User talk:Gwasaneth

Hmmm... I'm a tad tardy ain't I? Anyways, WELCOME TO WIKIPEDIA! JackLumber, 14:43, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Canadian English
Not knowing much about deciphering IPA, would it be possible to rephrase your additions in terms a layperson could understand? In particular, I still don't know whether you make mention of the items you deleted concerning the pronunciation of "ou" and "o" in parts of the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island. Fishhead64 17:15, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for BC English expansion
Nice to have some documentation to back up my apocryphal observations on the Talk page! The IPA/phonological details I didn't know, and there's still special lexical usages and syntactical/idiomatic forms that are BC-specific. Harder to track regional/town accents but it would make an interesting study; the city of Vernon in particular has a side-of-the-mouth snarl that always amazes me when I tie the accent to the place, as is always the case. In the Interior, especially the Cariboo, Thompson and Fraser Canyon, there's a natural/historical connection to accents of the US South and West, partly consciously cultivated from cowboy/country music culture but also built into the local paradigm since day one; many early non-native settlers in key town were from the States; either from there or one of the British Isles in fact; such that old-timer accents in a place like Lillooet or Lytton can be an interesting blend of American/cowboy/Dixie twang with Britishisms; this is all dying off and broadcasting has of course homogenized English across the board even in rural regions (where local usages and accents were formed and sheltered by shared isolation). On the Coast, there's another brand of this mixing of British and American elements, plus a healthy dose of Maritimer/Newfie mixed in.

My apocryphal stories of Easterners' reactions and observations concerning English in Vancouver are many and maybe I've already listed them on one of the Talk pages associated with Canadian speech Talk:Canadian English, Talk:Canadian words maybe. One thing I remember clearly is a colleague (a transplant from TO) who remarked on how "hick" native BCers/Vancouverites sounded; I pointed out to him that he was the one on different turf and this was the native accent; also cropping up in the media for awhile was something that had to do with a particular way native Vancouverites allegedly say the city's name "ew" instead of "oo"; as if we were saying it WRONG!!! :-0 ;-). An old edit on Canadian English somewhere (now gone, I think) used to assert while there were other accents to be found in Western Canada "none of them are really Canadian in flavour"; that struck me as very chauvinistically Central Canadian/Maritimer as a bias, and seemed to imply the cowboy-twang thing that Easterners cannot help but notice in Calgary or BC, and possibly also mid-Atlantic post-Scots, post-Irish accents which are fairly common both among acclimatized expats as well as their offspring and in those around them (and which do not resemble Maritime accents in the least).  Vancouver Island and the smaller Islands in particular, as well as Kerrisdale and parts of the North Shore, are also hold-outs of certain turns of phrases and the occasional prononciation that are distinct Britishisms, or were (i.e. dating from colonial times and the century-long contact with other parts of the Empire such as the Raj, Oz, Kenya, S. Africa).

Anyway, until I saw your cite, I had no idea there actually were any linguistic or cultural papers on English in BC; nice to know, even if the IPA goes in one eye and out the other....Skookum1 16:26, 5 June 2006 (UTC)