There was a conference banquet yesterday night. Dr. Wally Read gave a talk about Newfoundlanders. The speech was entertaining and informative. He was very proud of his Newfoundland origin. He was talking about the natives and was commenting on the attitude of the native people here. He was a very good narrator.
According to Wally, the native Newfoundlanders are not found in St. John’s. People in St. John’s are called townies. People in the ports are called baymen. He named a place where they are found (I had difficulty following him). The Newfoundlanders speak rapidly and have a CFA (Can Fix Anything) attitude. If one wants to communicate with them, he should not be pushy. After you talk to a Newfoundlander for more than 2 hours, he/she becomes uncle/aunt. The dialect and pronunciation is different from English language. They abbreviate many sentences and words. When using invectives, they tend to prefix them with so many adjectives that the common listener would be perplexed. After the talk, I picture Newfoundlanders as naïve and innocent.
Some of the Newfoundland words that were discussed in the banquet are listed below along with their meanings:
ARN - any
BANNIKIN – a small tin cup
BIVER – to shiver
CRANNICKS – dry roots of trees
DUCKISH – time between sunset and darkness
DWOI – short snow shower
FLANKERS – chimney
GLUTCH – swallow with difficulty
KINGCORN – the Adam’s apple of a throat
LONGERS – wooden rails for fence
PUDDOCK – stomach
SCRAWB – to scrape with finger nails
SLIEVEEN – a slime and deceitful person
TWIG – to get the meaning of
YAFFLE – measure for a pile of salt codfish
Please refer to the Dictionary of NewFoundland English for more words and reference.
1 comment:
I hope that Dr. Read wasn't simply promoting the stereotypes of Newfoundlanders, yet again, by the St. John's Intelligentsia. And he noted that these terms are in decline. I, for instance, have lived in both urban and rural parts of Newfoundland. Most younger people have never used these terms and many, like me, don't even know what they mean. I remember reading a study some years ago by a linguist that young, teenage males in rural Newfoundland structure their English much more like so-called Black Vernacular English because they identify with African-American culture -- the feelings of powerlessness and poverty.
A friend of mine, a PhD student from away, pointed this out one time. Look at the teenage boys in the shopping malls in St. John's and they are dressed "gang like" but in a way that, according to him, they should be fighting each other, rather than walking together. Baseball hats pointed opposite directions, etc.
The same linguist's study also pointed out that teenage girls in Newfoundland structure their language much like girls on TV shows like 90210 -- that dates the study I know.
In any event. Terms are loaded. Many know what "baymen" for instance, is: a derogatory term that people from St. John's use to describe anyone who lives beyond the city limits - a country bumbkin that can't tell his head from a hole in the ground. Just like "Newfie" is a derogatory term that mainlanders (and Newfoundlanders who have lived away from Newfoundland for so long that the feel superior) use to describe anyone "left behind": the "goofy Newfie" too stupid to know better than stay.
Most of these latter folks left before the wave of neo-nationalism in Newfoundland really took off, in particular after the failed Meech Lake Constitutional accord that sought to give special powers and rights to Quebec in the early 1990s.
Language is an interesting thing. So is the paranoia and xenophobia just under the surfice in many Newfoundlanders.
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