Abstract Colonialism is a broad term that encompasses a spectrum of sociopolitical realities for colonized peoples and places. An important distinction operates within this constellation, separating settler colonial states on the one hand from other colonial settings on the other. Linguistically, Settler Colonial Englishes are characterized by four aspects that set their evolutionary trajectories apart from those Englishes that emerge in other contexts. The outcomes are Englishes that are synonymous with the settler strand, rather than Englishes that constitute convergence between the colonial English and the local Indigenous Englishes that emerge in situ under colonial dominion. At the same time, there is a large range of factors that may impact the ongoing evolutionary trajectory of Settler Colonial Englishes, such as Indigenous linguistic diversity, population demographics, and isolation. We discuss these issues here and make predictions for the kinds of evolutionary phenomena we may and may not expect in Settler Colonial Englishes.

Canadians are perceived worldwide as being welcoming to people of diverse backgrounds, partly due to the government's adoption of official multiculturalism. Nevertheless, immigrants face substantial barriers to integration. The present study explores whether bias exists against job applicants with non-Canadian English accents in the province of Ontario and what variables influence listeners' evaluations of candidates' responses. Verbal guises of 'good' and 'bad' answers to job interview questions were recorded by British, Chinese, German, Indian, Jamaican, and Nigerian women, and Canadian women with at least one parent from these countries. Ninety-six human resources students from nine post-secondary institutions in southern Ontario rated (1) the content of job interview responses, whether candidates were (2) easy to understand and (3) desirable employees, and (4) determined what job they should be interviewed for. Quantitative analysis via conditional inference trees and random forests reveals accent discrimination. Local voices received significantly higher ratings than non-local voices on all parameters and were recommended for more managerial-level and customer-facing job interviews. These results indicate that linguistic assimilation is expected of immigrants and bias against accents can lead to inequitable access to employment, contra to multiculturalism. Consequently, we call for language to be added to Ontario's grounds for discrimination.

Multicultural Toronto English (MTE) is a register found in Toronto, Canada, associated with racialized youth. The ongoing enregisterment of MTE takes place, in part, through metadiscourse on social media, which disseminates the register to a wider audience. This article examines online metadiscursive engagement with representations of MTE. We consider how audiences take up, receive and recontextualize MTE through metadiscourse across grassroots and institutional media platforms. We argue that audience engagement with pop-cultural representations of language is a critical driving force of enregisterment and register change.

This study investigated accent bias against job applicants with extralocal (non-Canadian) English accents in the Greater Toronto Area. Verbal guises recorded by British, Chinese, German, Indian, Jamaican, and Nigerian women and by Canadian women with at least one parent from these countries were evaluated by forty-eight human resources students, who rated the content of job interview responses and the candidates’ ‘expression’ and ‘employability’, determined what job they should be interviewed for, and provided commentary. Canadian voices were especially privileged in comments on speech. Quantitative analysis of responses reflected bias against extralocal voices. Consequently, we provide recommendations for relevant stakeholders.

While multiethnolects have been documented in major European metropolises over the last several decades, no such varieties have been reported in North America. This is surprising given the high degree of global immigration in many North American cities. We consider Toronto, Ontario, one of the most multicultural cities in the world, and explore the features of a Multicultural Toronto English. Data comes from young people in an ethnolinguistically diverse region of the Greater Toronto Area. We investigate five vocalic phenomena: goose fronting, the Canadian Vowel Shift, Canadian raising, ban/bag tensing, and goat monophthongization. Our results indicate a great deal of interspeaker variability with some suggestion that young, immigrant men are least likely to produce normative Canadian English patterns. However, a lack of cohesion in covariation between phenomena is consistent with a multiethnolect as understood as a variable repertoire. We argue that Multicultural Toronto English represents linguistic alterity and a means of everyday resistance for young Torontonians.

Bucktee is one of several lexical items associated with 'Toronto Slang' - the emically-given name for an enregistered set of lexical items associated with Multicultural Toronto English (MTE), a multiethnolect spoken by young people in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), originating in the many and varied multicultural and multilingual areas of the conurbation - that is borrowed from Somali. This paper contextualises the influence of Somali on Toronto Slang and MTE: despite being spoken by a relatively small number of Torontonians, intersecting cultural discourses of race, place, gender, and more imbue words borrowed from the language with a desirable value. These cultural discourses and their links are described and mapped in an indexical field. Due to its desirable value and eventual place-based meaning, bucktee has spread well-beyond its source speech community and, in doing so, has undergone indexical bleaching of its ethnoracial origins. This has led to a tension between discourses of pride, the Canadian cultural mosaic, representation, and cultural appropriation.

