32.815, Review: English; General Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Dollinger (2019)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-815. Thu Mar 04 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.815, Review: English; General Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Dollinger (2019)

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Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2021 16:19:30
From: David Robertson [ddr11 at columbia.edu]
Subject: Creating Canadian English

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36632257


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1273.html

AUTHOR: Stefan  Dollinger
TITLE: Creating Canadian English
SUBTITLE: The Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: David Douglas Robertson, University of Victoria

SUMMARY

(xviii + 283 pp.) Here is a book that engages with the process, or processes,
by which the landmark Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles was
conceived, organized, and created. In the telling of this highly specific
history, Stefan Dollinger finds occasion for substantial meditations on
broader social issues that are too often left unaddressed by lexicographers. 

The Preface (xiii-ix) encapsulates this book's purview: an “intellectual
history of...the creation of a Canadian variety of English...by descriptive
linguists”. It intends to communicate across linguists' “silos”, and to a
broad public to show how lexicography works. (Thus the book is amply
illustrated, including simple data tables.) Acknowledgments follow (xiv-xvi).
“A Note to the International Reader” (xvii) notes North American English usage
conventions used.

Chapter 1 tackles the animating question behind the research documented here:
“What is Canadian English?” (1-33). Dollinger's response to this expansive
enquiry is to enumerate various matters entailed by it. There have been
languages spoken in Canada for millennia before any sort of English was, by
cultures massively impinged upon by its arrival and expansion. The value is
noted of recognizing that English brought a linguistic culture which presumed
hitherto alien ideas, e.g. that written treaties gave new rights to White
newcomers, whereas First Nations assumed themselves to be merely agreeing to
share resources. Issues internal to Canadian English include its often
insufficient acknowledgement of diversity and the extraordinarily slow
development of a national and linguistic self-image. A shifting target due to
ongoing immigration's effects, Canadian English speakers also long saw British
English as the standard and only worthy object of study – one powerful effect
of colonialism Dollinger points out. A “Big Six” of 20th-century North
American gradually influenced scholarly and public opinion towards curiosity
about, and pride in, English as spoken in Canada, leading to the milestone
achievement of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP),
editions 1 and 2.

Chapter 2 “The Heritage of Canadian English” (35-63) shows how limited
research on Canadian English was for the first several decades of the
country's modern existence. One slim dictionary of Westernisms and an
elementary volume (more a spelling guide) were virtually everything produced
until mid-20th century, when an undereducated American employee on a
dictionary of Americanisms, Charles Lovell, privately catalogued Canadianisms.
Though he is, ironically, the father of Canadian English, several female
researchers (Helen Munroe, Joan Hall, Faith Avis, etc.), influentially
contributed to the nascent field. But it was Lovell's slip files that became
the nucleus of the first great Canadian dictionary. His independent, driven
life receives attentive examination, illuminating his too short but stellar
career.

Chapter 3, “Avis Pulls It Off” (65-85), tells Walter Avis' crucial role in
seeing DCHP to completion. Like Lovell, Avis was rather an outsider, a former
soldier whose career was spent teaching at the Royal Military College, not a
mainstream academic department. Yet he was trained at Upper Midwest US
universities, a hotbed of intellectual ferment in English linguistics, by
luminaries like Hans Kurath and Charles Fries. Having already gained a solid
research reputation, Avis was a natural candidate to approach to take over
DCHP editorship upon Lovell's untimely death. His duties on this overdue and
financially straitened project inevitably encompassed much of the data
collection; it seems overwork led to his health problems and a shortened
lifespan, as with Lovell.

With Chapter 4 “The 'Technology': Slips, Slips, and More Slips” (87-116),
Dollinger interrupts the historical narrative with an excursus into
dictionary-making. His subsection title intentionally busts myths:
“Dictionaries are Written, Not Edited”. He goes on to explain how
lexicographers' data collecting necessarily involves much evaluation: What
qualifies as a Canadianism? As a reliable source for a given word? As an
appropriate example quotation? As the word's most plausible history? Photos of
DCHP file slips and documentation sheets illustrate these points. Further
discussion clarifies the great deal of organizing entailed in delegating work
among contributors, from data collecting to drafting sections of the final
product. 

Chapter 5 “1967 – Excitement and Hype” (119-141) carefully educates readers
about how amazing it was for DCHP to emerge in print after just 13 years'
formal work. Examples of dictionaries delayed by decades support this point.
DCHP's unique challenge, of justifying the Canadianness of every entry, is
examined. Measures of success in terms of reception and sales are tabulated,
with the added observation that DCHP-1 was so widely praised as to discourage
critical reviews. 

Chapter 6 “Riding the Wave of Success” (143-161) is a take on DCHP's fortunes
following 1967. Multiple published revisions originally foreseen did not
materialize, although for the same financial reasons an abridged edition aimed
at a broader, budget-conscious audience did. Additional misfortunes included
the relatively early deaths of the main researchers of Canadian English and
powerful shifts in linguistic research towards sociolinguistic and Chomskyan
approaches, away from lexicography.

