Canadian English

 

CANADIAN ENGLISH

Canadian English is the set of varieties of English native to Canada. According to the 2011 census, English was the first language of approximately 19 million Canadians (57% of the population) the remainder of the population were native speakers of Canadian French (22%) or other languages (allophones, 21%).

The term “Canadian English" is first attested in a speech by the Reverend A. Constable Geikiein an address to the Canadian Institute in 1857. Canadian English is the product of five waves of immigration and settlement over a period of more than two centuries. The first large wave of permanent English-speaking settlement in Canada, and linguistically the most important, was the influx of loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, chiefly from the Mid-Atlantic States – as such, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and West Virginia. Canadian English is believed by some scholars to have derived from northern American English.