The be like quotative emerged rapidly around the English-speaking world and has quickly saturated the quotative systems of young speakers in multiple countries. We study be like (and its covariants) in two communities – Toronto, Canada, and York, United Kingdom – in apparent time and at two separate points in real time. We trace the apparent-time trajectory of be like and its covariants from inception to saturation. We take advantage of the prodigious size of our dataset to examine understudied aspects of the linguistic factors that condition quotative variation. Building on earlier suggestions (Cukor-Avila 2002; Durham et al. 2012) that be like might show patterning over time consistent with the C onstant R ate E ffect (or CRE, Kroch 1989), we argue that the CRE does indeed apply to the rise of be like , but needs to be handled with care. Logistic modelling assumes that the top of the S -curve is located at 100 per cent of a given variable context. In the case of be like , the saturation point is nearer 75–85 per cent, with minor variants retaining small semantic footholds in the system. In conjunction with our analysis, we suggest how to adapt the predictions of the CRE to changes likely to lead to saturation but not categorical use.

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A key component of Labov's (2001:411) socially motivated projection model of language change is the hypothesis that adolescents and preadolescents undergo a process of vernacular reorganization, which leads to a “seamless” progression of changes in progress. Between the ages of approximately five and 17, children and adolescents increase the “frequency, extent, scope, or specificity” of changes in progress along the community trajectory (Labov, 2007:346). Evidence of advancement via vernacular reorganization during this life stage has come from peaks in the apparent-time trajectory of a change around the age of 17 (e.g., Labov, 2001; Tagliamonte & D'Arcy, 2009). However, such peaks do not rule out the alternative explanations of retrograde change or age-grading. This paper presents both apparent time and real-time evidence for vernacular reorganization. We observe the arrowhead formation—a counterpart of the adolescent peak—for quotative be like in a trend study of adolescents and young adults in Toronto, Canada. Our results rule out the alternative explanations for previously observed adolescent peaks.

Canadian English (CanE) is argued to present a textbook example of dialectological homogeneity. Its largely undifferentiated urban structure is attributed to source input, as a consequence of a shared founder effect. This outcome is predicted by the sociohistorical realities of settler colonialism but remains unexplored in diachronic perspective. The recent construction of large diachronic corpora of regional CanE varieties enables direct comparison in order to problematize longitudinal homogeneity and to probe the potency of foundcr effects over time. This article examines three features known to be undergoing longitudinal change and to be regionally variegated across dialects of English: deontic modality, stative possession, and general extenders. At the heart of the discussion is the nature of homogeneity in CanE. The authors conclude that although there is compelling support for longitudinal parallelism, the linguistic reality is somewhat nuanced: aspects of CanE homogeneity appear emergent rather than foundational and relative to linguistic variables rather than to the linguistic system as a whole.

Despite recent advances (e.g. Cheshire 2007; Pichler 2010; Denis 2015), discourse-pragmatic variables continue to challenge variationist theory and methods. An overarching dilemma concerns multifunctionality, raising difficulties for semantic equivalency and the circumscription of the variable context. In this article we present a case study to illustrate that deconstructing a discourse-pragmatic marker into its composite parts reveals clear criteria for disambiguating its principal function and its contextually derived functions. The discussion centres on the pragmatic marker eh in Canadian English. We illustrate that its multifunctionality is derivable from four parts: principal function, syntactic context, prosodic context, and discourse context. Our deconstruction uses a two-pronged methodology, drawing on storyboard elicitation and sociolinguistic interview data, which mutually reinforce our theoretical arguments. Under this transdisciplinary lens, the exponents of form and function become predictable, constrainable, and systematically derivable for probabilistic modelling within and across speech communities. (Confirmationals, multifunctionality, pragmatic markers, eh, speech acts)*

In this position paper, we take up David Deterding's 2008 call to think more carefully about the differences across varieties of English that have developed as a product of settler influence (e.g., Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, United States) versus those in which the Indigenous languages continue to influence lexis, phonology, morphosyntax, and discourse-pragmatics (e.g., India, Nigeria, Singapore). For us, this distinction is fundamentally rooted in the types of colonialism that characterize nations. The delineation is not simply a matter of sociopolitical optics—it directly informs the developmental pathway a variety may follow. We propose that "postcolonial Englishes" is an inaccurate cover term, one that glosses over important ecological distinctions and places varieties on a continuum when they are better considered separate evolutionary contexts.

This chapter discusses the connection between language change and fiction. We look at the relationship between change and fiction from two perspectives. First, we identify the ways in which language data from fiction is useful to the linguist interested in language change. We discuss its use both in the general sense as data in the investigation of change and in a specific sense, highlighting unique kinds of evidence that fiction provides particularly for historical pragmatics and sociolinguists. We then shift focus to what Eckert (2003) calls "the elephant in the room": what's the role of broadcast media in the diffusion of change? We review the sociolinguistics literature that has asked this question. Does fiction, especially in broadcast media, result in language change, spread innovation, or accelerate diffusion? Or, is the language in broadcast media simply a reflection of the everyday vernacular? We discuss a series of case studies, several of which consider phenomena that bridge historical pragmatics and sociolinguistics (pronominal variation, quotative be like, intensifiers, the pragmatic marker eh, and the marker of solidarity dude).