English is not my first language; the little English I know is mostly from the USA.
I know some of the differences between British English (or just English?) and American English, and the same with Australian.
In general terms, could you explain to me, or list the most important differences (if any), between Canadian and American English?
Canadian English tends to combine aspects of American and British spelling. Here are some highlights:
Canadian English uses generally the same vocabulary as American. There are a few regionalisms and quirks.
Pronunciation has American and British influence. There is some regional variation, and for some words, Canadians vary between British and American patterns. There are many little quirks, here's a few:
What sets Canadian pronunciation apart the most is the phenomonon known as Canadian Rising. Certain diphthongs are "raised" before voiceless consonants (eg. f,k,p,s,t). While most Americans discern no difference between writer and rider, in Canada, the vowel sounds are distinctly different.
Canadian Rising causes the illusion of about sounding like "aboot" to American ears.
aboot "illusion" is pretty impressive. I see it performed several times a day, and am fooled every time. ;-)
This is a huge question. Canadian English has many differences from American English. But it also has many differences from British English.
In general where there is a difference between American and British you can guess that half the time Canadian goes one way and half the other. Occasionally we go our own way.
pop, and was really confused the first time I heard an easterner say soda. For us "soda" is the unflavored carbonated water used in mixers. Why someone would want to drink that straight was beyond me. :-)
It is so tempting to say
Eh?
Of the main branches of the English language, Canadian English is the closest relative to American English, which, given history, makes a lot of sense: In 1607 brave men got off the boat in what is now Virginia to form the first permanent colony in North America for England and not long after that there were forays into New England and the Maritimes. Thus the foundations of the two are bound in the settlers that came from England, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, and Wales in the 17th century.
And then, after that, it gets tricky.
Canadian English obviously has more contact with Canadian French, itself the descendant of how people learned to parler français in the 1600s-1700s. Canadian French is the descendent of dialects and sociolects present in France before it was more standardized, which is why it has features more in common with a peasant from Poitou, Normandy, or Maine than modern bog standard French based on the Parisian dialect. When it mixes with an Anglophone substrate, weird things happen, like occasionally using French numbers for English street names, like in Quebec. When it goes in the other direction, not uncommon in Eastern Canada, the pronunciation sounds nothing like anywhere else in the world and if you want to know what this sounds like, go to Youtube and look up a boy who is trying on ballet clothes in Montreal. He is obviously bilingual but his speech sounds like what happens when you put the two dominant tongues together and threw them in a blender. Consider that he is only about nine or ten. A definite sign of evolution.
Canada was obviously more receptive to the Johnson dictionary than Webster's and to this day remains loyal to it. Bluntly the stubborn facts are that America voted itself off the island in 1776 and for a long time was disinterested in following certain trends in Europe: hence, we still, like stubborn mules, stick to units of measurement that the British used in the 1750s for its navy and don't change to SI units unless we absolutely must lest mayhem result (scientific papers, medicine, international shipping, the army, border areas so we don't cause car crashes). Canadian raising is a feature found in most of Canada but absent in large pockets of the US. The prairie provinces have a rounder o than their southern neighbors, like in the infamous word "hoser". Mary, marry and merry are distinctly different words in all forms of Canadian English, but not in the Southeast US or some forms of black English.
As an American living in Toronto, Canada (and, for a while, working for the Canadian branch of an American company), here are the biggest adjustments I've made to my speech:
Finally, and most important in a business context: I had to ban the use of the verb to table when I was working for a Canadian branch of a US company. It has completely opposite meaning in Canada vs. the US. In Canada, it means, "to introduce as a new topic of discussion," while in the US it means, "to put aside and end discussion for now."
