Social differentiation in Ottawa English

Abstract

Introduction Ottawa, the capital of Canada, is Canada's fourth largest city with a population of 819,263 inhabitants. It is bilingual, English (71 per cent) and French (29 per cent) and multicultural, situated on the bilingual belt which extends from Sudbury, Ontario to Moncton, New Brunswick. Ottawa and the area surrounding it, called the Ottawa Valley, was settled during the 1830s, 40s and 50s by Scots, Irish, English, Americans and French Canadians. Although there remains a great deal of interest in and popular writing about the ‘Ottawa Valley Twang’, a dialect derived from a mixture of the several Irish and Scots dialects, little of this ‘Twang’ can be found today as most of the surrounding area and all the city have assimilated to General English (Chambers 1975: 55–9). Recently, the federal government has placed great importance on making its institutions bilingual. Although some 57,000 anglophone federal public employees have undergone extensive French language training and a much larger number of English-speaking school children attend total-immersion French elementary school instruction, the English in Ottawa remains representative of urban Canadian English. English in Ottawa, and in Canada generally, appears to be very little influenced by its contact with French, though research on this topic is sparse (see Chambers, this volume).

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