INTRODUCTION

Nova Scotia is one of the predominantly English-speaking Maritime provinces that joined Canada at the time of Confederation. British culture and language have had a dominant presence since the eighteenth century. Initial British settlement in Halifax and the western parts of the province was augmented by an influx of ‘Loyalist’ settlers from the ‘New England states’ fleeing the republicanism of the American Revolution. Prior to English settlement in Nova Scotia, the province was known as Acadia, a possession of France that had had a history of 150 years of French rule and colonization. The French presence remained strong, especially in Cape Breton, where the Fortress of Louisbourg, a bastion of French power, was eventually conquered by the British in 1758. Despite its loss, and the dislocations of the Acadian expulsion in 1755, French remained a minority language.

Before the arrival of Europeans, Nova Scotia was inhabited by Algonquian-speaking people known as Micmacs. (The spelling currently favoured by some, Mi'kmaq or Mi'gmaw, reflects an effort to come closer to Micmac phonology, in which the apostrophe represents a long vowel. In most Algonquian languages, voicing is not a distinctive feature of stop consonants.) Despite some apparent population loss earlier, the aboriginal population of the province has rebounded, and the Micmac language continues to be used, particularly on reserves in eastern Nova Scotia.