Canadian English in its North American context

Extract

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.