8 - ‘Canadian Dainty’: the rise and decline of Briticisms in Canada

Summary

Canadian English is one of the oldest transported varieties of English. Newfoundland, Canada's tenth province, is perhaps the oldest English-speaking colony in the New World, having been claimed by England in 1497, but Newfoundland English must be treated separately from other varieties of Canadian English because Newfoundland had a different settlement pattern and a long autonomous colonial history before becoming a province of Canada in 1949. (See Clarke, this volume.) In this chapter, I deal with mainland Canadian English, that is, with varieties spoken everywhere but Newfoundland.

Mainland Canadian English is also venerable. English-speaking settlers began arriving in the part of the world that would become mainland Canada in 1713 when the French were forced to cede their colonies on the Atlantic seaboard to Britain, under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht which ended Queen Anne's War. Those colonies, called Acadie by the French, became charter members of the Canadian Confederation 156 years later as the provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. In 1763, fifty years after English-speaking settlers began arriving in Acadia, the French lost another war to England and were forced to cede their inland colony on the St Lawrence River, called Nouvelle France, in the Treaty of Paris. At that point, all of mainland Canada came open to English-speaking colonists.

England was a much more avid empire-builder than France had been (Chambers and Heisler 1999) and settlers began arriving in fair numbers soon after.