Do You Speak Canadian?

What makes a word CANADIAN?

Sometimes it’s origin. Words and terms like DEMOVICTION, RENOVICTION and TRICK OR TREAT originated right here in Vancouver; BUNNY HUG, a synonym for hoodie in Saskatchewan, exclusively, appears to have originated there; and though it was named the American Dialect Society’s 2023 word of the year, ENSHITTIFICATION, or digital platform decay, was coined by Canadian tech guru Cory Doctorow. That makes it ours.

Sometimes it’s frequency. Geographical phrases like DOWN ISLAND and UP ISLAND are primarily used along British Columbia’s west coast, when travelling, say, between Nanaimo and Victoria on Vancouver Island. Climate change-related terms like ATMOSPHERIC RIVER, HEAT DOME and ZOMBIE FIRE (a fire that reignites after smouldering underground over the winter) have also achieved widespread use in B.C., as we’ve seen them so recently.

These are two of six types of Canadianisms, according to lexicographer Stefan Dollinger, a professor in the department of English language and literatures at the University of British Columbia. AS WELL, Dollinger serves as chief editor of the newly released third edition of A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, or DCHP-3, considered the definitive collection of words, expressions or meanings distinctive of Canadian English.

Alongside origin (Type 1) and frequency (Type 5), some phrases qualify by dint of preservation (Type 2). KERFUFFLE, for instance, is Scottish in origin, but Canadian in terms of common parlance nowadays, especially compared with the Americans, who rarely use it.

The verb form of DING, meaning to charge someone unexpectedly, is an example of semantic change (Type 3). The word is widely used in other Englishes and contexts, largely defined as a sharp ringing sound, but only Canadians tend to complain about getting “dinged” 20 bucks for forgetting to cancel their free trial of Apple TV. SOUTH OF THE LINE, it’s uncommon.

Some phrases are culturally significant (Type 4). ELBOWS UP, for example, is loaded with meaning in Canada. Derived from hockey, it describes a rough-and-tumble style of play but has recently become a synonym for Canadian resistance to U.S. tariffs. On the flip side, other terms are considered memorial (Type 6). These phrases are culturally significant too, but in a shameful, colonial-legacy way, like RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL or PRETENDIAN, the latter of which hit the mainstream Canadian lexicon in the last decade, amid a flurry of INDIGENOUS IDENTITY FRAUD scandals, from Joseph Boyden to Buffy Sainte-Marie.

There are 137 new Canadianisms in DCHP-3, including every phrase above appearing in all caps. Compared with the second edition, which padded the word list by roughly 10 per cent, DCHP-3 is a relatively minor update, increasing the scope of the project by just one per cent. Time is a factor. The second edition followed half a century after the initial 1967 edition. DCHP-3 arrives just eight years later, necessitated largely by digital code rot. With the release of DCHP-3, the whole project is finally mobile friendly.

“The bulk [of the funding] went into the rewriting of the code base, on an old code base that no longer worked,” Dollinger told The Tyee. “We decided to do it from scratch, new, and that is very costly now.”

DCHP-3 is a crucial component of a much larger linguistic project: the first full-size dictionary of Canadian English released in more than 20 years, a long-awaited replacement for the outdated Canadian Oxford Dictionary, whose second and final edition was published way back in 2004.

That was at the tail end of what Dollinger calls the Great Canadian Dictionary War of the 1990s, when Oxford University Press came to Canada and cornered the market. They played dirty, according to Dollinger, stoking anti-American sentiment and inflating their collection of Canadian phrases for clout. Winning the war wasn’t lucrative, though. In 2008, after killing its competitors, Oxford closed its offices, fired its lexicographers and left the country. In the decades since, no one has managed to publish a truly comprehensive Canadian dictionary.

If you write for a living, you’ve noticed. Modern spellchecking software relies on U.S. and U.K. dictionaries, creating constant headaches. U.S. English won’t recognize hockey positions like CENTRE and DEFENCEMAN. British English sees typos in “ton,” “traveler” and “tire.” God help you, then, if you’re writing a story set at the Costco “tire centre,” a phrase whose spelling, Dollinger notes, is unique to Canadian English.

But Canadian linguists never say die. They don’t even know the meaning of the word.

An overdue dictionary in the works

Spearheaded by the Editors’ Association of Canada, the Canadian English Dictionary, or CED, is being developed in conjunction with two research units: the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University, and Dollinger’s UBC Canadian English Lab, tasked with the list of official Canadianisms. Editor-in-chief John Chew is aiming to release a print edition and an app by 2028, though work is slow going.

So far, they’re almost done Q.

This is painstaking work. Consider words like “quincunx” — a geometric pattern consisting of five points, or the novels of André Alexis. Is its adjective form “quincuncial” or “quincunxial”? Debate rages. How about a much more loaded Q-word, like “queer”? Its definition has changed considerably over time. Since the release of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary it’s become “politicized,” a brand-new linguistic classification devised for the new CED, Chew told The Tyee.

