by Neil Carleton
On Friday night, April 26th, Professor Sali Tagliamonte of the University of Toronto will be the guest speaker for the Almonte Lecture Series. Her 7:30 p.m. presentation at the United Church Hall will be about the dialects research she conducted last spring in the Almonte area.
In May 2012, the Toronto linguistics professor interviewed 15 residents in Lanark, Hopetown, Middleville, the Clayton area, Pakenham, Arnprior and Almonte. What she heard in the Valley was a distinctive style of speaking which dates back to the European settlement of the region. Some of her preliminary findings were posted last year on The Millstone News. That feature is available here.
Millstone readers can also listen to an 8 minute interview with Professor Tagliamonte and Almonte’s Myrtle Crawford that was broadcast June 1st on CBC Radio1 from Ottawa. Click on ‘Listen’ to hear the archived feature.
Professor Tagliamonte’s work as a language detective was recently recognized by the Canada Council for the Arts with the award of a prestigious Killam Research Fellowship. This will enable her to synthesize a dozen years of fieldwork and research in a book called The Roots of Canadian English. An interview about her research was published earlier this week in the April 8th edition of the U of T Press.
Although nobody will be growled at (criticized or reprimanded) for not turning up, you wouldn’t want to be a son of mope (gloomy, sulky person) if you discovered the next day that you had missed Professor Tagliamonte’s lecture. That would sure put a whistle on your weekend (dampen it). Step out to hear about the roots of our language in the Valley.”
