Would our English be swallowed up by America’s? Or prescribed out of existence by British authorities? Who would protect our linguistic sovereignty?

“We’re going back now from being a country that establishes its own norms to being one that is almost dictated to from outside,” Stefan Dollinger, a professor of linguistics at the University of British Columbia, told the Globe and Mail several years ago.

So Dollinger got to work. In collaboration with linguists across the country, he spent 10 years updating the mid-century Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP). His DCHP-2, which was completed earlier this month, just in time for Canada’s 150th birthday, is an amusing compendium of distinctly Canadian words and a fascinating lexical portrait of an unusual country.

The dictionary is full of gems. It is perhaps no surprise that “stickhandle” and its more specific cousins, “deke” and “dipsy-doodle,” are chiefly Canadian terms. But did you know that “Garburator” is our own word for garbage disposal? In fact, its first known appearance was in this very newspaper, in 1948. (Not to gloat, but our coinage was a clear improvement on the inelegant American term of the day, “In-sink-erator.”)
“All-dressed,” which comes from the French “tout-garnie,” is another Canadianism. Originally applied to pizza, it is now said of a variety of foods adorned with “all the standard, free garnishes and condiments.” It is also, of course, a uniquely Canadian flavour of potato chip, a source of national pride or national shame depending on your palate.

As for our linguistic signature, “eh,” well, the DCHP-2 has everything you could ever want to know about the term. Nearly 5,000 words, in fact, are dedicated to defining its five meanings and discussing its shifting cultural significance. Long associated with urban, blue-collar speech, the term has apparently fallen into disuse, becoming “rather infrequent in Canadian English.”

The DCHP2 is great fun; but its etymologies and insights into the geographic distribution of word use also tell an edifying story about one of our two official languages. Our English, like our country, is a vast and surprising thing, unavoidably shaped by Britain and America, but irreducible to any combination of influences. It shows distinct regional variation, most notably in Quebec and Newfoundland, but also a remarkable cohesion given our sprawl. It shows that we are much more than Tim Hortons, hockey and frozen tundra, but that we are not not those things either.

We don’t need a dictionary to preserve Canadian English; it will evolve on its own, oblivious to its chroniclers, as dialects do. But by putting all of our English words in one place, the editors of the DCHP-2 have given us a fine birthday gift: an opportunity to reflect on the things we alone say and what they say about us.