Canadian Dollar in the English Language Varieties: Corpus‑Based Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22364/BJELLC.07.2017.10Keywords:
Canadianism, slang, corpus, occurrence, English language varietiesAbstract
The slang name for Canadian dollar loonie is a Canadianism used not only in spoken (Boberg, 2010: 121), but also in written texts such as Canadian news articles. While loonie is obviously taken for granted by Canadians, its occurrence in English texts published beyond Canada has hardly been in the focus of corpus-based studies. The goal of this study is to find out in what Canadian English written texts loonie occurs and whether it is encountered in the other varieties of English by researching the corpora adapted for web access at Brigham Young University (BYU), the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English (SCCE), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). The first two corpora were searched to reveal the genres of the written texts loonie occurs and GloWbE – to see loonie used in the other varieties of English. The obtained results revealed that loonie occurs in such written texts as newspaper and magazine articles of SCCE and COCA predominantly in the contexts connected with money issues. Search of GloWbE showed the use of loonie in American and British mass media texts, which reveals that this Canadian slang name goes beyond Canadian texts and thus, as Davies (2005: 45) has stated ‘[...] few of us are cocooned from [...] vocabulary of the major international varieties of English’. These findings therefore call for more detailed research of the collocations containing loonie in various text types of different varieties of English.
References
Adams, M. (2009) Slang: The People’s Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Avis, W. S., Crate C., Drysdale, P., Leechman, D., Matthew H., Scargill, M. H. and Lovell, C. J. (eds.) (1967) A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. Toronto: Gage.
Aitchison, J. (2001) Language Change, Progress and Decay (3rd ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bednarek, A. (2009) Studies in Canadian English: Lexical Variation in Toronto. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Biber, G., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Boberg, C. (2010) The English Language in Canada. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boberg, C. (2005) The Canadian shift in Montreal. Language Variation and Change, 17(2): 133–154.
Bušs, O., Joma, D., Kalnača, A., Lokmane, I., Markus, D., Pūtele, I., Skujiņa, V. (2008) Valodniecības pamatterminu skaidrojošā vārdnīca. [The Explanatory Dictionary of Basic Linguistic Terms] LU Latviešu valodas institūts.
Coleman, J. (2012) The Life of Slang. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coleman, J. (2014) Introduction: Understanding slang in a global context. In J. Coleman (ed.) Global English Slang. Methodologies and Perspectives. (pp. 14–23). London & New York: Routledge.
Crystal, D. (1998) The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cragg, C., Czarnecki, B., Philips, H. I. and Vanderlinden, K. (2003) Editing Canadian English. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
Davies, D. (2005) Varieties of Modern English. London: Longman.
Davies, M. (2015) Introducing the 1.9 billion word Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbe). The 21st Century Text, July 1. Available from https://21centurytext.wordpress.com/feature-article/ [Accessed on 20 August 2016].
Francis, W. N. and Kučera, H. (1982) Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Green, J. (2016) Slang. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
McArthur, T. (2003) Oxford Guide to World English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Swan, M. (2005) Practical English Usage. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Wales, K. (2001) A Dictionary of Stylistics. New York: Longman.
Woods, H. B. (1999) The Ottawa Survey of Canadian English. Kingston: Queen’s University.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
