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The Toronto English Project

The Toronto English project explores how social and cultural changes are taking place in Toronto and in society more generally, and how these are reflected in the way people talk.

To do this, we created a corpus of ‘old-line’ Toronto English - a record of experiences, memories, and stories about living in Toronto from people who were born and raised here. Currently the corpus consists of 214 men and women between the ages of 8 and 92.

Our biggest problem has been finding people who were actually born and raised in the city. Where are they? There are only six areas in the city where non-immigrants represent a sizable part of the population. These are certain wards in the following neighbourhoods: The West End, The Annex, East York, Scarborough, Eglinton/Lawrence, and The Beaches. Our corpus currently contains a sample of speakers from each of these areas.