New Canadian superhero - Acadieman

Canada has always had its share of comic book superheroes. For years, Captain Canuck, Kébec, Northguard and many others (read here for a great overview) have stood on guard for our home and native land. These superheros have mirrored our national makeup, with English and French-speaking heroes battling side by side to rid our shores of evil. But wait! Up in the sky! Is it a Canada goose? Is it an Avro Arrow? No, it's a new Canadian superhero... Acadieman! Huh?

Acadieman is the brainchild of Dano Leblanc, a New Brunswick-based cartoonist. Acadieman is a super-teen who protects eastern New Brunswick (yes, that's where the 'Acadian' comes from) from such villains as Le Living Dead, La Beach and Le Time Travel. Like any self-respecting modern superhero, Acadieman has his own web site (found here), complete with MSN avatars (like the one above, found here), screensavers and music downloads. The unusual thing about Acadieman is that he doesn't speak French or English, but Chiac, the unique mix of Acadian French and English popular among young people in Moncton.

On first impressions, Chiac seems creole-like, with French sentence structure but many, many English loanwords. Some of the English verbs have French endings, such as parker 'to park (a car)' in the sentence J'vas parker mon char 'I'm going to park my car' (Standard French: Je vais garer ma voiture) (example found here). Other English words and phrases are taken as entire chunks (e.g. 'c`est pretty good', 'le language police take over'). As the Wikipedia points out (here), Chiac is actually a mixed language, the result of language contact in a bilingual community, rather than a proper creole (which has its roots in a pidgin language). Such mixed languages are often considered substandard, and Chiac has likewise been referred to as an 'impure hybrid' (Wikipedia).

In an interview with CBC Radio (found here), Leblanc said although the main purpose of creating Acadieman was to entertain, it has thrust him into the role of spokesman for Chiac. He has done presentations on Acadieman and Chiac in New Brunswick schools and for French teachers' association meetings. Although many educators and parents in New Brunswick want the youth to learn standard French and English, they have been willing to listen to Leblanc. Leblanc says you can't negate Chiac or hide it away. Kids who only speak Chiac are shy to express themselves in school, and hearing Leblanc talk about Chiac helps them to feel OK about it.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds for Chiac. Despite pressure from both the French and English-speaking worlds, Chiac seems to have a foothold in eastern New Brunswick. Perhaps the coming of Acadieman is the beginning of a new era of respect for Chiac.

Canadian dialectology: Timhortonese

All businesses develop their own register, the special vocabulary associated with their focus activity. The food business abounds in such registers; we know what kind of food to expect when we hear such terms as 'Big Mac', 'Blizzard' and 'Frappucino'. Regular customers come to pride themselves at their fluency in the register used at such establishments, and look down on the newbies who fumble their way through the simplest order.

The iconic Canadian coffee-and-donut store Tim Hortons has its own unique terminology, some examples follow:

• timmies: usual way of referring to Tim Hortons
• double-double: a coffee with two doses of both sugar and cream
• iced capp: short for Iced Cappucino, the cold coffee drink
• timbits: table tennis-sized balls of donut dough, with glazed or sugary coatings
• roll up the rim: a popular annual contest where customers unroll the rim of their coffee cup in order to see whether their cup is a winner
  

You can get Tim Hortons coffee and donuts in almost every corner of Canada and a few privileged areas of the US (mostly close to the border) but nowhere else in the world - until this year. A request from a general in the Canadian Armed Forces led to the opening of a Tim Hortons outlet in a very out-of-the-way place: Kandahar, Afghanistan. Kandahar is the main Canadian Forces base in Afghanistan, and Canadian soldiers serving six-month terms there were missing their caffeine fix. The outlet now serves up to 1,300 customers a day.

The cross-cultural nature of the Kandahar air base led to an amusing article on CTV.ca (found here) about the plight of non-Canadian soldiers trying to order from Tim Hortons. Soldiers from eleven other countries are taking advantage of the coffee, donuts, bagels and other treats, but their attempts to order require them to learn some Tim Hortons register. This has prompted the following reaction from Kelly Taylor, one of the Tim Hortons employees:

The confusion over the Tim Hortonese has Taylor vowing to put a Tim Horton-English dictionary on the door of the store. "I'm going to write a dictionary and post it on the outside of the door for all the non-Canadians. That's my job for the next week,'' she said.

As can be expected, some of the loudest chuckles are reserved for customers from the US:

The most humorous thing that happens at the Tim Hortons in Kandahar involves Canada's southern neighbours. "We're a bilingual country and we have English and French on the menu sign here, Taylor smiled. "We have gentlemen come up and ask for an apple fritter/beignes aux pommes, or an icecap/glace. It's pretty funny -- they're pretty funny."

Bilingualism and Leadership

A week ago Saturday the federal Liberal party elected a new leader, Stéphane Dion. One of the major criticisms of Mr. Dion prior to the party caucus focused on his language ability. Dion's heavily accented English drew comments such as the following, posted on a Globe and Mail discussion page prior to the vote (found here):

Mr. Dion's English is poor at best. While his vocabulary isn't terrible, his accent is far too prevalent to communicate well with English Canada. Yes, I know Chretien's was worse, but he faced a divided Conservative Party and could pretty much say whatever came to his mind. The new Liberal leader will have no such advantage.

