info CANADA

There is no one Canadian English, any more than there is one British or American English. We tend to fall more-or-less in the middle, being somewhat ambivalent about spelling honour/honor and theatre/theater.

British Columbia tends to be more British, although sometimes with a Hong Kong intonation.

The Prairies are, well Midwestern, with possible French, Ukrainian, Cree, etc. accents.

Ontario is pretty cosmopolitan - Toronto has the third largest Italian-speaking population (after Milan).

Quebec is, to a greater or lesser extent bilingual, with some die-hard Anglophones or Francophones, who tend to clump together, with the more fluent bilingual speakers tending to be in the larger centers of population. Numerous other languages and ethnic groups are also present.

New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, on the English side, have deep Scots and Irish roots, with Celtic and Gaelic (Old Gaulish) origins. On the French side, the Acadians share a common origin with the Louisiana Cajun, (Whose ancestors were exiled there for refusing to swear allegiance to the British Crown in 1755 - or was it just a good excuse to steal their property?) whereas the city Quebecois tends to be more Norman French. Note that Breton, spoken in Brittany, France, is also Gaelic - I once saw Prince Charles, who of course, speaks Welsh, conversing with an old Breton farmer (on television).

I've never happened to visit Prince Edward Island, but I gather it is much like N.B. and N.S.

Newfoundland is both our oldest (John Cabot/Giovanni Caboto heard about it from Portuguese fishermen before he set sail for the New World), and our newest province (joined in 1949). Hewfoundlanders (Newfies) have their own distinct dialect of English - for a sample, see:
1000 http://users.uniserve.com/~newfie/speech.html (actualmente offline pero se encuentra archivada aquí)

The backwoods Quebecois has similar ancient Norman French and Breton roots, going back to Old Gaulish and Celtic roots, with strong oral history in both song and dance - often surprisingly similar to the Maritime provinces. The dialect, called "Joual", after their pronunciation of the Modern French equivalent "cheval", or horse, can be mutually incomprehensible to a Frenchman from Paris. A friend witnessed one such incident that nearly led to blows:

("Tu" is nearly as rare in present-day France as "thou" is in English now.)

The Quebecois used the word "claque" for the classic wooden shoe - which in Quebec has been stretched to include other protective footwear - what the Frenchman would have called "sabot" (hence English "sabotage" - throwing a wooden shoe in the machinery). "Claque", of course, comes from the clacking sound they make when walking on a hard surface. Fortunately, others on the elevator were able to recognize the problem and defuse the situation.

The analogy between Modern English and the more-or-less Elizabethan English spoken by television's Beverly Hillbillies (or the real Hillbillies) and Modern French and Joual is quite apt, except that Modern French is officially codified by l'Academie Francais, and the French spoken by the ancestors of the Quebecois had already diverged from the common root with Modern French long before they emigrated to the New World.

Note that most of the documents of the era (such as you might encounter in searching your family tree) would have been in Church Latin.
See:
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Latin/
http://www.yahoo.ca/Arts/Humanities/History/Genealogy/

Take a look at:
http://www.endirect.qc.ca/~quebec/salon/glossaire/glossdex/glossdex.html (actualmente offline pero se encuentra archivada aquí)
http://www.lava.net/~quebec/index2.htm

or search:
http://www.yahoo.ca for "joual"

Note that some pages use the French keyboard codepage, with "strange" characters showing the place of various accents if viewed as ASCII. I have stuck to ASCII for the sake of uniformity, and therefore apologize for the lack of correct accents.

I shouldn't forget the more sparsely populated areas, The Yukon, the Northwest Territories (soon to split off Nunavut), and Labrador (which came with Newfoundland), where the proportion of aborigines can exceed 50 % in some areas. I recall that there are something like fifty-six distinct aboriginal language groups...

The above is just the opinions of one Canadian - for more information on demographics, etc., see:
http://www.statcan.ca/english/search

Boyd Ram