The St. Lawrence is just a beast of a river. It's scale is such that it almost seems to have its own category. Picture the view to Quebec looking upstream... even the Mississippi becomes the placid Danube in comparison.
But for European rivers, the Rhine is a lively one. It has a real power and flow you can feel when you're on it, particularly at Basel. |
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That doesn't necessarily mean we all speak alike. There are variations in any regional dialect. Sound changes don't occur at a uniform speed: rural and remote areas tend to be more conservative while linguistic innovation tends to happen in large cities and spread outward. As long as we're all moving in the same direction (say, if a 10 year-old in Timmins speaks the same way a 40 year-old speaks in Toronto) then we're all one dialect. IIRC, there is some evidence that Inland Canadian is starting to break up - the Canadian shift may be moving in slightly different ways across the country, for example. There are some big omissions from that map. The Ottawa Valley still has its twang, parts of BC do their own thing and, well, no one's going to be confusing a native English speaker from Kitchener with a native English speaker from a Northern reserve (Aboriginal Englishes have barely been studied at all). |
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And those guys who went beneath the ice are insane! |
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A "fleuve" is generally more substantial than a "rivière". You can tell which is which by which article ("le" or "la") is used when the generic is dropped. For example: la Seine (rivière) le Rhin (fleuve) le Rhône (fleuve) la Meuse (rivière) le Mississippi (fleuve) le St-Laurent (fleuve) Generally speaking, in French-speaking Canada, "le fleuve" means the St. Lawrence. Although usage drops somewhat as you move away from the St. Lawrence valley. For example, the Saguenay River is also a "fleuve" and is referred to in the masculine as "le Saguenay". But if you're listening to national francophone media and they refer to "le fleuve", everyone knows they are talking about the St. Lawrence. |
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My mom refers to "down east" as "par-en-bas" which almost literally means "down below" but likely means "down the river" or "downstream". "Il vient de par-en-bas." (He's from down home.) |
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...ticle27890648/ |
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In general, francophone Canadian culture is much more "geographically rooted" than anglophone Canadian culture. It's one of the biggest things I noticed when I had my personal "awakening" when as a young adult I transitioned from a primarily anglophone Canadian identity to a francophone Québécois one. |
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For the average English-speaking person in the world there is a pretty good accent consistency from the Ottawa River to the Pacific Ocean. And this accent is also increasingly the dominant one in the non-Acadian areas of the Maritimes (especially in urban areas). This accent also sounds to most people quite similar to the neutral American accent spoken by tens of millions of people in the U.S. Just to give a parallel example. To many Frenchmen (with little experience in Canadian accents), a Québécois and an Acadien sound very similar. Whereas to Québécois and Acadiens the difference is obvious. And to most Québécois, most Acadiens sound pretty much the same. Whereas Acadiens themselves can tell difference between an NB Acadien and a NS Acadien, or a PEI Acadien. Or even a difference between a NE NB Acadien and a SE NB Acadien, or between a SW NS Acadien and a Cape Breton Acadien. I am actually pretty good with Canadian francophone accents. But I am sure to a lot of people they really sound the same. And it's sometimes hard for me to tell a Belgian francophone or Swiss francophone apart from a Frenchman. Unless they use certain specific words. |
Still with the St. Lawrence...
"Un St-Laurent frappé"... a glass of tap water (usually with ice) |
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Except it's potato plants instead of wine grapes! |
I learned something new about the pronunciation of Newfoundland today - or, rather, specific dates.
Until the early 1900s, the pronunciation varied but most people fully pronounced "found" and put the emphasis on "land". So "New-found-laaaaaaand". Lots of old people still say it that way. The Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland (our pre-Confederation equivalent of CBC) standard was that all syllables should be given equal weight but a slight emphasis on "land" was permissible. It was Joey Smallwood who tried to popularize Nyoo-fn'land. The "Nyoo" never caught on broadly, but the "fn'land" did. And weirdest thing was I read it a few days ago in the National Post and went to the Rooms to check it out. They had it almost right. And I never knew these timelines. :haha: And even though the pronunciation has become mostly homogenous across the island, people who were born in the 1940s and earlier tend to still put way more emphasis on "land" than younger people. For them, land is longer than the other two syllables combined. |
I love when Americans say New FOUND LAND - sounds so wrong, and forced :haha:
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"Land" is O.K., as long as it's not "lund". They actually had a funny quote about it in the National Post story:
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I found this data looking at the 1931 census:
Canadian-born, Canadian parentage: Ontario 49% Manitoba 26% Saskatchewan 24% Alberta 20% BC 19% British Isles birth or parentage: Ontario 36% Manitoba 33% Saskatchewan 24% Alberta 28% BC 50% I didn't jot down the figures for Quebec or the Maritimes, where the vast majority of the population would have had multi-generational Canadian roots. Also they didn't have parentage figures beyond "Canadian", "British" and "foreign." What's striking is how British British Columbia really is. Note that at the time it actually had a smaller population than any of the Prairie provinces and since that time it along with Alberta were the provinces most impacted by internal migration. Today whatever difference between BC and Ontario exists is extremely subtle, but I wonder if there was any difference in BC pre-1940 or if those born in BC sounded more "British" then. |
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A new entry in the ongoing investigations of what a Canadian accent is:
I saw this somewhere a few days ago and totally assumed it was American, but then saw a news story about this indicating that he lives in St. Thomas Ontario, and I thought: wow, are things changing? Do people there really sound like that? Because both he and the manager he calls, presumably also in St. Thomas (though she could be in London) sound almost exactly like "neutral-sounding" Americans (aka Ohio, maybe the mountain states, though definitely not Michigan or Chicago). At 1:46 he says "it's just so nice out" exactly like an American, no Canadian raising-style "oat in a boat" about it at all. You will not hear anyone in Toronto sounding like this, and Hamilton and points southwest might be closer to it, but we still do the hoserific "oat in a boat" thing. But this guy is completely bereft of what we normally think of as a Canadian accent. He actually sounds almost exactly like my sister's husband, who grew up in non-redneck Florida. This is amazing to me. I've never heard anyone in Ontario speak like him ever, not even in Chatham or Windsor (much less the rest of Canada, especially the west). I wonder if he's representative of that area, or is he an anomaly? He's really laying on the "whiny Millennial" act pretty thick, so maybe that explains it? I'm confounded. |
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He didn't say much that would lead me to believe that he couldn't be Canadian. |
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