May I begin by stating an advance disclaimer of any intent on my part to disparage the work of any preceding scholar, North American or otherwise, or to assert that the problems I am examining are in any way peculiar to this continent. If most of my examples are chosen from the English of the Western hemisphere, and particularly from the United States, the choice simply reflects my own inexperience. Reared in another culture, one might have cited analogous examples from Northern Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Indonesian, Burmese, or Arabic. In fact, Kloeke and Leopold respectively — to cite random examples — have commented on the social forces operating to produce present-day Afrikaans and mid-century West German; and the debates over the shape of standard Norwegian and standard Czech are matters of historical record, along with the milder discussions of the nature of standard Canadian English.

The well-known names of Labrador, St. John’s and Newfoundland have variant pronunciations among the older speakers of the oldest communities on the Avalon Peninsula in southeast Newfoundland. The following description is based on field interviews; made during the summer of 1960. It is important to note that possible trends and changes in pronunciation in the younger and middle generations have not been examined; the informants ranged in age from two in the 40s and 50s up to 94 years. Almost all were associated with the fishery since childhood.

This paper should be considered a sequel to the paper read at the meetings of the Canadian Linguistic Association at Kingston in June 1960 and to be published in the Proceedings of the Learned Societies of Canada; in the first paper, the linguistic theories of J. R. Firth (and which are summarised in section 1.0. 1.1, and 1.11 of this paper) were outlined, and in this article the procedures at the different levels (Firth himself has used the term “spectrum analysis”) of the analysis of a text are described and copiously illustrated from the works of Firth and his associates. These methods have been developed by Professor Firth and his colleagues in London on the lines of the linguistic theory promulgated by Professor Firth and adumbrated in the original paper. This article concludes with a detailed bibliography of the writings of Firth and his colleagues; reference is also made to the work of other scholars who have discussed Firth’s linguistic theories.

It is unfortunate that in the field of English studies the science of linguistics has been largely neglected in many Canadian universities. The reasons for this neglect are varied. But the results are always the same: students lamentably ignorant of the most elementary facts about the English language. I have heard an English honors graduate from one of our universities describe Chaucer as “the best of Old English authors.” I have met teachers of English in our schools who complained that, in spite of all their courses, they did not feel equipped to teach English grammar and composition and “hated’ the school “language periods.”