A few years ago, a writer in a Canadian magazine complained that the word snye was not defined in any dictionary even though the Canadian Board on Geographical Names had certified it as “a lawful and proper generic term.” Later, another writer in another journal complained that none of his dictionaries included the word mukluk. About the same time, a Canadian novelist writing about a semi-rural part of Queen’s, near New York City, referred to a character living “near the end of a concession road”; unwittingly, he was using a term that would be quite unintelligible to Americans and, no doubt, to some Canadians. Still another Canadian, a historian, having found the word carcajou in an eighteenth-century document on the fur trade, glossed it as “the American badger”; had he had access to a Canadian dictionary, he could have ascertained that carcajou was a common traders’ synonym for wolverine, the word having come into Canadian English from Canadian French, the coureur de bois having borrowed it from the Cree, who also gave the English traders the term quickhatch, yet another Canadian synonym, one that entered another door, so to speak.

These anecdotes illustrate the long-felt need for readily accessible information about Canadian English, past and present. Happily, the situation has much improved in recent years, ever since the first volume of the Dictionary of Canadian English series became available in 1962; this series, completed in 1967 and revised in many particulars since, was the first extensive attempt to satisfy the need for Canadian dictionaries. To this series belongs the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (Toronto: Gage, 1967), which attempts to provide a historical record of words that are peculiarly Canadian.

Saltchuck? Skookum? Oolichan? Saskie? A Squamish? Saskabush? Slough? …How many Vancouverites are familiar with these words? How many know their meaning or meanings? How many have heard them used or actually used them? All of the words in question should be at home in the Vancouver area, some in British Columbia generally or even in the wider area of the old Pacific Northwest. A traditional dialect investigation would have localized such words, pinpointing on a map in a linguistic atlas the spots where they cropped up. Recent urban sociodialectal linguistic surveys, however, have been emphasizing the social rather than the geographical variability of language. In the recently completed Survey of Vancouver English (SVEN) it was decided to include a short component (Section VI) in the questionnaire that would elicit information about local words—a mere 26 questions out of a total of 1,058. This section aroused the interest of many of the informants who were able to add a considerable body of useful data to what was known about this group of words.

We interviewed a total of 240 informants over a period of six years. Included were equal numbers of males and females, divided into three age groups (old, middle, young) and fitted into four socio-economic classes which could be labelled lower working class, upper working class, lower middle class and upper middle class. If the informants knew the local lexical items they were asked the questions: (1) What does this word mean? (2) Have you ever heard anyone say it? (3) Do you use it yourself? In some cases questions were asked about pronunciation and spelling.

Like all pidgins, the lexicon of Chinook Jargon has a number of sources; although the core vocabulary is chiefly of Chinookan and Nootkan origin, English and French have also made large contributions, the percentage of each varying from time to time and from place to place. As Sankoff (1980: 145) points out, “Chinook Jargon remained highly variable throughout its history. Its vocabulary changed radically over time depending on the locus and proportions of its various groups of speakers, and because of the increasing dominance of English over time.” While most of the lexical items in the Jargon have been more or less satisfactorily accounted for, especially those of French and English origin, there remain a score or so of words for which an etymology either is not recorded or is of dubious accuracy. For some time, I have been attempting to track down the origins of as many of these ‘mystery words’ as possible, or to offer more probable sources than those usually cited. In this paper, I deal only with those items whose origin is apparently in or through French.

Having lived in both Quebec and Newfoundland, without being native to either, I often note the similarities between the two that transcend linguistic boundaries: ancient settlement, isolation, survival, the sense of tribe, la nostalgie des Vieux Pays, the wealth of folk song and folklore, the strength of the family, the proud sense of identity with a place and with a history. This paper, then, starts with a reverberating comment from Jean-Paul Vinay, another CFA (a come-from-away, Newfoundland term for one who is not native-born) who was born across the Channel from me, and whose early training as an angliciste corresponds to mine in French language and linguistics. JPV wrote (1979:60):

In the linguistic literature much is made, both implicitly and explicitly, of metalinguistic abilities but little is seen on the role of individual differences. The role of individual differences in ambiguity detection and resolution is discussed here as an example of the range of individual variation in shared abilities of the metalinguistic type.

