A Corpus-based Analysis of some Canadianisms of French Origin in Canadian English

This paper is part of a wider research project on language contact and variation in Canadian English and focuses on some lexical Canadianisms of French origin in the recent International Corpus of English (ICE- Canada). Being Canada an officially bilingual and multicultural country and having language contact deeply shaped its national identity over the centuries, I will show how certain French loanwords that have come into Canadian English are under-represented in some current resources. After outlining the theoretical and critical debate on language variation and language contact in multilingual settings, the first part of the paper introduces Canadian English and discusses the notion of Canadianism. In the second part, I look at Canadianisms of French origin found in Only in Canada, You Say (Barber 2008), a popular but very sound discussion of Canadianisms by the editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, and then illustrate their rarity in ICE-Canada. The results necessarily open up to further investigations of different types of corpora.