Quote:
Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker
In NS, several communities were up to 10% Newfoundland born in the 1920s, especially on Cape Breton.
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This is true and I've seen these numbers before. It's definitely an interesting piece of history, and I wonder how things might have been different had Atlantic Canada maintained more internal migration in later decades (if it had some big cities that attracted more of the people who instead moved to places like Toronto or Calgary in the 1950's and later). But you won't normally see the long-term accent of a place get determined by a minority of 5-10% who move there during a certain period, particularly if it's migrant workers (sometimes upper class people have more impact).
We also need to explain Creignish or Mabou which I doubt offered good enough employment prospects to draw Newfoundlanders in 1920, or had some kind of reverse migration from Sydney or anything like that. In many of those places circa 1900 people were still mostly speaking Gaelic but were on their way to shifting to English.
There is a related question which is how much the culture of a minority in a place counts as being from that place instead of wherever the minority originated. I think that if 5% of people in a town have a certain culture that's just a part of the culture of the town. I don't think the "culture of Halifax minus the stuff that came from Newfoundland" is a useful construct or meaningful way to compare against other cities. And I think we should consider cities that function as regional melting pots to be showcases of those cultures. The city is just the sum of whoever moves there plus what is built by those people over time.
In the same way I think of say Chinese culture as being a part of Vancouver, not exotic or temporary. It's just a part of the city as is whatever stuff came from people who moved from somewhere else in Canada. And increasingly we're getting stuff here that is a blend of Asian and North American influences.
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