Chapter 7, “A Global Village and a National Dictionary War” (163-195), shows
how the 1980s saw a  rising concept of Global Englishes, influenced by Braj
Kachru's recognition of Inner Circle Englishes (those of countries where
English is typically taught as L1) versus Outer and Expanding Circles.
Canadian English, just as scholars were codifying it distinctly from British
and US standards, was thus re-lumped into the world standard, as against
newer, under researched varieties. Simultaneously, a common perception among
scholars and laypeople that Canadian was indistinguishable from, and dominated
by, US English similarly dampened research and publishing. Market competition
stiffened as well, impelling Canadian dictionary publishers to new, not always
accurate counts of the sheer quantity of Canadianisms that their products
contained. Canadian dictionary-making became a declining business. 

Chapter 8, “Decolonizing DCHP-1 and DCHP-2” (197-217), reevaluates the two
editions of this landmark dictionary in the context of Canada's history of
unquestioned domination by a European, particularly an English-speaking,
ruling stratum. Dollinger looks at the degrees to which these projects have
had awareness of issues of ethnic relations and identity, and responded to
them by imparting such awareness to readers. The second edition has wound up
adding disclaimers to many of DCHP-1's ethnic-related entries, particularly
those on First Nations, to indicate that many such terms are more or less
unacceptable in civil discourse, being predicated on both an imbalanced power
dynamic and an insensitivity to minorities' wants and needs. Substantial
examples are provided, including entries with “Eskimo”,  “Indian”, and
“residential school”. 

The book finishes with Chapter 9, “Is There Really a Canadian English?”
(219-244). The point here is that Canadians have never ceased both doubting,
on some level, whether the answer can be “yes”, and on another, marveling that
they seem to suddenly have a noticeably distinct dialect or dialects. An
ongoing tension rives the national psyche, between wanting to claim a national
identity and fearing overinflating what can seem like a collection of small
differences from the US and Britain. The author muses on the ensuing vexed
question of why Canadian English is not taught in schools, concluding that it
remains up to Canadians themselves what to do with their recent discovery of a
standard national language.

The book closes with information relevant to each chapter, both a section of
Notes (245-255) and suggestions for Further Reading (256-258), as well as a
Bibliography (259-273) and a General Index (274-283).

EVALUATION

Dollinger's style stays conversational, inviting the educated lay reader in
and keeping them engaged by eschewing most technical terminology (any that he
uses shows up first in shock quotes and with plain definitions) and by giving
what I might call a healthy dose of gossip. That is, he wisely humanizes the
figures involved in his bit of scientific history at every turn, showing them
as individuals with definite quirks and troubles, and taking these qualities
seriously as likely motivators of their career paths. He also engages his
target national audience with quite a number of in-group references that will
be all but invisible to the non-Canadian reader – quite a feat, as he is an
Austrian immigrant. (For instance, on page 37 he speaks of traveling “coast to
coast to coast”, i.e. Arctic to Atlantic to Pacific, a phrase common enough in
Canada but absent in, say, the US.) His tone overall is well calculated to
hold the attention of those readers who stand to learn the most from what he
is reporting. 

Another highly laudable feature of this book, worthy of sustained discussion
in this review, is its consciousness of Canada's multiethnic history and
present. Dollinger's overt discussion of the effects on Canadian English of
coexisting ethnolects, and of serious social inequalities among groups, is
exemplary and it bodes well for future research that will idealize (simplify)
linguistic facts less. His strategy of foregrounding First Nations concerns by
starting the book with them and periodically returning to them provides a
continuity of context that enriches the significance of this volume.

One example of how Dollinger integrates Indigenous and lexicographic concerns
is in his discussion (pages 92ff) of the decision to omit all First Nations
place and personal names from DCHP-1. This was partly in order to conserve
space, and in fairness an entire separate volume was projected to present the
sidelined material. But that publication never happened, and the
dictionary-reading public was left with a work that drastically
underrepresented the presence of “Indian” words in Canadian English. The
author indeed could fairly have added further nuance to this topic by
informing readers that such decisions need not be entirely due to a
colonialist mentality; it is typical of dictionaries as a genre to
purposefully omit names, despite the demonstrable fact that a great deal of
spoken language consists of them. 

Another praiseworthy strand of Indigenous acknowledgment in this volume is
Dollinger's repeated involvement of topics related to Chinook Jargon (Chinuk
Wawa; CW), the pidgin-creole main medium of interethnic communication in
British Columbia and elsewhere from the first decades of European contact. The
Canadianism “cheechako” 'newcomer' appears early (33, 39), as does the
Tlingit-derived “hootch” 'homebrew; any alcoholic drink' (85). We also find
“Stick” 'northern interior BC Indigenous people' (94). The section on the
derivation of “Canuck” 'Canadian person' from the Polynesian word “kanaka”
(97-98) is a fine contribution showing that this word, contrary to some
linguistic folklore, is actually unlikely to have come via CW's borrowing of
it. Similarly valuable is the background information on DCHP-1 collaborator
Douglas Leechman's earlier research on CW (115, 152); little of this has been
previously known. Page 133 quotes the pithy accolade of DCHP-1 in a Vancouver
newspaper: “This is a skookum book.” 

To summarize, “Creating Canadian English” provides us with a highly competent
and readable story, diligently researched in archives and by interviews,
written by a scholar working in Canada, in nuanced Canadian English, that all
audiences should find is a helpful introduction to its subject and a clear
call for further community-involved efforts. I rate it highly.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David Douglas Robertson PhD is a consulting linguist who specializes in
Pacific Northwest tribal language work, particularly Salish and Chinuk Wawa.





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