“Every now and again when we get somebody like that that we can put on the air,” she said. Any disagreements with merging this to Atlantic Canadian English? The more connected a person is to their community – consciously or unconsciously – the more committed they tend to be to sounding like their ancestors. When he interviewed high school students, they were indifferent about the way they sounded, whether they had an accent or not, he said. Speakers of Canadian Gaelic have their origins in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. When it comes to Cape Bretoners, Gardner said the connection someone has to their homeland also plays a big role in the strength of their dialect. “It’s part of an identity.”, “The big thing that determines why different areas sound different in North America has more to do with the first people that settled there, and less to do with the people who came later.”, - Linguist and historian Matt Hunt Gardner. Almost a half-century later, in 1670, the Hudson's Bay Company was given exclusive trading rights to all North American lands draining into Hudson Bay – about 3.9 million km² (1.5 million sq mi – an area larger than India). “If you associate a dialect with poverty and joblessness, that tends to carry over into how you think about that dialect,” said Kiefte. Glen Breton Rare, produced in Cape Breton, is one of the very few single malt whiskies to be made outside Scotland. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Iknowsomestuff (talk • contribs) 23:38, 14 September 2017 (UTC), So after over a decade, we've been able to accumulate a whopping one source? Dialects can be broken into three distinct groups: - Industrial Cape Breton English (Sydney, Glace Bay, New Waterford) - Gaelic influenced Cape Breton English (Inverness, Judique, Ingonish) - Acadian influenced Cape Breton English (Cheticamp, Isle Madame, L'Ardoise) While Cape Breton is part of Nova Scotia, its history is quite different. There are slight differences between the New Waterford dialect and the Glace Bay version, but this, i cannot define, it is a thing i simply know by ear. “Any Cape Bretoner will tell you that,” she said. In the 2011 Canadian Census, 10 individuals in PEI cited that their mother tongue was a Gaelic language, with over 90 claiming to speak a Gaelic language. Sponsored by local Gaelic organizations and societies, ongoing Gaelic language adult immersion classes involving hundreds of individuals are held in over a dozen communities in the province. But, trying to lose the Cape Breton accent is still a common occurrence, according to MacDonald. I would also like to add that I don't know a single person in the CBRM that trills their r's! Like the many parts of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton was first settled by the French, known as "Île Royale". TWL, Should this be formally named Cape Breton Island accent? By the 1950s the number of speakers was less than 7,000. [3][11]:371–387, In 1890, Thomas Robert McInnes, an independent Senator from British Columbia (born Lake Ainslie, Cape Breton Island) tabled a bill entitled "An Act to Provide for the Use of Gaelic in Official Proceedings. Legislators questioned why "privileges should be asked for Highland Scotchmen in [the Canadian Parliament] that are not asked for in their own country?". McNeil is a third generation miner. [3], While there have been many different regional dialects of Scottish Gaelic that have been spoken in other communities across Canada, particularly Ontario, Atlantic Canada is the only area in North America where Gaelic continues to be spoken as a community language, especially in Cape Breton. Many of the traders who came in the later 18th and 19th centuries were Gaelic speakers from the Scottish Highlands who brought their language to the interior. The first ship loaded with Hebridean colonists arrived on "St.-John's Island" (Prince Edward Island) in 1770, with later ships following in 1772, and 1774. When Gardner was young, he was told if he wanted to be successful, he had to go to university and get off the island – something that would difficult if he sounded like what people believe is the traditional Cape Bretoner. [16][21], Job opportunities for monolingual Gaels were few and restricted to the dwindling Gaelic-communities, compelling most into the mines or the fishery. Perhaps you are from Cape Breton. Maxville Public School in Maxville, Glengarry, Ontario, Canada offers Scottish Gaelic lessons weekly. The second a Cape Bretoner opens his or her mouth, longtime radio reporter Peggy MacDonald has a pretty good idea of what part of the island they’re from. A. W. R. MacKenzie founded the Nova Scotia Gaelic College at St Ann's in 1939. These two documents are watersheds in the timeline of Canadian Gaelic, representing the first concrete steps taken by a provincial government to recognize the language's decline and engage local speakers in reversing this trend.