World English

For my World English project, I am going to focus on Canada and how American and Canadian English coincide. I wanted to focus on Canada, because the country is so close to ours but they have just a different influence on their speech and culture. French-Canadian is spoken more on the east side of the country, whereas on the west side of the country the influence of French is not as strong. I want to answer some questions in my presentation: How/when did French infuse Canada? OR When did Canada change over to Canadian-English instead of French-Canadian? Has Canada always spoke English or was there a time in their history that they only spoke French? How does this relate back to students and their learning of language? (Or in my case since I am not necessarily going to teach and I want to do more editing/writing) how does the culture/speech of Canada influence how we speak today? Does it have any impact? These are a couple questions that I want to focus on. I have found a couple academic sources about the history of Canadian-English/French-Canadian, and I have also found some non-academic sources about the differences in American English and Canadian English. I want to make a prezi or PowerPoint of some sort. I always feel like prezi’s aren’t as boring, but I want to make sure that I add some sort of graphics to my presentation also. 

Here are the sources that I have right now (I will probably find more as I go along):

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3050502?seq=2

http://www.yorku.ca/twainweb/troberts/raising.html

http://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-use/canadian-english/

http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2056/stable/3444544

** The link might not open if you click on it, you might have to copy and paste it into the browser.

Movie Blog

In my part of the Video was the O Pioneers O Pioneers part. What I liked about this part was that it looked at Canadian language, train language, riverboat, gold miners, and cowboy language. I liked that it broke it up into sections and gave different examples of sayings that we use in our everyday language. “Oh boy I’ve got it”, “Long time, no see” these are both examples that show how far back in time our language expands. To me, it was cool to see where all of our sayings come from and how they differ from region to region. Even our accents differ from region to region. For example when they talked about Canada, and how there is a border between them and Niagara and there is a difference in speech.