The Gaelic Substratum in the English of Glengarry County and its Reflection in the Novels of Ralph Connor

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One of the many aspects of the study of Canadian English which the late Walter S. Avis pioneered was the study and analysis of the literary representation of a Canadian dialect, first in his M.A. thesis, “The Speech of Sam Slick” (1954), subsequently in the “Note on the Speech of Sam Slick” in the introductory matter of R. E. Watters’ Sam Slick Anthology (1969), and the application of that study in the edition he prepared of that text for linguistically naive modern Canadian readers. Like all those who work in Canadian English, those of us working on the Linguistic Survey of the Ottawa Valley owe a great debt to Walter Avis, not only for his outstanding work in the lexicography of Canadian English and his studies of the Loyalist based dialects of Southern Ontario, but also for many more immediate favours and services: his whole-hearted support of our project, his answers to queries about particular lexical items, his visits to the project and the commentaries he made on our tapes and our transcriptions of them and, outstandingly, his willingness to let us borrow tapes which he himself had made of Valley speakers, and to let us use them for our own purposes. The study which follows tries to reflect something of our debt by discussing the literary representation of another Canadian dialect, one which is spoken within the area under investigation by the Linguistic Survey of the Ottawa Valley, and one heavily influenced by the Loyalist dialects of Southern Ontario which feature so largely in Avis’s work. The dialect in question is the dialect of Glengarry County, Ontario, and more particularly the two northern townships of Glengarry County, and the representation of the dialect of that area in the Glengarry novels of Ralph Connor.