People Talking
Some say Newfoundland’s distinctive dialects are under threat, but is it really true?
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As the groceries moved toward me along the conveyor belt, I couldn’t help but notice the Newfoundland and Labrador provincial flag printed on a white tub. I stopped scanning the groceries and looked at the container of Newfoundland-style salt beef. The Winnipeg grocery store I worked at was a long way from the island where lots of my fondest childhood memories were made, but the flag brought me right back to the friends, family, kitchen parties, walks on the beach, and lobster suppers that I associate with Newfoundland.
The man who was buying it, probably in his late 30s, said he was from St. John’s.
As often happens when people with ties to Newfoundland meet on the mainland, he started sounding more and more like a Newfoundlander as the conversation went on. When the subject turned to dialects, he said something that surprised me. He and his friends in Newfoundland don’t speak differently than people on the mainland. “Well,” he said, “a lot of the time you use the accent it’s kind of as a joke nowadays.”
But in Brown’s Arm, NL, a town of about 500 people in Central Newfoundland’s Notre Dame Bay, where my dad’s side of the family comes from, the Newfoundland dialect is alive and well. Younger people don’t all speak the same way as their older family members, but they certainly don’t sound like folks in Winnipeg. According to what this guy at the grocery store was saying, Newfoundland dialect is something of the past.
Some people, like the man at the grocery store, hold the attitude that Newfoundland culture is dead or dying, that it’s slowly but surely being absorbed into the behemoth that is North American mass-media culture. At the same time, many Newfoundlanders — and other Canadians — see the dialects as central to Newfoundland identity.
The way these dialects developed has a lot to do with Newfoundland and Labrador’s history and geography. Though the English arrived for the first time in 1497, according to a 1982 paper by Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) linguist Sandra Clarke, it wasn’t until the 1800s that most of Newfoundland’s European population began living on the island year-round. Even then, almost no Newfoundland communities were connected except by boat. This meant that generations of people had relatively little contact with other communities in Newfoundland, let alone with mainland North America. This isolation helped differentiate their speech from the rest of Canada and from each other.
Newfoundland speech and culture stand out from the rest of the country, but cultural changes in the past century have connected Newfoundland to mainland Canadian culture and speech patterns.
One major change was when the British Dominion of Newfoundland, merely a Canadian trading partner until the late 1940s, became a Canadian province. Newfoundlanders voted in a referendum on the province’s future, opting for a responsible government by such a narrow margin that Canada won in a redo in 1949.
Since then, Newfoundlanders have been getting a lot of the same media as the rest of Canada. But despite the mainland influence, Newfoundland speech patterns have been resilient.
Urban Newfoundland
The late-afternoon sun shone down on the orange Gulliver’s taxicab as it headed down Portugal Cove Road on its way from St. John’s International Airport to George Street, the city’s iconic pub-and-bar-lined street.
At 65, the driver’s way of speaking nestles perfectly into the category of “Older, educated guy from Newfoundland” he spoke clearly and eloquently while bending his vowels like only someone who grew up on the Rock could.
“Well, the only thing that’s really left of real Newfoundland is rural Newfoundland,” he said. “St. John’s has just changed a lot.”
Lili MacAllister, a 32-year-old St. John’s artist, feels that her way of speaking is distant from traditional Newfoundland English. She says this isn’t rare in her city, which makes up roughly half of the province’s population. “I don’t really think I have an accent,” she said. “I’ve lived away and I’ve lived in town, and nobody’s said I have an accent.”
She added that in some cases, St. John’s accents have changed so much that people from rural Newfoundland need to speak differently to be understood by them.
“I’ve worked with coworkers from the bay that when they talk on the phone, they have a ‘phone’ voice,” MacAllister said. “They have to cover their accent to try to speak more clearly so that people can understand them.”
This is an example of the pressure that many Newfoundlanders feel to speak with less of a traditional dialect. Part of this pressure may come from mainland influences, but there are also negative views of local dialects within Newfoundland itself.
The 1982 Clarke study showed that Newfoundlanders were proud of their dialects, and that people in the capital region saw people with strong accents as friendly, honest, and likeable. However, they also saw people with strong accents as more incompetent and having less social status.
Over generations, these pressures have changed the way people in St. John’s speak. Some say the dialects are dead, but it turns out to be more complicated than that.
