The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
One of Newfoundland's many attractions is their diverse dialect, which have been labelled as 'Newfinese'! Newfoundland has a number of dialects, which differ from one community to the next. It is very easy to identify where an individual is from, simply by listening to them speak. Newfoundland's dialects retain their distinctive features due to a number of factors. One reason is historically based. Immigration to Newfoundland came from two sources, South East Ireland and South West England. When immigrants settled in Newfoundland, lack of contact with others on the island resulted in dialects evolving independent of each other. Newfoundlanders have the pattern of dropping -h's and tend to add -h's to the beginning of their words. There are two reasons why they do this, one is due to the make up of the sentence structure and the other is naturalness. When speaking, it is much easier to take short-cuts and not pronounce every syllable. This is not unique to Newfoundland. For example, "hand him the book", when spoken quite easily becomes "hand 'im the book". This pattern is simply more pronounced in Newfoundland as it is more common there. Something to Ponder The cardiologist's diet: if it tastes good, spit it out.