And then there’s QAJAQ, a decolonized variant spelling for KAYAK. Both terms are part of DCHP-3. As a competitive Scrabble player, not to mention the CEO of the North American Scrabble Players Association, Chew is excited about that one. He’s been keeping an eye out for new high-scoring words since he took over this project in 2022.

“My plan was just to become a low-ranking member of whatever organization was going to be building the Canadian dictionary and use my position,” he said, “to get an early peek at Canadian words that I could bring into the Scrabble dictionary.”

But this isn’t a game, and it’s far from a NOTHING GAME. In addition to practical uses for editors and authors who live in the linguistic gray/grey area between U.S. and U.K. English, a proper Canadian English dictionary is a matter of identity.

“Even Australia has its own dictionary,” Chew said. Canada’s corresponding lack of one, Chew said, “demotes us from being a country in our own right to having our own linguistic variety of English.”

In other words, it’s a matter of SOVEREIGNTY, another new Canadianism by virtue of its cultural significance. Between Quebec separatism and Indigenous rights, not to mention the present-day cross-border tension with the United States, the concept of sovereignty is top of mind for many Canadians.

“There is a deep well of Canadian patriotism when it comes to things that are culturally related, such as our language,” he said. “People want to know what is Canadian and what is not.”

Sometimes you find out the hard way. As a word nerd myself, I was quietly outraged last year when the New York Times Spelling Bee wouldn’t accept the word “unceded.” To my mind the phrase is incredibly common, but as it turns out, that’s because I live in British Columbia, where “unceded” went mainstream amid the Wet'suwet'en pipeline protests of February 2020. According to Google Trends data, it hasn’t caught on in the States, although you can suddenly play it in Spelling Bee.

Decolonizing Canadianisms

From coast to coast, Canadians use English very differently. Ascribing authority only to Oxford or Merriam-Webster amounts to a form of erasure, a problem DCHP-3 has begun to address as it relates to Canada’s racialized communities.

According to Dollinger, after coding, the secondary emphasis is decentring whiteness and decolonization, a difficult task when you’re working with English, or trying to update anything that started in the ’60s. Nevertheless, DCHP-3 had added previously neglected Canadianisms connected to VISIBLE MINORITY groups and regional slang: phrases rooted in Indigeneity, like KOKUM, SKODEN, LAND BACK or SETTLER-COLONIAL VIOLENCE.

It bears mentioning here that one of the six white men who started this project, Charles B. Crate, who did nearly one-third of the work for DCHP-1, was recently found to have served as co-leader of the Canadian Union of Fascists in mid-1930s Toronto. For a while, there was hope that the guy in Toronto was a different Charles B. Crate.

“Now we’ve found out he’s the same guy,” said Dollinger.

Further to that, DCHP-1 once included the phrase “good Indian,” defined as “an Indian friendly to whites; a peaceful Indian.” In other words: an Indian, but good. That’s as classic a case of white-centred linguistics as I’ve ever seen, with the exception of my next example.

DCHP-1 also included (and still includes) seven different variations on the N-word without noting, even once, that it’s an ugly racial slur. Apparently, it’s a term for little fires used to separate trees into chunks. Not in my experience. The ambivalence and ignorance with which this word is defined are downright baffling, unless, of course, Black populations don’t count as Canadian.

That’s the way it’s been for years, of course. I ran into this issue describing my hairstyle while writing Invisible Boy. My proofreader flagged the word afro, which is typically capitalized or italicized, thusly. Either seemed fine, on first blush, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that neither treatment would apply to, say, the updo, the bowl cut, the bob or the mullet — only to racialized styles, like the afro or mohawk. As one goal of my book was to normalize the Black Canadian experience, I insisted that the word, when it appears, be left as is.

There are interesting signs of progress. Among the most curious additions to DCHP-3 is the phrase TO BE A KAREN. Anyone worth their salt knows this particular dig comes from Black Twitter in its heyday, and DCHP-3 notes that the term is offensive to “any woman named Karen.” I would argue that it’s offensive only to Karens who are KARENS, but that’s just semantics, and this is linguistics.

DCHP-3 notes that it’s not a true Canadianism, as the term originated elsewhere and is widely used across North America. Chew notes that it’s well on its way to becoming a common, rather than proper, noun continent-wide — but according to Google Trends data, its usage is five times higher in Canada than in the United States.

Dollinger and Chew could only speculate as to why. Maybe Canadians are more willing to laugh at themselves. Maybe we simply have more Karens per capita. Maybe it’s simply less socially acceptable to ask for a manager in Canada. Talk amongst yourselves. I’ve no idea.

Whatever the case, between “Karen” and “pretendian,” and racialized identity terms like INDO-CANADIAN, AFRO-CANADIAN, and even its elision, AFRICADIAN, it’s clear that no Canadian English Dictionary can claim to be comprehensive without accounting for the voices, experiences and linguistic contributions of everyone who uses the language in this country, even if it might increase the WAIT TIME for this project.

It’s not truly Canadian otherwise.