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The field of Postcolonial Studies is one of the academic fashions that has arisen in an attempt to amend or replace radical theories of social power since the alleged discrediting of Marxism. The Canadian case is more ambiguous. Postcolonialism, already an essentially contested concept, is especially conflicted where Canada is concerned. Canada has certainly had a colonial past, with parts of its territory having been claimed by one European power or another since Giovanni Caboto (alias Jean Cabot, a.k.a. John Cabot) landed in Newfoundland in 1497. Canada, however, is unlike countries such as Peru, Congo, Iraq, India, and Malaysia whose indigenous populations were politically repressed and economically exploited during long periods of alien cultural domination. As Cynthia Sugars (2004) has pointed out, like other "settler-invaded cultures," the application of postcolonial methodology is problematic because of Canada's "location within the industrialized West [and] because of its treatment of its aboriginal peoples and other minorities. [So], questions proliferate: Is Canada postcolonial? Who in Canada is postcolonial? Are some Canadians more postcolonial than others?" Elements of this story have cropped up in the work of the widely respected US sociologist, Seymour Martin Lipset. The genuine and original "Canadian identity," Lipset says, is "the result of a victorious counterrevolution, and in a sense must justify its raison d'etre by emphasizing the virtues of being separate from the United States."

It has been said that the difference between a dialect and a language is that a language has an international border and a flag. But that is not entirely true. Canada has a border, a flag, and two major languages, somewhat in the fashion of Belgium. Unlike Belgium, where they call the local varieties of French and Dutch "Walloon" and "Flemish," respectively, Canadians have not come up with new names for their languages to make them seem more their own. Although the major languages of Canada may have some differences from the languages of the United Kingdom and of France, in most polite circles the languages are known simply as English and French. The importance of the French and English conflict and coexistence is so pervasive that the Canadian census provides data on bilingualism only in terms of French and English. This article does not deal directly with Francophone/Anglophone issues, although it cannot ignore them completely. The author's focus is on the description and reputation of Canadian English in the scholarly, popular, and Internet sources that deal with the variety of English spoken in Canada, the native language of nearly two-thirds of the population.