People in St. John’s, a city with a heavy presence of Irish ancestry, traditionally speak in a way more similar to Irish English than the rest of the province. There’s often a stretch put on vowels that come before the letter “L” in the middle of words such as in “milk,” “call”, or “old.” These examples come from The Dialect Atlas of Newfoundland, MUN’s database that documents features of dialects from around the province.
Even though Newfoundland accents are becoming less prevalent in St. John’s generation by generation, they aren’t disappearing. Many people in St. John’s speak with some sort of regional accent features depending on where they are and who they’re with.
A 1991 study by linguists Clarke, Amani Youssef, and Ford Elms published by Cambridge University Press found that younger generations in St. John’s still have many of the same Irish-Newfoundland accent qualities when they speak to each other, meaning that the use of these qualities is changing, but not disappearing.
A 2012 paper by Michael Collins of the University of Toronto explains that many Newfoundlanders have what is called a diglossia, a common phenomenon in minority language communities, where people switch between ways of speaking in different contexts. Mainland Canadian English comes with a certain prestige, motivating people to adopt it in professional settings, explains Collins.
Collins gives the example of Krystin Pellerin, who acted as a police officer in The Republic of Doyle, a CBC TV show about private investigators in St. John’s. The show starred many Newfoundland-born actors, and some took note of the strong Irish-Newfoundland accent Pellerin has in the show, which she didn’t have in past performances on the mainland. This led to social media accusations of the accent being fake.
According to a 2010 Clarke paper, many in the city still use some local language features in work settings. This includes what are called elevated vowels, which are given more emphasis and sometimes a higher pitch than what we’d find in Winnipeg. Her paper gives the words “cure” and “poor” as examples, where the vowel is more stretched (like it is in the word “tourist”) than it is in people from the prairies.
An example of Newfoundland speech qualities at work is found in long-time Hockey Night in Canada announcer Bob Cole. Cole has lived in Newfoundland his whole life and travelled from St. John’s to the mainland virtually every weekend during hockey season from 1973 to 2014.
Although Cole doesn’t have a strong accent, some of his vowels and tone reflect traces of the Irish Newfoundland accent he may have spoken with more prominently in his youth. The “Newfoundland” in the way he speaks on air can also be found in his simple, genuine, and sometimes humorous delivery, qualities almost all visitors see in Newfoundlanders.
Rural Newfoundland
The to-the-point and relaxed attitude many have appreciated in Cole can be found all over the island. A family friend who lives very close to Brown’s Arm told me when something bad would happen to her dad, he’d simply say “Ah, what odds?” If it was going to happen, it was going to happen. What’s the point in stressing about it? I still say that to myself in my head to get perspective in stressful moments.
Peoples’ relaxed attitude combined with a warmth you wouldn’t necessarily find as much in other parts of the country are what make rural Newfoundland what it is, in addition to being a preservation ground for traditional Newfoundland speech.
MUN professor Phillip Hiscock says many think of the St. John’s area as Irish-settled and the rest of the Island as English-settled, with most rural Newfoundland accents sounding similar to Western or Northern England. However, he says the influences are more diverse than that.
“It’s easy to say there is an English-based and an Irish-based dialect,” Hiscock said in a 2018 article by the provincial tourism agency that appeared in the Globe and Mail examining the intricacies of Newfoundland English. “That ignores many other things: the Scots-influenced speech of the Codroy Valley area, the French-influenced speech of the Port au Port area, the Inuktitut-influenced speech of the North Coast of Labrador, and so on.”
As a result, a day trip through rural Newfoundland lets people hear a wide array of different accents, separated by relatively short distances.
“As I travel the island, I still hear the differences,” said Newfoundland-born comedian Mark Critch in the Globe and Mail article. “I brought a friend from Ireland to Newfoundland and he was amazed at how one community would sound like Cork, while another like Wexford.”
Clarke’s 2010 paper details studies that have shown rural Newfoundlanders to use lots of local language features in casual speech. The most common are Th-stopping (dropping TH sounds and replacing them with either a D or T sound) and adding an “S” after certain verb conjugations (“I must get my wallet before I goes to the store”).
Despite rural speech still changing through the generations, both rural and urban Newfoundlanders consider these parts of the island to be rich with traditional Newfoundland parlance.
Barry Porter, 67, is a proud Newfoundlander. He’s a former director By the Bay, a museum in Lewisporte, NL. He’s lived in the central part of the island most of his life, having grown up and currently living in Porterville, NL, just a short walk from Brown’s Arm, where my dad grew up.
Porter says that although accent change in his part of the island may not be as dramatic as in St. John’s, there have been changes.
