English World-Wide - Volume 36, Issue 3, 2015

This paper reports on the first-ever linguistic study of the variety of English spoken in the Gaspé region of eastern Quebec, which is 86 percent French-speaking. An on-line survey was used to gather data from 200 participants on 58 phonological, grammatical and lexical variables, drawn mostly, for comparative purposes, from earlier research on Canadian and Quebec English. The analysis, focusing on data from the 124 participants who still live in the Gaspé region, produces a complex linguistic portrait of the community. It displays a unique mixture of Canadian, Quebec, Maritime and rural features, reflecting its location near the boundary between Quebec and New Brunswick, with evidence of both convergence with and divergence from Quebec English as spoken in Montreal. It also shows more frequent use of several Gallicisms, or borrowings from French, suggesting that this effect of language contact is encouraged by its minority status.

This paper provides the first perceptual dialectology survey of Scotland. Respondents from the northeast fishing town of Buckie were asked to mark and label dialect areas on a map, and to rate 12 government regions on five scales: “degree-of-difference”, “correctness”, “pleasantness”, “broadness” and “sounding Scottish”. Based on the results of the survey, Scottish dialect perceptions could be placed into three main cultural dimensions: : (i) “Scottishness”, the “Good Scots/Bad Scots” distinction; (ii) “Englishness”, the cultural prominence of the Scotland-England border; and (iii) “Foreignness”, the influence of other languages on its islands. The conflicting responses regarding correctness offer a glimpse into different aspects of linguistic (in)security in Scotland. These findings provide a means of understanding Scotland’s current perceived linguistic landscape through significant regional and cultural dimensions.