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August 31, 2026
By Ryan Martin

Last December, when I was visiting Cape Breton over the holiday break, I made plans to see a few of my old friends. One day, a friend came to pick me up in his car, and upon getting in and seeing him, I instinctually said, “How’s she goin’ there, b’y?” Over the course of that car ride, I continued to employ such Cape Bretonisms liberally: “Oh, Godjeah!” and “Hyeah” (or, the Gaelic Gasp), and “Go ‘way witcha!” Beyond these common expressions, I also spoke with a high inflection that is a staple of the Cape Breton accent; it is as though each word must be accented and emphasized. This was not an isolated incident with this one specific person, however; at a family holiday party, I asked a longtime friend about her boyfriend and said, “How’s your man?”

In my daily life in Ontario, where I’m a student, I don’t use Cape Bretonisms very often, nor do I have a particularly strong accent. Yet upon returning home to Cape Breton, I spoke completely differently. This was not a new phenomenon; in fact, even when I lived in Cape Breton, I would find my accent changing depending on who I was with and where I was. Yet it is only now that I find myself reflecting upon why exactly it is that I don’t speak with the Cape Breton accent in everyday life, despite the fact that many of the friends with whom I grew up have all managed to maintain their accents. I feel I should have a stronger (and more consistent) accent than I do. So why don’t I?

The Cape Breton accent does have baggage. In his thesis on the linguistic patterns of industrial Cape Breton, Matthew Gardner writes that “To ‘sound Cape Breton,’ especially towards non-islanders, is an ideological stance incongruous with sounding and thus being successful” (25). Gardner has a point. At a summer job I held in Sydney, Cape Breton for the past number of years, I worked with some of the funniest and most clever people with whom I’ve ever worked. Their wit, storytelling, and (of course) accents could not be found anywhere but in Cape Breton. Despite this, they would often turn to me after telling one of these stories or jokes and self-deprecatingly say something like, “Oh God jah must think we’re loony!” I didn’t think that at all, nor did I convey anything other than delight at hearing them talk and gossip. They seemed to need to address and excuse their “Cape Breton-ness.” Knowing I was an English student perhaps exacerbated this: they seemed to want to apologize to me for their lack of “proper” English. And, in fact, this kind of joking self-deprecation was often repeated to the Mainlanders who visited the office. Thinking about moments like these, I cannot help but feel troubled, not only by my lack of accent, but also how that lack is perceived by others.

This makes the occasional manifestation of my accent all the more interesting. In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the usage of “Tydney Mines” or “Nort’ ‘Nydney” in lieu of the towns’ actual names. I wrote that such slang often seemed to be ironic, an exaggeration of an accent and a culture as opposed to authentic. Meanwhile, Gardner writes that, when it comes to regional accents, “[r]esidents can employ local features as part of their performative and agentive co-construction of local identity – an identity they are expected to create in order to belong to the local community” (25). Where my coworkers’ accents were a vital tool in their wit and cleverness, I worry that my own accent is, at best, an attempt to fit in and, at worst, an ironic joke. When I spoke with an accent to my friend, it did not authentically reflect my day-to-day manner of speaking but instead a kind of codeswitching so that I could converse comfortably with him. Is my accent, then, suspect?

There does remain, to me, some kind of hope in my own accent’s authenticity (and, perhaps, survival). While transferring old photos and videos from my old iPod recently, I found a video I shot in the seventh grade. A friend and I are wandering through a Halloween corn maze at Hank’s Farm in Millville, Cape Breton. In the video, my voice, fraught with terror, is distinctly Cape Breton in its accent. Other videos that I have from around this time lack a distinctive accent and sound far more akin to how I speak today. But here, the intensity of the situation had drawn the accent out of me, and you can hear it “right good”!

I am not entirely certain why I lost my accent as I got older; maybe it was intentional, maybe it wasn’t. While it is tempting to ponder the reasons for that loss and beat myself up over it, perhaps I can learn to accept the fact that sometimes I have my accent and sometimes I don't. To worry about my accent’s authenticity is fruitless; really, I ought to feel grateful that, when I am among people who have a Cape Breton accent and vocabulary, my own accent slips out of me as though it had been there all along. And perhaps it was. I like to think that my accent is an innate part of me that, regardless of whether or not it is audibly noticeable, is nonetheless still present. Through it, I will always remain connected to my home and history.

Works Cited and Consulted

Gardner, Matthew Hunt. Grammatical Variation and Change in Industrial Cape Breton. 2017. University of Toronto, PhD dissertation.