing.” Can you give an example of how this ferrets out Canadian usage? “We’re looking at the Canadian word keener. It’s such a great word. I’d like to bring into American English.” Oh, I see.

Is there a problem here? Some people certainly think so. “We’re going back now from being a country that establishes its own norms to being one that is almost dictated to from outside,” complained a linguistics professor at the University of British Columbia. And a University of Toronto linguistics professor said much the same. “These little things—like a dropoff among younger people in the use of the famously Canadian ‘eh’ expression—give us an inkling of who we are, how we fit in and where we come from.” Of course, if that is what we want, we have the CBC radio program This is That to do the job.

On the contrary side, a McGill University linguistics professor maintains that it is through the pronunication of ordinary words in day-to-day conversation that differences develop—something a dictionary doesn’t pick up very well. And one author claims Canada is no language island, and global English usage is becoming more common.

But how can that be? Didn’t the uniquely Canadian expression, “double double,” develop in our own Tim Hortons? Oh, wait a minute: Tim’s is now owned by Burger King. Well, at least the expression originated in Canada: it can be our contribution to global English. Just as global English has given us—praise be—the expression, “fries with that?”

Now what’s all this about a dropoff in the use of “eh,” eh? Are those younger Canadians not pulling their weight or something?

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca