From the Globe and Mail: Mark their words, eh?
Posted on January 29, 2005 01:36 AM. Filed under: language.Our yods are toast. Our "eh?" is disappearing from adolescent speech. Young women are showing signs of abandoning our prized raised diphthongs. But gotchies — or gonchies, west of the Alberta-Saskatchewan border — is a vibrant all-Canadian word for underpants.
Indeed, at least 2,000 words in our everyday speech now merit the lexical accolade of "Canadian English." And, national-linguistics-pride-wise (multiword modifiers functioning syntactically as a single word appear with statistically significant high frequency in Canadian English-language newspapers), the good news doesn't stop there.
The folks of Nova Scotia's rural Lunenburg County are hanging on to the only non-rhotic dialect spoken by mainland Canadians of European descent. (They don't pronounce the letter "r" after vowels, in words like "car" and "world.") [continue]