Why doesn’t Dr. Jim speak Canadian, eh?

Since Dr. Jim’s one and only dearie-sweetie-love, Mary, moved this blog from wordpress.org to our own site, there have been a few odd things happening, like some posts that have gotten misplaced in the drafts folder. So, I’m going through them and the ones that can be updated and are worth the effort will be reposted. Here’s one suitably edited.

As my 3 regular readers know, my buddy Dan and I are the editors of the Public Professor column in the Lethbridge Herald. We get various faculty at the U. of Lethbridge to write brief articles about some aspect of their research. Sadly, the Herald does not keep the articles online forever, but I think there is enough of this one quoted that the post still makes sense. It was originally posted

Anyhoo, Dr. Inge Genee in the Dept. of Modern Languages wrote on “Why Canadians Don’t Speak Canadian” back in 2009 (I think).

http://cheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=5125720

She starts with reference to Serbo-Croat, which, with some regional variation, never bothered any native speakers as a label for the way they spoke. But (there is always a but…)

Fast forward to the early 1990s. After a bloody war, Yugoslavia splits up along largely ethnic lines, resulting in the now separate countries of Serbia and Croatia. And now there are also two separate languages: Serbian and Croatian.

What’s happened? Didn’t the linguists decide that it was one language? Can countries just go ahead and declare not only political but also linguistic independence? Who gets to decide when something is a language or a dialect or an accent?

From here Dr. Genee goes on to discuss the rather blurry distinction between a “dialect” and a “language”, but you’ll have to read the whole thing on site (click the title above), because I don’t think I should reproduce the whole thing here (and its only 600 or so words), although I can’t miss quoting (pun not intended) this:

So if the Serbs and the Croats feel the political need to call their varieties Serbian and Croatian and insist that they are separate languages, they can go ahead and do that. You might say: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

So, where does this leave Dr. Jim’s mother tongue?

Canadians don’t speak Canadian because they themselves don’t feel the need to call it that way. They are happy to call it English… All we need is some really pressing reason to distinguish our variety from all these other varieties of English. A language ultimately is “a dialect whose speakers feel it is important to insist that it is a language.”

So now you are enlightened. Now, some good old Canadian Culture.

IT’S CHILLY BEACH!

Oh heck, one more won’t hurt, eh?

Now, back to work on an emergency article for Saturday!

For all of the Public Professor articles, go here.

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