Talk:Canuck

The content added 23:59, 9 February 2009‎ looks like it's pretty clearly a joke or hoax. I'm thinking particularly of "Bart Bandy's Lexicon of Canadian Etymology (Don Mills, Ont., C. Farquharson, 1994)". C. Farquharson - i.e. Charlie Farquharson - is a pseudonym of the well known Canadian comedian Don Harron. Bart Bandy is the most famous character of Canadian comic writer Donald Jack. Moreover, I can't find any record of any book called "Bart Bandy's Lexicon of Canadian Etymology" existing, apart from in Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 156.34.32.79 (talk)

"Can-UK "Canada/United Kingdom" (A person of British-Canadian descent)"

• Is there any evidence for this claim? It sounds unlikely to me since the common use of the designation "UK" is relatively new. Canuck seems to date from the early 19th century. Prior to the last couple of decades, people most commonly used the "Great Britain" part of "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". I could be off base here, so I won't change it yet. I'm hoping that someone will provide evidence that this is not just just an imaginative modern construction. Ground Zero 07:25, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
• I googled "Canuck + etymology" and came up with nothing to support this claim. Here are a few links: Ground Zero 07:44, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • Straight Dope
  • Random House dictionary
  • Moot Game
  • About words
• I have removed this reference pending provision of evidence. If someone can find a reference, then we can add it back in. Ground Zero 16:09, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

'It sometimes means "French Canadian" in particular' -- I have never encountered the word used in this way. Has anyone else? Rrburke 01:53, 16 December 2005 (UTC)Reply

I have never heard 'Canuck' used to describe French Canadians in particular either, and I'm Canadian. 05:04, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm French Canadian and I actually thought Canuck referred only to English Canadians... --24.200.133.131 22:16, 14 April 2006 (UTC)Reply

I've removed that sentence. It's clearly false. I also seriously question whether it can be seen as derogatory. I suspect most Candians, were someone to try to insult them by calling them "Canucks", would either laugh or scratch their heads. --24.81.13.220 04:28, 21 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

Cleaned up and added the table of contents. Some entries were moved around. The entries for the Table of Contents are not the best but hope this is an improvement statsone 03:39, 15 July 2006 (UTC)Reply

I have serious doubts on the derivation from Can + Inuk. If the word is as old as the 18th century, contact with the Inuit, other than by whalers, was very minimal. Significant contact with Inuit culture was only in the late 19th and early 20th century. Inuktitut would have been almost unknown in New France or British North America. Unless someone can come up with evidence that the word "inuk" was known at the time sufficiently to expect it to be used to derive Canuck, I'd say the etymology is bogus. Michael Daly 05:49, 16 August 2007 (UTC)Reply

There's a suggestion it's related to Chinook here: [[1]] 82.28.33.86 (talk) 18:59, 2 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

The Hawaiian migrants theory isn't represented on the page at all. From rootsweb:

"Many moons ago, in Canada's formative years when fur trading was all the rage, the fur trading companies searched for anybody they could hire who could wield a beaver trap. In the far west of Canada at that time, there weren't a lot of crowds. There were several Hawaiian islanders who came to the western shores of North America in search of, well, we don't know what -- but it sure as hell wasn't "nicer weather".
They worked out just fine. The Hawaiian word for "Hawaiian person" (or just a "person") is "KANAKA". Also, a "KANAKA HANA" is a worker. Still more, "KANAKA'E" is a foreigner. There's also a creek in Maple Ridge, a suburb of Vancouver, called "Kanaka Creek" though I'm not sure how that came about. Anyway, soon, the word KANAKA was used to describe these workers. Or in another version of history, all the people already living here were deemed by them to be "Kanakas", as in "foreigners".
As with all words, it soon become shortened and obliterated and KANAKA eventually became "Canuck", probably because some idiot who worked for the CBC said it wrong once (kidding)."

