The Survey of Vancouver English
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8728536 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert J Gregg (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 67 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 250-250 |
| Publication date | 1992-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Speech (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/455563 |
| OpenAlex | W2326629095 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 1 |
T HE SURVEY OF VANCOUVER ENGLISH (SVEN) began in 1978, and, seeing that the Final Report was dispatched to the SSHRCC in Ottawa in 1984, it may be considered as officially completed.1 Including the Pilot Survey (1976-78), a total of 300 informants were interviewed, and their recorded responses have been transcribed and computerized. Finally, with the help of the SPSS:X computer program and the Oxford Concordance package, a preliminary analysis of our data has been made from which many interesting results have emerged. The proximate source of SVEN was, of course, the Pilot Survey, with some important input from the related study of Ottawa English (Woods 1979). The ultimate origins, however, are to be found in the earlier surveys of British Columbia and Vancouver English organized at the University of British Columbia from the 1950s onwards (Gregg 1957a; 1957b; 1973b; 1973a; 1975; Stevenson 1976). The main aim of SVEN was to carry out an urban dialect survey which would provide the necessary data for a systematic sociolinguistic study concentrating on a number of variable elements-phonological, lexical, grammatical-known from our earlier research to occur in Vancouver English. Taking the area of phonology as an example, some of these variables (such as the well-known diphthong allophones) are characteristic of Canadian English in general, while some are mainly North American phenomena (e.g., the voicing of medial /t/), and others are features of World English (e.g., the various pronunciations of final -ing). We investigated 39 of these rule-oriented phonological variables and a further 80 words in which free variation occurred, often affecting more than one segment and producing what we called SPECIAL PROFILES (e.g., garage, which yielded as top three preferences [go'ra3], [go'rad3], [go'rae3], as well as seventeen other profiles, including some, such as [go'rar3], with intrusive [r] before the final consonant, and some monosyllabic forms resulting from the deletion of the schwa in the first syllable, [grand3]). In vocabulary we checked on the survival of local west-coast words such as saltchuk, skookum, siwash, colichan, and saskie, derived mainly from the old ChinookJargon. We also investigated a number of general lexical variables including curtains/drapes, apartment/flat/suite (the last being a Westernism in this sense), and the well-known Canadianism chesterfield with its rivals
Geography · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · History
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,38 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2026 (17) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |