by Aiden Hickey
February 28, 2024
How’s she goin’, b’y?
Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, like Newfoundland and other Maritime provinces, is known for its distinctive accent, along with its wonderfully innovative deviations and manipulations of the English language. In this way, Cape Breton English is a unique and regionally defined category of Canadian English, academically established by William John Davey and John P. Mackinnon’s recently published Dictionary of Cape Breton English. Or, put somewhat differently, Cape Breton English, known in the Canadian cultural imagination as an oftentimes humorous, dialectically inflected language filled with what have come to be known as Cape Bretonisms, can be understood to constitute a subset of regional, localized, vernacular language under the national umbrella of Canadian English.
Phrases and usages, however, are not always confined to the Island, of course, as transmission routinely escapes its territorial bounds. Speakers from Cape Breton and Newfoundland, for instance, are often conflated by more metropolitan (or “mainland”) Canadians because of the distinctive yet similar sounding accents. A common quip within the Maritimes, for instance, is that a Cape Bretoner is just a Newfoundlander who took the wrong turn on their way to Toronto.
The unique accent of Cape Breton English today can be traced back, at least in part, to the diverse history of Cape Breton’s settlement. My parents, along with my aunts and uncles, grandparents and great grandparents, were all born in North Sydney, located on the Eastern coast of the Island. But the ethnolinguistic ancestors of our family tree, the “Gaels”, arrived in Cape Breton from Ireland, Scotland most notably, and the Isle of Man throughout the earlymid-eighteenth century, accounting for a previously unprecedented influx of immigration to the Island. As Stephen J. Hornsby writes in his geographical account of Cape Breton, there were—mainly due to what are known as the “Highland Clearances”—more “Highland Scots [...] moving to Cape Breton than anywhere else in North America” throughout the 1820’s and early 1830’s. “The effect on the Island,” he continues, “was dramatic. The population increased from fewer than 3,000 in 1801 to almost 55,000 in 1851, and the ethnic composition changed greatly.”
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were nearly 100,000 Gaelic speakers in Cape Breton, mainly of Scottish and, to a lesser extent, Irish origins. And while the number of Gaelic speakers has declined sharply since the turn of the century as a result of waves of shifting attitudes towards the use of Gaelic within the public domain, the language has nevertheless bestowed a lasting, formative influence on the accent associated with Cape Breton English. Here are some defining characteristics:
➢ The "a" sound (as in "ah") is often extended, so that to non-Cape Bretoners, "wash" sounds like "waash".
➢ The t and d sounds are sometimes dropped when they are positioned in the middle of a word (or in linguistic terms, they are replaced with a glottal stop). For example, “battery” is pronounced “ba-ry”, and "rudder" is pronounced "ruh-er".
➢ The r sound is often pronounced with a light trilling effect.
➢ The "o" vowel in Cape Breton sounds closer to "uh", so that to a non-Cape Bretoner, “almost” sounds like “al-must”.
➢ Another characteristic feature of the Cape Breton accent is what is called the “Gaelic Gasp”. While breathing in, a speaker may, in a semi-audible whisper, say “yeah, yeah, yeah”, or “yep, yep, yep”, usually at the end of a phrase.
To give you a better idea of the Cape Breton accent, here is a video of Cape Breton native and popular media figure within the Maritimes, Justine Williamson (otherwise known as “Tracy”), as she interviews American tourists arriving by ship to the Sydney Waterfront.
This piece is part of the series: Englishes from the Maritimes.
References
Davey, W.J. Mackinnon R.P. (2016). Dictionary of Cape Breton English. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Hornsby, S.J. (1992). Nineteenth Century Cape Breton: A Historical Geography. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.