NATIONAL SPECIFIC CHARACTERISTICS OF CANADIAN ENGLISH

• Published in: Writings in Romance-Germanic Philology
• Main Author: О. О. Русавська
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: German; English; Spanish; Russian; Ukrainian
• Published: Odessa I. I. Mechnykov National University 2019
• Subjects: канадський; британський; американський; просодичний; специфічна національна риса; Philology. Linguistics; P1-1091; Newfoundland; Canada; British Columbia
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.18524/2307-4604.2019.1(42).168860; https://doaj.org/article/510b47f9a06143d3bf500e4e69861748

The recognition of the Canadian language standard means that in Canada, continuous historical interaction of the British and American English standards brought about a special norm which is no longer British or American. The distinguishing features of Canadian prosodic rules serve as the evidence for divergent characteristics of the Canadian linguistic standard in the paradigm of the national variations of the multinational English language. Therefore, Canadian English is an amalgam of American, British, and Canadian English. It includes the literary norm of its own, based on the local linguistic norm, distributed through the system of education and media in the Canadian areas, where the local speech distinctiveness is particularly pronounced and is close to the dialect status.The body of the experimental material, arising from the research aim and the tasks, included 20 episodes of speech from representatives of 4 Canadian areas: provinces Ontario, British Columbia, the Islands of Newfoundland and Labrador, Island of Prince Edward. All experimental texts are quasi-spontaneous monologues of improvised, informal, and laidback nature. These characteristics of a communicative act are the key extralingual factors to feature colloquial speech. This gives the groundings to study these monologue texts as samples of natural colloquial informal speech. The perceptive and instrumental analysis revealed the key speech units of the speech melodies (scales and terminal tones), common and distinguishing features of speech prosody as well as frequent speech parameters, taking into consideration gender and territorial belonging of the Canadians. The bilingual situation in the country, influence of British and American English on Canadians’ pronunciation resulted in emerging of a distinguishing Canadian English with its peculiarities at the prosodic level of the phonological system. The divergent features of Canadian English are associated with re-distribution of functions of American and British prosodic parameters with a due ...