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Kirsten Bell's avatar

I definitely think Canadian English is much closer to English English than American English. I first noticed this when reading Margaret Atwood (long before I moved to Canada), because there were many expressions she used that I thought of as Australianisms but, it turns out, were originally Britishisms* and were in widespread use in Canada as well. When I moved to Vancouver, I had to spend much less time explaining myself than I did in the US. (Although in the US when I lived there, everyone thought Australians were adorably exotic; not so much in Vancouver. Canada is actually where I heard the ‘NAFA’** expression for the first time, where it had travelled by way of the UK).

For example, Canadians are familiar with ‘whingeing’ as a term – at least in Atlantic Canada; Americans aren’t. That said, I heard ‘whining’ used much more commonly in Canada. My sense is that Canadians, much like Kiwis and the English themselves, tend to use the terms interchangeably. (I’ve never heard ‘moaning’ used in the English sense outside the UK.) Wierzbicka’s argument is that only in Australia has it reached the status of a cultural keyword, which seems right to me, given the particular form of nationalism that developed in Australia around ideals of toughness, resilience and fairness (Bruce Kapferer’s work on this is excellent).

Of course, the Kiwis have the ANZACs too as part of their national mythology, but they also have something equally significant to define themselves with, or, rather, against: Australians. Canadians have a similar sort of problem with their more culturally dominant neighbour, which is why ‘being Canadian’ is often defined as much by what it isn’t (being American), as what it is. That’s not to say that it’s not possible to talk about Canadian national identity in positive rather than negative terms (and the British influence on Canadian culture is definitely part of that), but just that it’s harder to articulate, which is why everyone resorts to the ‘polite Canadians’ stereotype (although I will never stop finding that fight scene in ‘Anchorman 2’, where the Canadian news team keep apologising, funny).

Speaking of Fox, I thought her failure to mention Canadians in her discussion of English politeness norms was a significant oversight, given the ways in which Canadians are far more culturally associated with politeness than the English. However, I think there are regional differences in Canada in terms of how politeness is practiced, with an east/west divide in terms of whether politeness is positive or negative (in my experience of living in Vancouver, politeness gets more negative/less 'friendly' the closer to the Pacific you get).

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*Although I claim ‘No worries’ for Australia and will go to my grave insisting that it was ours long before everyone else started using it!

** It means ‘Not another fucking Aussie’, in case you’ve never heard of it.

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Judith Roback's avatar

In reading about your work and your posts It occurs to me that you have learnt or at least been exposed to 4 different Englishes, as well as the cultures in which they are spoken. Did you find Canadians to have a national-cultural style or characteristic similar to “moaning”, “whining” or “whingeing” or in any other ways?

I had read Kate Fox’s 1st edition and have now read the 2nd, and am somewhat disappointed that she ignores Canadians and Canada altogether! In terms of class markers and in other respects we differ, but in many of her observations we do seem closer to “the English” than to Americans or Australians, so perhaps that is the reason for her emphases (and neglect of Canadians)?

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