Expert for Canada Day: what’s up with "eh"?

The following University of Victoria post-doctorate fellow is available to media for comment on the origins of “eh” and the ongoing use of this two-letter word in Canada.

Derek Denis (Department of Linguistics), now in his last month of post-doctoral research at UVic, is an expert on the social meaning and long history of the word “eh” in use since the early 1800s; how and why we throw this little word onto the end of our sentences as verbal punctuation; and what its use says about certain stereotypes of Canadians and impressions of national identity. This research was part of a much larger sociolinguistics post-doc project at UVic, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, on the homogeneity of Canadian English as spoken from the Quebec/Ontario border to the west coast. (By email at ddenis@uvic.ca)