As a mountaineering enthusiast who holds a life membership in the Sky Line Trail Hikers of the Canadian Rockies, as well as the 1,000-miles emblem of the companion order of Trail Riders, I have made acquaintance with persons from most of the provinces. Mentions of my lexical interests, tracing word origins, have often given rise to impromptu discussions of Canadian speech. These trail-side sessions, while interesting, have rarely proved instructive; the average Canadian is seemingly better informed about American speech than the American is about Canadian, but neither is familiar with the background of his own language. A minority were of the opinion that Canadian English is essentially British English, citing the prevalence of -our and -re endings, as in labour and centre, together with such variants as analyse-analyze, licence-license, cheque-check, and pyjamas-pajamas. A Kansan observed, “Canucks say ‘in hospital’, just like in British whodunits, and not ‘in the hospital’, like we do.“

L'enquête linguistique, faite durant l'été de 1954 sur la côte sud de la Gaspésie, à Bonaventure, s'insère dans un groupe d'enquêtes dont le but est d'établir un Atlas linguistique de la région gaspésienne.

Comme on a déjà décrit cette région dans ses grandes lignes et signalé sa richesse en matéiaux linguistiques, nous nous contenterons, dans cet article, de faire les remarques générales qui s'imposent sur la paroisse qui nous intéresse, et de donner un bref aperçu phonétique des matériaux recueillis.

Bonaventure, une des plus vieilles paroisses de la côte sud de la Gaspésie, fut fondée vers 1774 par des Acadiens en quête de terres nouvelles où habiter. Depuis lors, ceux-ci se sont multipliés au point de former l'agglomération la plus considérable du comté, et ce, presque sans apport d'immigrants étrangers.

In the first article of this series I pointed out the great similarity between the speech habits of Ontarioans and those of their American neighbours across the line: both speak a variety of North American English. This state of affairs should not be surprising in view of the early settlement history of the borderlands and of subsequent cultural and social contact along the border.

There are, nevertheless, many linguistic features not shared by speakers of English on both sides of the border. In terms of vocabularly I have already illustrated a number of such differences, indicating that, in the main, they probably result from the generalization in Ontario of words current in British English—the speech of thousands of immigrants who have come to Canada during the past century or so.

Fondée à Québec en 1902, la Société du Parler français au Canada est sûrement la doyenne des sociétés de linguistique au Canada. Seule, croyons-nous, The American Dialect Society, est de fondation antérieure en Amérique du Nord, cette dernière ayant vu le jour en Janvier 1889. La fondation de la Société du Parler français fut l'oeuvre de l'abbé Lortie et surtout d'Adjutor Rivard qui demeure le pionnier des études de linguistique française au Canada.

Le but de la Société fut l'étude de la langue parlée: phonétique, lexique, morphologie, syntaxe. Pour mener à bien cette étude, on organisa une vaste enquête par correspondance qui devait durer un quart de siècle. Les résultats de cette enquête étaient ensuite étudiés en séances d'études, par un groupe de chercheurs, mis sur fiches et versés dans un immense fichier d'où sortit plus tard le Glossaire du Parler français au Canada.

What is a Canadian? Have we who call ourselves Canadians a distinctive culture, a distinctive way of life and thought? Or are we “American” or “British”? Or are we perhaps in the unhappy position of being nothing but reflections of two great, yet different, nations? These questions are exercising the minds of a great many people today, and not just within our own borders. To be sure, the historian and the geographer have their answers: the economist has his. And the ethnologist has yet another. But none of them are quite satisfactory. Perhaps the best answer will soon be provided by another scholar—the linguist. And his will embrace those of other scholars and be better than theirs because it will be based on better evidence.