It is not the case that all reader/hearers of the language possess the same linguistic abilities with respect to metalinguistic tasks. From a theoretical point of view, linguists have typically assumed it was the case and necessarily so for postulating an ideal competence grammar. But in doing so we have often come to assume that such basic metatheory considerations show up reliably and uniformly even in performance tasks. There is a large and growing body of evidence to remind us that this is not so. Certainly, it holds true neither in the areas of paraphrase nor in ambiguity detection and resolution, two of the more basic metatheoretical premises, and it may not be so in other areas of language either. Very simply, apparently shared linguistic abilities operate on the same type of a graded continuum scale that cognitive abilities of a more general sort do. Having benefited from the postulation of abstract mental structures for ideal speaker/hearers, we are once again recognizing the importance of individual differences in defining the nature of psycholinguistic tasks, as well as the nature of language abilities.

Si la traduction peut bénéficier des enseignements de la linguistique théorique, il est possible qu’à son tour, de par son ancrage dans la pratique quotidienne des langues en contact, elle parvienne à éclairer certains problèmes de langage. C’est donc un regard de traducteur que nous jetons sur la ponctuation.

Longtemps celle-ci est demeurée l’affaire des grammairiens, des typographes et des pédagogues qui s’efforcèrent d’en régler l’usage, mais elle intéresse aujourd’hui les linguistes, habitués à observer, décrire, classer, expliquer, éventuellement désireux de rationaliser des habitudes fondées davantage sur la tradition que sur des principes explicites. La revue Langue française y consacre en effet une livraison, dirigée par Nina Catach, dont en guise d’introduction nous présenterons quelques articles susceptibles d’intéresser les traducteurs.

Les auteurs anciens et modernes ne s’entendent guère sur la définition de la ponctuation. Selon Nina Catach, il faudrait retenir deux définitions, l’une “extensive,” l’autre limitée aux signes “intérieurs au texte, en général explicites, discrets, formant système” (1980:19), et qui sont “communs au manuscrit et à l’imprimé” (1980:21). La “ponctuation de mots” (blanc, apostrophe, trait d’union, trait de division) et la “ponctuation de texte” (alinéas et paragraphes, par exemples) viendraient alors compléter la “ponctuation de phrases” (virgule, points, etc.). La ponctuation ainsi comprise s’inscrit dns le cadre de l’ “orthotypographie, qui recouvre tous les aspects de l’orthographe …relevant essentiellement de l’autorité des ateliers d’imprimerie, et qui sont explicitement traités comme tels dans les codes et manuels typographiques” (1980:20).

One of the recent developments in sociolinguistics is the investigation of the relationship between a speaker’s personal disposition or cultural value system and his language behaviour. William Labov (1963) notes that a tendency of the inhabitants of Martha’s Vineyard to modify their pronunciation of diphthongs relates to their feelings of resentment towards intruders from the mainland United States. In a later publication, Labov (1964:94) observes that language may be viewed as a system for integrating cultural values, and he cites the conflict of value systems as a probable cause for the failure of students to acquire Standard English despite their exposure to 12 years of teaching. Although in many instances value systems may closely parallel social classes, certain types of values, such as those associated with political and religious persuasions, for example, cut across socio-economic classes. It follows from this that, by isolating attitudes from socio-economic class descriptions, a more accurate assessment can be made of their effects on language behaviour.

In English-speaking Canada, and particularly in British Columbia, some Canadians identify themselves culturally with Britain and its people, some with the United States, and others actively seek a uniquely Canadian identity. The reasons for these differences in outlook are not difficult to find, given the history of the settlement of Canada and of its political and economic development. Nor is it surprising that Canadian English has been characterized as “a dialect which resembles American English in some respects and British English in others and includes, at the same time, a great deal that is significantly Canadian” (Avis 1966:19). This paper attempts to show that the attitudes referred to above are reflected in language usage.