November 1, 2018
Halifax, Nova Scotia
44°38’10.5″ N, 63°35’37.9″ W
It’s nearing the end of my guest lecture on language evolution in a class at Dalhousie. We’re locked in a good-natured, but heated, debate about the “right” word to use to refer to a hooded sweatshirt. Most of the class—myself included—says ‘hoodie’, but a single student is adamant that hooded sweatshirts are called ‘bunnyhugs’ (which is, quite frankly, adorable).
Without knowing anything else about this student, I already have better-than-random odds at correctly guessing which Canadian province she is from. The reason? The word ‘bunnyhug’ is used almost exclusively by Saskatchewanians. While the exact origin of the word is murky, one thing is clear: if you’re from Saskatchewan, you wear bunnyhugs, not hoodies.
We spend the rest of the class debating our way through more examples like that. What do you call your evening meal? A knit head covering? The cheesy noodle dish that comes in a blue box? As a native Pennsylvanian, I say ‘dinner’, ‘beanie’, and ‘mac and cheese’, but most Nova Scotians say ‘supper’, ‘toque’, and ‘Kraft Dinner’. The source of this near endless entertainment is a fantastic survey conducted by the 10 and 3 which set out to better map how Canadians speak. (If you have a few minutes, I highly recommend working your way through the maps in the linked article; I revisit it at least once a year and always have new realizations. For example, I was recently invited to a play ‘soccer baseball’, which I only realized today is the sport I know as ‘kickball’. Also, as someone who recently moved and spent many hours scouring Kijiji for apartments, I just realized that the likely reason ‘hydro’ is listed as a utility on the site rather than ‘electricity’ (as I and most Nova Scotians call it) is because the founder of Kijiji is from Ontario and the site was first launched in Quebec; in both provinces, ‘hydro’ is preferred to ‘electric’.)
When you stop to think about it, these examples are truly remarkable. From hearing only one or a few words, we can make well-educated guesses about where a speaker is from. These split-second deductions can also feed into a pervasive human behavior that has both positive and negative repercussions: rapidly classifying someone as ‘us’ or ‘them’. Such is the power of dialects—variants of a language that are particular to a specific region or social group—to drive our thoughts and actions.
The boundaries separating the words ‘dialect’, ‘accent’, and ‘language’ are blurry at best, with loose consensus being that accents (how you pronounce words) are part of dialects, and multiple dialects comprise a language. The dialect/language distinction is particularly fraught, with clear sociopolitical influences; as linguist Max Weinreich aptly noted, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.”
Armies and navies aside, the foundation of my own research is the fact that humans are not the only species with dialects. Certain birds, insects, amphibians, and, of course, cetaceans have dialects as well. In my next blog, I’ll introduce you to my favorite dialect-using species: the sperm whale.