The CBC put it this way (here):

Stéphane Dion, the new leader of the Liberal party, has been criticized for his highly accented English. Some Canadians see it as a roadblock for a future election campaign, as it could hinder his ability to communicate with anglophone Canadians.

The CBC article went on to explore the topic of the Canadian electorate's linguistic expectations of candidates for the job of prime minister. For the first century of Canada's existence, nearly monolingual English speakers such as John Diefenbaker were elected with little concern for their inability in both official languages (Diefenbaker's Conservatives actually won a majority of the seats in Quebec in the 1958 election). But since the time of Pierre Trudeau, Canadian voters have expected their leaders to be true bilinguals. The political parties have responded by nominating candidates fluent in both official languages, such as Brian Mulroney. Jean Chrétien's English was accented but good enough for him to lead his party to three successive electoral victories. Now the Liberals will see if Stéphane Dion proves satisfactory to Canadian voters.

Bilingualism in both of Canada's official languages is not a widespread phenomenon. The 2001 census found that 5,231,575 of Canada's 29,639,090 inhabitants (about 18%) speak English and French. This number does not speak to the issue of fluency. A study of bilingualism in Canada in 2003 found that 12% of the respondents considered themselves "perfectly bilingual", and another 31% said they "could get by in the other (official) language".

Bilingualism is not only important in politics, but in Canada's other great pasttime, hockey. A captain of Les Canadiens de Montréal has high expectations placed upon him, and one of them is the ability to interact with the Quebec French-language media. The current captain of the Canadians is the Finnish superstar Saku Koivu. Koivu speaks Finnish and English, and perhaps other languages, but hardly any French. Although Koivu has played in Montreal since 1995 and been team captain since September 30, 2000, he has still not learned enough French to converse with reporters. This has led to recent confrontations, such as two reported in an article in the Gazette (here), whose sole purpose seems to be to expose Koivu's lack of fluency in French. Jack Todd, the Gazette reporter, ended the article in this fashion:

It is, however, time Koivu learned a little French - enough so that the next time he is ambushed by the likes of Charles Faribault, he can tell him to "go play in the traffic" in the language of Moliere.

In politics and hockey - the Canadian preference is clear.

Big gas taboos

One of the subjects dear to a sociolinguist's heart is language taboos. This week in the House of Commons a slip of the tongue that violated a language taboo derailed a serious question about the environment. While the slip was worth a smile, the venerable CBC's reporting of the slip is worth blogging...

This past Monday (Dec 4) Jack Layton, the NDP leader, rose to ask the PM, Stephen Harper, a question about the environment. The CBC reported it thus on their web site at 2:59 pm, in an article entitled "NDP chief's cheeky question steals the show in House of Commons Monday" (here's the link):

Layton rose in the Commons today to attack the government over subsidies to big oil companies. But he tripped over his tongue and instead asked Prime Minister Stephen Harper if he would finally cancel subsidies to "big oil and big ass." Layton meant to say "big gas."

The slip of the tongue brought laughter from all sides of the House.

Harper jokingly answered that he would "get to the bottom of it." He went on to joke that he wasn't sure if he should take Layton's miscue personally.

Later on that same afternoon (5:40 pm), the link to this article on the CBC web site was replaced with another version of the same story, this time cleaned up--with an explanation of what occurred, but no actual quote. This second article was entitled "Butt it wasn't supposed to be funny..." (link is here):

The House of Commons broke into cheers and laughter Monday after NDP Leader Jack Layton dropped the first letter from the word gas.

Layton was pressing Prime Minister Stephen Harper to cut subsidies to big gas producers, but misspoke.

Layton had a look of conviction as he launched into his stumble, but after a few seconds of parliamentary laughter, he grinned at his own mistake.

Why the change? Were the CBC censors on coffee break when the first "cheeky" article was posted, and only removed the offending word 3 hours later in the "butt" article? Are Canadian Internet readers not ready to face articles with the "a-" word? I'm happy to report that the following morning, the CBC had gone back to providing a link to the "cheeky" article on their main web site. A victory, perhaps, for free speech?

You may be wondering what Hansard (the official record of House business) has done with all this. I am pleased to report that the Hansard scribes reported the gaffe in clear unadulterated English (here is the link), adding with their typical understated style the reaction of the Honourable Members to Layton's goof:

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

The Globe and Mail chimed in with an article appropriately entitled "Does my gas look big in this?" (link is here). One thing we Canadians sure do well is laugh at ourselves!

Beginnings...

Good morning, world!

(drum roll) I have decided that what the Internet needs is a new blog. Not that there aren’t enough blogs out there already, the online universe is awash in them. No, it is painfully obvious that what is needed is a blog about two things dear to my heart – Canada and sociolinguistics. Canada has fascinating language dynamics, as an officially bilingual nation, with an aboriginal language heritage that is rapidly disappearing, plus huge immigrant communities speaking many of the world’s languages. The interaction between language communites in Canada changes on an almost daily basis, and sociolinguistics has much to offer in understanding these changes. But who is drawing this to the attention of the online world?

I propose an occasional blog entry about current news events that combine the theme of Canada and sociolinguistics. I imagine there are others with this same interest, so comments are of course welcome!