Seems like an apologia rather than anything based in reality: yes, we know you folks are all Brit/French/Spanish hybrids, but c’mon, you can’t speak worth shite.

Interesting topic. The conclusions (statements set out as fact) about ‘accents’ in this article are not exactly accurate or correct.

I have no idea who Nick Patrick is other than a Wells Fargo customer service person with a facebook page (who doesn’t want to be bothered by people with annoying inquiries). He references and links to an excerpt from The Cambridge History of the English Language on Google books. His summation (or rather interpretation) of that text is not accurate. (I read a few pages around where he linked in the book.) I see he has also read or skimmed wikepedia entries on American English, Received Pronunciation and Rhotic and non-rhotic accents, excerpting extensively from the latter.

I know (assume, hope) he’s not a student writing a paper on the topic but the article gets an ‘F’ anyways.

\grumpy English speaker

Oh and Mr. Patrick’s home page is a profile photograph of himself superimposed on one of Mount Rushmore. I take it he thinks rather grandly of himself.

It’s on the internet so it must be true. Was a time when everybody sounded like me, even the Chinese.

Who can explain Canadian Frenglish?

Québécois French is a truly bastardised dialect, unitelligible to a native Parisian French speaker.

Canadian English I like to think of as a quaint evolutionary melange containing arcane British English elements and some wonderful French and Québécois French elements and word offerings like “toque” and “serviette”. “Program” might be “programme”; shopping “center” is more likely to be “centre”.

...and by *toque* I mean the uniquely Canadian winter snow hat *toque*, not the Chef’s hat *toque blanche*.