Genevieve's Journeys

This article is long and quite technical, but it does give a pretty good overview of not only what words we Canadians use, but how we say them. Naturally, we do have similar speech patterns and pronunciation to some of our cousins south of the border, but with a few regional exceptions (most notably, places in The Maritimes and the Ottawa Valley), we are amazingly homogeneous across this vast land, much more so than either the US or Britain, the two main contributors to our Canadian English language heritage. However, despite our physical proximity to the US and their overwhelming influence on us, we still stubbornly and proudly retain British spellings (favourite, colour, etc), if not their idioms. So we say trunk where the Brits say boot, gas rather than petrol and TV, not telly.

We are a blend of our founding fathers and mothers, both direct immigrants from Britain and UEL from the States, but have very much linguistically grown into our own, unique and proudly Canadian skins. I find it fascinating how endlessly varying our common language can be and yet still convey the thoughts we desire to communicate, one to the other. And if our idioms mark us as "not British" (insert proper Brit sniff here) - oh well. We're Canadian, and proud of it! :)