Stefan Dollinger

The Western Canadian Dictionary and Phrase-Book (WCD) was written in 1912 as a guide for British immigrants who were encountering a variety of English that was “more resistant to British linguistic norms than the conservative Anglophone heartland of Ontario” (Considine 2003: 252). Though the dictionary has been researched in terms of its lexicographical value, relatively little research has examined the historical and cultural reasons as to why a dictionary of western Canadian English was viable at the time it was written. This thesis examines the connections between the WCD and the Canadian Government’s pre-World War I immigration campaign. This includes connections between the writer of the dictionary, John Sandilands, and the Canadian Government through Sandilands position as a proofreader of pamphlets intended to advertise the West that were produced by the Department of the Interior. The thesis also examines how the dictionary participates in a network of literature produced at the time to reproduce a “Promised Land” (Francis 1989) narrative of the Canadian West which became “the dominant perception of the region during the formative years of agricultural settlement” (Francis & Kitzan 2007: IX). This network of literature includes stories by Nellie McClung and poetry by Robert J. C. Stead, who both employ Promised Land narratives in their work. Within these narratives a western Canadian dialect, marked by slang found in the WCD, becomes associated with a heightened morality of its speakers, and is used as a shorthand for values of hard work and honesty. Ultimately, it is argued that the dictionary reflects a dominant, settler, narrative of the West that was pushed by the Canadian Government to ‘sell’ the West.

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In existing lexicographical works on Acadian French English loanwords are underrepresented and often purposely excluded. Despite purporting to represent a comprehensive, modern depiction of Acadian French, lexical works, such as Yves Cormier’s Dictionnaire du français acadien, display demonstrable bias against English loanwords. The disregard for these loanwords results from a general fear that Acadian French is assimilating into the dominant language, English. Using existing theory on language contact as a basis for comparison, I examine the speech and sociolinguistic situation of two Acadian villages, Wedgeport and Pubnico West. This corner of the Acadian diaspora has had some of the most prolonged contact with English and a great number of Acadianisms, as noted by Cormier. Because Acadian writers tend to edit out any traces of English borrowing, transcribed oral interviews were used as source data. Materials were collected from interviews conducted by native speakers from within the community to assure the most reliable representation of the Acadian French variety. There follows a discussion and categorization of the English borrowings found in these materials, taking a qualitative rather than quantitative approach. A proposal is made for future study and potential next steps of a dictionary project using these lexical items as a base for categorization and discussion.

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