Broken English

1857, Toronto. The Canadian Institute is having a meeting. Back then, the Institute was a learned society where scholars, clergy, and professionals gathered to discuss science, literature, and culture. It’s still around today as a public science education organization.

At that meeting, the Reverend A. Constable Geikie stands up and declares the Canadian dialect as "corrupt." It sparked debate there, sure, but also kind of stuck with us.

British Lite?

For decades, we've been told Canadian English is nothing special — just watered-down British with some American bits thrown in. We're linguistic comfort food: familiar, maybe a bit boring, but gets the job done.

Except that's complete nonsense. Any linguist worth their salt will tell you Canadian English is its own thing entirely. We sit on chesterfields wearing toques, measuring everything in kilometres, while still talking about things being "a few clicks down the road."

The Bestseller Nobody Updated

Katherine Barber got this. When she published the Canadian Oxford Dictionary in 1998, Canadians went absolutely wild for it. A dictionary became a bestseller. Think about that for a second… we were so starved for someone to acknowledge our language that we lined up to buy a book that finally said "eh" was a real word.

But that dictionary hasn't been updated since 2004. Bush was still president. Facebook was for college kids only. The iPhone didn't exist. Yet somehow, this ancient reference is still what Canadian editors rely on because—well, what else do we have?

The current edition doesn't include "Wi-Fi." It still calls Haida Gwaii the “Queen Charlotte Islands.” The entry for "Indian" reads like something from my uncle who lives in Facebook Groups would say.

Oxford closed its Canadian dictionary division in 2008 and says it doesn’t plan to update it. The government won't fund a replacement. So we're stuck letting Americans and Brits decide what counts as Canadian, which feels about as sensible as asking your neighbours to name your kids.

And honestly? Our dictionary crisis isn't even the worst of it. Canada has more than 70 Indigenous languages, many hanging by a thread. For some communities, a dictionary might be all that stands between their language and extinction. These groups are fighting with shoestring budgets to preserve entire worldviews while we can't even keep our English dictionary current.

Messy, Borrowed, and Beautiful

The good Reverend Geikie wasn't entirely wrong — Canadian English is “corrupt” in the traditional sense. It's messy, it borrows from everywhere, it breaks rules left and right. But that messiness is precisely what makes it ours. It reflects who we are: a nation of compromise. Finders of the middle way. Practical, adaptable.

We need to update that dictionary, and soon. Not because we're desperate for validation, but because language shapes how we see ourselves. Let our words gather dust, and we lose more than spelling rules, we lose the stories that make us who we are.

Languages change. Ours has, too.

A Canadian dictionary should keep up, not sit in a museum.