“Well, it’s not a lot of change. I mean people are probably speaking better English now than, say, back in my parents’ day because of education I suppose,” he said with an accent typical to Porterville. “The smaller outports have stronger traditions and there’s less influence from the mainland.”
However, he says there has been incremental change, and this includes disappearance of words and expressions unique to Newfoundland, such as the word “skint,” which people would say to mean beautiful.
“The younger crowd’s not picking it up and not repeating it. Maybe because it was slang or not perfect English,” he said, adding he finds this in his own community and in others.
There’s evidence that speech insecurity is part of the reason.
The education system has played a part in causing Newfoundland speech insecurity, according to the 2010 Clarke paper. “If anything, schools have helped to reinforce the idea that traditional local speech is ‘incorrect’ and ‘ungrammatical,’” it reads.
It says in the 1960s, rural Newfoundlanders wanting to attend MUN had to take an extra speech course that would change their dialect.
Porter says though things change over time, he’s proud of Newfoundland speech. “It makes me proud if somebody is comfortable talking in the old fashion way,” he said. “More power to them. They’re keeping the Newfoundland dialect going.”
Critch said in the Globe and Mail article that this regional pride is common throughout the island. Despite the negative stereotypes, he said many Newfoundlanders are also very skilled and imaginative communicators.
“Newfoundlanders are definitely proud of the use of language. And nobody can turn a phrase like a Newfoundlander,” he said.
“That’s one reason we have such good writers but it’s also why we have such great talkers. Rex Murphy and Rick Mercer come to mind. They might not have as thick an accent as others but they can turn a phrase inside and out.”
However, some Newfoundlanders in the media may sometimes further negative stereotypes of the province, wrote Clarke in her 2010 paper.
She references comedic acts like This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which Critch stars in, that use Newfoundland dialect in their comedy for satire.
“Brilliant as some of this often self-deprecating humour may be, it also frequently plays into existing national-level stereotypes of Newfoundlanders as dimwitted, rough-and-ready, working-class individuals,” she wrote. She added that while Newfoundlanders may see the satire in it, people from other provinces may, ironically, let these stereotypes make up their view of the province’s population.
These stereotypes sometimes make it harder for Newfoundlanders and Labradorians when they move away from the province.
The Mainland
According to popular myth, in 1497 when John Cabot landed in what is now called Newfoundland on an expedition on behalf of King Henry VII of England, there were so many fish near the East Coast of the island that the European boat could barely move.
Fish made up a large part of the Newfoundland economy for centuries. By the 20th century, overfishing became a concern.
The industry ban had a big impact on both the province and its culture. More than a third of the province’s processing plants were shuttered, and around 27,000 people became unemployed according to the paper.
This exposed a longstanding reality for Newfoundlanders and Labradorians: people needing to leave the province for work. This has happened in surges over the past century, namely to Ontario, Alberta, and to here in Manitoba.
Moving from Newfoundland to the mainland was a big adjustment, said Wayne Good, originally from Little Bay East, NL.
Good, now 67, moved from Newfoundland to Toronto in 1973 at age 17 in search of work.
Living in a town of less than 200 people on the Burin Peninsula in the southeastern part of the island, Good and his family were isolated from the rest of the province, let alone the rest of the continent.
Good’s family didn’t have a car or electricity in the house. He wore homemade, hand-me-down clothes, he said, as did many other kids in the town.
The town’s closest neighbour was Harbour Mill, which was only accessible by boat at the time because there was no highway out of town, said Good.
Moving to Toronto was a big adjustment.
“I was fresh out of high school,” he said. “I was on my own.”
He lived with a man he called an “adoptive uncle” and made some good friends working at a gas station before moving onto a few other jobs. However, people made fun of him for the way he spoke, he said.
“It was a different era, the 1970s. Back then, people from the East Coast in general were a little bit discriminated against. We were looked down on kind of,” he said.
“Oftentimes, we were referred to as “Stupid Newfies,” he said. “It didn’t matter if they knew you or didn’t know you. They just heard the way you spoke and they just made a judgement call.”
He said he began trying to change the way he spoke.
“I would really think about things before I said it,” he said. “But you can’t hide the accent. I tried at first, and I eventually gave up and I let myself (say) ‘let me be me’.”
With time, he began speaking less like a Newfoundlander.
“But I will say, when I talk to my sisters who still live in Newfoundland. Within 10 minutes of talking to them my accent starts to come back again.” He added that the same goes for expressions.
