Canada's English dictionary hasn't been updated in almost 2 decades. What does that say about us?

"Just how far removed we had already become from Britain even in the nineteenth century was not well understood in the mother country," begins an essay in the first pages of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

"So it happened that the first person in recorded history who ever spoke of 'Canadian English' did so disparagingly. The Rev. A. Constable Geikie, in an address to the Canadian Institute in 1857, ten years before Confederation, stated that 'Canadian English' was 'a corrupt dialect.'"

That anecdote paints a disheartening picture of Canadian heritage near its inception. Although Canada has evolved since then, that perception largely hasn't, and it can be difficult for even Canadians to believe there is anything special or distinct about our English.

But while we may have a hard time believing that our version of the language is distinct enough to warrant attention, linguists, lexicographers and writers would disagree.

Everything from our spelling to our idioms to our grammar warrants and necessitates research, documentation — a dictionary. Because of that, experts see a Canadian English dictionary as a vital tool, but it's a tool that has a much shorter history than you might think — and largely exists due to the passion and drive of one woman.

"I think if you'd spoken to her, she would have said it's absurd that there wasn't a dictionary beforehand," said Mike Barber, nephew of Katherine Barber, the late editor-in-chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

"She saw herself ... as a Canadianist, in a sense that there was something important about Canadian language that needed to be codified and explained and shared with people — who tend to have a real inability to see themselves through the prism of public and national identity."

Hailed as the "maven of Canadian English" by the Washington Post and known widely as Canada's "word lady," Katherine Barber was renowned for researching and documenting how language works in this country. In 1991, she became the founding editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary — the country's first authoritative and comprehensive reference work for Canadian English — with the first edition publishing in 1998.

But despite her work, it has been nearly two decades since the most recent edition was released (the COD's second edition was published in print in 2004, and released online in 2005) while Barber herself died in April 2021. The entire Canadian Oxford research staff was laid off in 2008 due to declining sales, and responsibility for identifying our country's words was placed largely in the hands of researchers in the United States and Britain (though Canadian researchers continue to add Canadian influence).

Without an up-to-date dictionary to rely on, writers and editors are left to flounder in the dark over how the language "should" be written. At the same time, the representation of Canada on the world stage suffers and our understanding of what makes the language unique becomes increasingly obscure.

"I definitely think it puts Canadian English at a disadvantage — or at the very least, it doesn't give it the same kind of visibility and representation as you see for other varieties," said Daniel Hieber, a research linguist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton who also shares linguistics information on social networking site TikTok.

Lacking a contemporary study of its language, he said, puts Canadian English in the realm of "low resource" languages: those that lack adequate learning and reference documentation. That makes it difficult, for example, to create a version of Microsoft Windows in Canadian English or make decisions on the evolving spelling and meaning of words.

Hieber said that doesn't threaten Canadian English's existence. While past dictionaries were sometimes created for the explicit purpose of dictating how people "should" speak — such as the first truly American dictionary, Noah Webster's A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1806 — modern dictionaries document how people are already speaking.

A dictionary's relationship with writing is more direct. Writing is not the same as language, Hieber explained, but is instead a "fairly arbitrary set of conventions for representing language." A dictionary observes and documents those conventions. Without one, writers have to make it up as they go along — and they're quickly losing track of the rules.