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  • How Canadian was eh? A baseline investigation of usage and ideology
  • Derek Denishttp://orcid.org/0000-0001-7908-6393

1. Introduction

Eh is a confirmational – a multifunctional pragmatic marker that typically functions to seek addressee confirmation of the truth (or knowledge of the truth) of the proposition that has been put into the common-ground (Wiltschko and Heim 2016, Wiltschko et al. 2018). Patterns of synchronic variation and change in a recent sociolinguistic corpus of Toronto English has shown that eh occurs infrequently relative to other confirmationals (e.g., Denis and Tagliamonte 2016), yet it persists as the “quintessential Canadian English stereotype” (Denis 2013: 1). This mismatch between usage and ideology leads to two questions. First, was eh more frequent in earlier Canadian English (CanE) than it is today? Eh’s stereotype status might suggest a higher past frequency. Second, given Denis and Tagliamonte’s (2016) focus on Toronto, how homogeneous was the variable system of confirmationals across Canada? Was eh broadly Canadian as the stereotype suggests or was it limited to particular regions? As a first step toward addressing these questions, I report on research that investigates confirmational variation in synchronic and diachronic corpora of two varieties of CanE: Southern Ontario English on the one hand and Southern Vancouver Island English on the other. While similar longitudinal data sets from more regional varieties of CanE (and perhaps other varieties) are [End Page 583] necessary to fully answer these questions, the data discussed here allow for preliminary exploration and are intended to serve as a baseline for future research.1

2. Background

To begin, I layout the relevant background on two fronts: 1) eh and other confirmationals in CanE and 2) dialect homogeneity in CanE.

2.1 Eh and other confirmationals in CanE

While eh has been present in CanE since at least 1836 (Denis 2013, Dollinger and Fee 2017), Avis (1972) rejects the notion that eh is a Canadianism (i.e., a word that originated in CanE or has a meaning unique to CanE) on the grounds of its presence in many other Englishes.2 However, in doing so, he discusses multiple examples of eh as the subject of metadiscourse that links it with CanE. For example, he notes that Americans find eh to be “characteristic of Canadian habits of speech” (Avis 1972: 91). Indeed, Gold (2008a: 141) notes that discussion of eh as a stereotype of CanE has appeared in the literature and popular press for the last 60 years beginning with Avis in 1957 and then Allen (1959: 20) who observes its shibboleth status in contrast with American English. Gold (2008b: 74) provides many additional similar examples in the linguistics literature from the decades that follow.3

Denis (2013: 4) argues that in the mid-twentieth century, the vehicle of the enregisterment of eh was the link made to the ideological schema that place and dialect are inherently connected (Agha 2003, Johnstone and Kiesling 2008). For eh, this is played out at the level of the nation-state (Gold and Tremblay 2006: 247, Boberg 2010: 122, Denis 2013: 4, Dollinger and Fee 2017). Specifically, it is the Canadian-American cultural contrast that is critical to Canadian cultural identity; [End Page 584] as Kymlicka (2003: 363) puts it “what defines being Canadian, perhaps above all else, is precisely not being an American” (see also Lalonde 2002, Resnick 2005).

However, the analysis in Denis (2013) is predicated on the idea that eh occurred above some threshold frequency within CanE, frequent enough to be salient to speakers and to propel through the process of enregisterment.4 While Avis (1972: 95) notes that “[t]here can be no doubt that eh? has remarkably high incidence in the conversation of many Canadians these days”, we have no sense of the frequency of eh relative to other confirmationals in earlier CanE. What we do know is that in contemporary urban CanE, eh is infrequent: Denis and Tagliamonte (2016) report that eh represents 3% of all “utterance-final tags” in the Toronto English Archive, which represents the speech of Torontonians born between 1916 and 1992.5 The variable system is dominated by you know among older speakers and by right among younger...

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