Stefan Dollinger
UBC Vancouver, Canada

Two contiguous national varieties of English in comparative perspective:
the complex case of lexical variation in Canadian English and American English

English is an “unusual” language in a number of ways, a statement which is particularly true for conceptualizations of its pluricentricity. What is the norm for most other pluricentric languages, i.e. that national or supra-regional varieties are contiguous, i.e. adjacent across international borders, is the absolute exception for English: with the exception of the Northern Irish-Irish border, the Canada-US border is the only contiguous international border in the English-speaking world that is not geographically separated by a body of water. This fact, it is argued in the present paper, has led to a paradoxical neglect of pluricentric forces in contiguous Englishes, which will be explicated in relation to the Canada-US situation. Frequent parallels will be offered to the Austrian-German situation, which has become paradigm-establishing since Clyne’s (1984) ground-breadking work.

While a somewhat pluricentric approach is implicit in much work on the Canada-US border (e.g. Avis 1954, Chambers 1994, Boberg 2000 or Dollinger 2012), the concept of plurcientricity as developed by Clyne (1984) and colleagues (see, e.g., Muhr 2012) has not yet been fully applied in the context. The present paper attempts to do so with a focus on lexical variation, which in some English-language studies is considered as “unimportant’ for identity creation (e.g. Kirk 1987, oral paper response 2012). It will be shown that lexical variants do their fair share of identity work between CanE and AmE varieties along what has been called the “longest unguarded border in the world”.

The data behind this paper has been collected from 2008 to 2014 in a number of written questionnaire surveys (Dollinger forthc.) and includes more than 1200 respondents. The data is sociolinguicially fully documented and provides, apart from regional information, apparent-time scenarios of linguistic change. Twelve lexical variables will be presented with data from British Columbia and adjacent US regions, which include the interesting cases of cube van ‘moving truck’, all-dressed ‘pizza toppings’, take up #9 ‘going over the answers’, P.E. ‘gym class’, parkade ‘parking garage’ and Vancouver Special ‘type of detached home’. The case studies suggest that lexical variables, given their regional dissemination and apparent-time progressions, do indeed constitute – quite in step with research on Austrian German and German German (e.g. Muhr 1989, Ammon 1995, Schrodt 1997, Ammon 2004) – a highly important field, one that has largely been neglected by English variationist sociolinguistics (see Boberg 2005 for the rare exception beyond a pluricentric framework).

      Canadians may be told, off and on, that the linguistic differences are “small” or “negligible” between their varieties and American ones and they may indeed feel that “the line” is not as big a linguistic divide as it is in other parts of the world; yet the accumulated data clearly shows more nuanced patterns, which are at times in striking contrast to such statements. Unlike the Austrian-German situation, internal linguistic variation (Sprachschichten) (Wodak et al. 2009) plays only a minor role in the Canadian context. While the old and new world scenarios are surprisingly similar on many levels, they are also quite different in at least this way.

References

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