The Irish Heritage of the English of The Ottawa Valley

Abstract

T H E I R I S H H E R I T A G E O F T H E E N G L I S H O F T H E O T T A W A V A L L E Y IAN PRINGLE AND ENOCH PADOLSKY Carleton University I l o r many years it has been a commonplace among those interested in Ca­ nadian English that the Ottawa Valley constitutes a dialect pocket of excep­ tional interest. Admittedly it has not received the final accolade; no one seems to have alleged that the pure Elizabethan English which popular mythology attributes to Newfoundland can be found in the Ottawa Valley. Instead, the general belief attributes to the Valley a kind of English which is held to be predominantly Irish, or perhaps Irish with some admixture of Scots traits. This belief clearly derives above all from the settlement history of the area. Popular histories of Valley communities refer to the “Ottawa Valley Irish” and to their English as the “Ottawa Valley brogue.” In Ralph Connor’s Glengarry novels Ottawa Valley characters are made to say such things as: “Shure, and it is a dhry night, and onpolite to kape yez talking here. Come in wid yez.” And the brief discussion of Ottawa Valley English in J. K. Chambers’ “The Ottawa Valley ‘twang’” characterizes it (“tenta­ tively” ) as a “colonial Irish dialect.” 1 The importance of the Hiberno-English speech types in the Ottawa Valley region is undeniable. Nonetheless, such claims are certainly too simple. The settlement history of the region and the demographic data of the census records suggest that a number of English dialect types might be expected in the Ottawa Valley area, and, while it would be premature to make precise statements about their characteristics and distribution, the preliminary inves­ tigations of the Linguistic Survey of the English of the Ottawa Valley Region have revealed that this is indeed the case. In the Ottawa Valley itself, and the adjacent areas which share its settlement history, it is possible to distin­ guish, in addition to at least three Hiberno-English speech types, no fewer than six other varieties of English — varieties which are often sharply dis­ tinguished from each other, especially in their phonology, but also in their morphology, their syntax, and their lexicon. E n g l i s h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , v ii, 3, Fall 198 They include, in the first place, the Loyalist-based dialects of the north shore of the St. Lawrence Valley. These are now the only survivors of the type of English first spoken in the area, for the Loyalist settlement of what was to become the Ottawa-Hull metropolitan area has been completely overcome linguistically by the effect of later settlements. The Loyalist vari­ eties are distinguished from adjacent varieties of English most noticeably by the fact that, unlike “General Canadian” English and the Hiberno-English dialects to the north, they have different vowel sounds in cot and caught. This is a trait which they share both with much British English and with the American English of much of New England and New York state.2 Secondly, there are the dialects of the English-speaking areas of the north of Glengarry County. These represent the kind of English spoken by what was originally a predominantly Gaelic-speaking community which learned its English from the Loyalist settlers to the south and west of them. Preliminary fieldwork, especially that carried out by Mrs. Diane Munier, has revealed the occasional use of Gaelic borrowings in the English of rural informants from this area, such as gruamach to describe a gloomy, overcast day. Much more pervasive, however, and just as clearly Gaelic in origin, are various phono­ logical traits, such as the tendency to devoice final and initial voiced sounds, so that very sounds like ferry, and zigzag (in zigzag fence) sounds like sicksack . (This trait also is fairly consistently represented in Connor’s Glengarry novels.) Thirdly, there are two quite distinct pockets of Scottish settlement in Lanark County and Renfrew County to the west of Ottawa. The former was predominantly a...