Speech Differences along the Ontario-United States Border
In the first article of this series I pointed out the great similarity between the speech habits of Ontarioans and those of their American neighbours across the line: both speak a variety of North American English. This state of affairs should not be surprising in view of the early settlement history of the borderlands and of subsequent cultural and social contact along the border.There are, nevertheless, many linguistic features not shared by speakers of English on both sides of the border. In terms of vocabularly I have already illustrated a number of such differences, indicating that, in the main, they probably result from the generalization in Ontario of words current in British English—the speech of thousands of immigrants who have come to Canada during the past century or so.