E-Book, Englisch, Band 52, 297 Seiten
A comparative perspective with views from Wales and Singapore
E-Book, Englisch, Band 52, 297 Seiten
Reihe: Language in Performance (LIP)
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0185-1
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
PD Dr. Jakob Leimgruber lehrt Englische Sprachwissenschaft an der Universität Basel.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
2.1 Historical context
Before European contact, and to a large extent still today, the Canadian part of the North American continent was peopled by a diverse range of ethnic and linguistic groups. Some of the language families found in this vast area are (from east to west) Algonquian, Iroquoian, Eskimo-Aleut, Siouan, Na-Dené, Salishan, and Wakashan (see Lewis et al. 2016 for an overview of the languages on the North American continent). The northern half of the country has always been sparsely populated, with speakers of Eskimo-Aleut settling primarily in coastal communities. The western seaboard of British Columbia, blessed with a more temperate climate, exhibits higher linguistic diversity; ample food supply, in the form of ‘a never-ending supply of fish’, primarily salmon (Bothwell, 2007, 7), enabled the emergence of wealthy cultures with distinct internal social stratification. Pre-Columbian European contact took place when Norse expeditions to the eastern Canadian shore began under the leadership of Leif Eriksson. These travels, via Iceland, Greenland, and Baffin Island (the presumed location of the Norse Helluland), resulted in the founding, around the year 1000, of a settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows, on the island of Newfoundland (now a listed National Historic Site of Canada in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador). This settlement, which Ingstad and Stine Ingstad (2000) consider to be the historical Vínland of old Icelandic sagas, did not last long: contact with the local indigenous population, called Skrælings by the Norse and presumed to be Dorset Eskimos (the only Inuits to have lived south of the treeline, see Bothwell, 2007, 9), was rough enough to persuade the Vikings to leave for good again after some years. The Norse may have gone back to harvest timber from a place called ‘Markland’ in the sagas, with Icelandic records mentioning, as late as 1347, a ship returning from this place that has been speculated to have been located on the Labrador coast (Seaver, 1996). Figure 2.1: A map of Canada showing Quebec. The received wisdom is that Canada was left untouched by Europeans for two centuries thereafter, until Columbus’ 1492 crossing of the Atlantic. There is some evidence, however, that Portuguese and Basque fishing expeditions kept the transatlantic route open, with some Basque records ‘point[ing] towards their having made contact with Newfoundland in the 1370s’ (Forbes, 1993, 20). In any case, Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean and, later, to South and Central America, did not impact the much more northerly regions that would later become Canada. It was later, in 1497 and 1498 that John Cabot, sailing under British commission, began exploring the region around Newfoundland, but without making further inroads into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The Portuguese also laid claim to an area around Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in the early sixteenth century, with the explorer João Fernandes Lavrador giving his name to Labrador (Rorabaugh et al., 2004). The few Portuguese settlements established there, however, did not last long. It was the French colonial expansion, beginning with Jacques Cartier’s landing in 1534, that was to have a lasting impact on the continent. From the first cross planted on the Gaspé peninsula to the later settlements along the Saint Lawrence River, Cartier’s ships sailed up the river all the way to the rapids around present-day Montreal and its ‘Mont Royal’. French explorers and adventurers created alliances with aboriginal peoples, using their local expertise in geography, and establishing trading links (especially for fur) along a complex network that would be crucial for the eventual colonisation of the entire land. Unlike the Spanish expeditions to South America, contact was not entirely hostile and bent on the stealing of natural resources (the area had little gold, and fur did not have the same appeal in Europe; rich fishing grounds were the main attraction), with Cartier’s landing party even being helped over the winter of 1535–1536 by the Iroquois of Hochelaga (Montreal), whom Bothwell (2007, 18) considers ‘hosts’ reasonably well-disposed towards their ‘guests’. Later, more permanent settlements were established by Samuel de Champlain in Port-Royal in 1605 (in the colony of Acadia, now Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia) and the city of Québec in 1608. Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve founded Montreal in 1642. These areas, collectively claimed for the French crown and named New France, extended, by the early eighteenth century, from Acadia over the Great Lakes and the prairies of Saskatchewan to Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta in a giant arc, largely leaving the Atlantic seaboard to British colonial interests, where major settlement took place (Jamestown in 1607, Boston 1620). The British presence in Canada coincides to a great extent with French presence, though their numbers were, initially, lower. British expeditions in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century brought explorers such as Frobisher, Davis, and Hudson in search of the Northwest Passage, the famed sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, long supposed to exist but only recently (since 2009) having become more navigable, expected at the time to reduce the long journey to Cathay (China, ??). While the Passage itself remained elusive, the expeditions did provide the British a foothold in the heart of the continent, enabling them to establish trading ports and links with the aboriginal fur trade networks. The chartering of the Hudson Bay Company in 1670 increased British activity on the shores of the Hudson Bay (see Figure 2.1), and resulted in more trading posts and settlements around river mouths as well as further upstream. Later in the eighteenth century, the settlements in the future thirteen colonies began to expand, largely driven by the settlers’ search for additional resources. Furthermore, a larger number of new arrivals meant that the British soon overtook the French, as the following passage from Boberg (2010, 57) explains: French emigration to North America amounted to no more than 10000–15000 people over the 150-year history of New France; natural increase was the main factor in raising the colony’s population to around 70000 by 1760 (Charbonneau et al., 2000, 104, 106). By contrast, Britain’s American colonies received over 300000 immigrants over the same period, helping to raise their population to well over a million by 1760 (Gemery, 2000, 171).1 The consequence of this rise in the British presence in North America was an ‘inevitable clash of French and British colonial aims’ (Boberg, 2010, 58), resulting in a number of skirmishes eventually culminating in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). This war, rather a series of battles fought globally between the major powers at the time (foremost Britain and France, but also Prussia, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Russia, the Mughal Empire and a number of German states, but also including several aboriginal nations in Canada and the American colonies), ended with complete British control over the entirety of eastern North America. It actually began with the British assault on Acadia in 1755, followed by the expulsion of the Acadians, an event remembered as Le grand dérangement in which 11500 of the region’s 14000 Acadians were deported until the end of the war, to locations ranging from Quebec to Louisiana. French retaliation saw the capture of British forts south of the Great Lakes, but 1759 brought a series of British victories, culminating in the battle on the Plains of Abraham outside Québec, the capital city of New France, leading to its capture after a siege lasting three months. French counteroffensives in 1760 were defeated, with final surrender at Montreal in September 1760. With the exception of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon (which would change hands repeatedly for the following one hundred years), France had lost control of its erstwhile possessions in North America with the Treaty of Paris of 1763. This loss of control effectively cut off Francophones in North America from the ‘mother country’ in Europe, with repercussions in linguistic terms (varieties of French on the two sides of the Atlantic diverging through decreased contact) and in ethnic population terms (with dramatically reduced immigration from France, internal procreation became the only source of population increase). A thorough account of English-speaking migration to Canada is given in Boberg (2010, 58ff). Apart from the English mission led by (the Venetian) John Cabot in 1497, Humphrey Gilbert was chartered in 1583 to establish an English colony on St. John’s, Newfoundland. Actual settlement was seen as less important than fishing monopolies, so that only some...
