Preface

My native language is English – Canadian English. It was the mother tongue of my mother and my father, both of whom were born in Canada. But it is my mother’s language that was my linguistic model because, like many of my generation, my mother was a homemaker and the one who raised me. My mother’s parents were also born in Canada. Yet if I go back just one generation more, to my mother’s grandparents, one was born in Ireland and the other was born in England, and both my grandfathers were Scots. Each one of my great-grandparents was a pioneer in a new frontier, the rich farmlands of southern Ontario. They all migrated during the 1800s when thousands of Scots, Irish and English settlers went to North America, the new world of opportunity. To trace my roots back to the ancestors of my great-grandparents in the British Isles is murky. The links are long lost. Or are they?

Have you ever wondered how your ancestry affects the way you speak? For me, it is certain that the dialects of my fore-parents are not directly reproduced in my variety of English. Yet in the bigger picture, Canadian English is a product of development from these founding populations of Scots and Irish and English migrants who first settled in what was then known as Upper Canada. As Canadian English evolved over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it developed into the variety I speak, a variety pretty much indistinguishable from other Canadians like me.