Newfoundland English - Other Languages and Dialects That Have Influenced Newfoundland English

Other Languages and Dialects That Have Influenced Newfoundland English

There is also a dialect of French centred mainly on the Port au Port Peninsula on the west coast of the island which has had an impact on the syntax of English in the area. One example of these constructs found in Newfoundland is Throw grandpa down the stairs his hat, a dative construction in which the hat makes the trip, not the grandfather. Another is the use of French reflexive constructions in sentences such as the reply to a question like Where are you going?, reply: Me I'm goin' downtown (this reflexive form of grammar also exists in Irish Gaelic and Jerriais).

Newfoundland French was deliberately discouraged by the Newfoundland government through the public schools during the mid-20th-century, and only a small handful of mainly elderly people are still fluent in the French-Newfoundland dialect. In the last couple of decades, many parents in the region have demanded and obtained French education for their children, but this would be Standard French education and does not represent a continuation of the old dialect per se. Some people living in the Codroy Valley on the south-west tip of the island are also ancestrally Francophone, but represent Acadian settlers from the Maritime Provinces of Canada who arrived during the 19th century. This population has also lost the French language.

The greatest distinction between Newfoundland English and General Canadian English is its vocabulary. It includes some Inuit and First Nations words (for example tabanask, a kind of sled), preserved archaic English words no longer found in other English dialects (for example pook, a mound of hay), Irish language survivals like sleveen and angishore, compound words created from English words to describe things unique to Newfoundland (for example stun breeze, a wind of at least 20 knots (37 km/h)), English words which have undergone a semantic shift (for example rind, the bark of a tree), and unique words whose origins are unknown (for example diddies, a nightmare).