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.105.132.193 (talk) 17:58, 28 October 2007

Rootsweb is not a reliable source, and folk history is not folk history. The story is without merit, and I'm from BC and have never heard it before (in fact, I come from about 6 miles from Kanaka Creek, and am familiar also with Kanaka Bar). This ranks in the same conjectural silliness as the story about Haida and Kwakwaka'wakw actually being Polynesian (because Heyerdahl speculated on it, without any linguistic or historical basis for it, and people have treated it as fact, often vociferously). I repeat, rootsweb is not a reliable source.Skookum1 (talk) 17:51, 2 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

In German the word Kanake describes a foreign person. Now given that German Americans are a pretty large group, and the German language in the United States is widely spread at some parts of the US along the Canadian border (even more in the 19th century, see the map) and the first footnote references Speaking Canadian English quoting Walt Whitman:

Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

and given that Whitman grew up in an environment where German would have been a wildly spread language, I think it is reasonable to assume, that Canuck may come from the German language term Kanake, that is also pronounced the same.

Tmw (talk) 15:37, 5 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

There's still a reference to Canuck being used as an ethnic slur... I've never heard it used as one or considered it one... Any idea where this came from?142.59.135.116 07:03, 25 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

My uncle told me of how Americans called the Canadians "Canucks" in WWII and it was considered an insult by the troops. Similarly, some Americans consider it an insult to be called a "Yank" (and not just southerners). Michael Daly 05:29, 16 August 2007 (UTC)Reply

From what I understand, "canuck" began as a derogatory term towards French-Canadians, which has since evolved into quite the opposite. It is now a slang term that refers to all Canadians, and not viewed as derogatory by Canadians, though some Americans do try to use it as an insult at times. EZC195 January 2008. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ezc 195 (talk • contribs) 04:53, 15 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

So what was all the brouhaha over the Canuck Letter during the Muskie campaign? that suggested to me it was a slur, but then we have the Vancouver Canucks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.29.79.250 (talk) 16:45, 16 June 2011 (UTC)Reply

I live in New England, and when we use the word "canuck" it's always to describe specifically French-Canadians or Franco-Americans originally from Quebec and not Acadia.- 11:34, 16 January 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.109.153.60 (talk)

"It is similar in use to "Yankee" for an American." This might've been true once, but the word fell into disuse, and its revival has had negative connotations to it worldwide. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.81.77.13 (talk) 21:27, 8 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

The word didn't fall into disuse and it's not derogatory. I'm Canadian and it's used in a variety of contexts - The Vancouver Canucks (hockey team), Captain Canuck, it's affectionate or neutral. Not a slur. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.248.117.215 (talk) 12:00, 2 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

I heard once that a newspaper editor in the US was fired for using the word "canuck" as it was considered to be a derogatory term. I asked a friend of mine from Texas whether he considers 'canuck' to be derogatory and he said people will use it as such. Hardly useful as a source for Wikipedia, but a good indication that someone needs to look at this more. Linguosyntactico (talk) 13:47, 24 August 2009 (UTC)Reply

Canuck doesn't have derogatory connotations for most Canadians in Alberta from what I know. I've lived here 28 years and had never heard it applied negativly unless the person didn't like Canadians in general in which case "Canadian" could be derogatory the way they might say it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.150.45.231 (talk) 16:44, 14 October 2010 (UTC)Reply

Interesting how the connotation seems highly regional. I grew up in Seattle and visited the Vancouver area regularly. For us, Canuck was used in an affectionately teasing sense, much as you might call a sibling by an embarrassing nickname. It meant any Canadian. I now live in Massachusetts and here, it feels less like teasing and more like a simple descriptive term for any (not necessarily French) Canadian. Similarly, I think most Americans wear the term Yankee proudly, but the baseball rivalry between Boston and New York has made Yankee a dirty word in much of New England. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.41.90.137 (talk) 11:25, 2 August 2013 (UTC)Reply

And here we have a case of ignorant pollcorr Americans arguing amongst themselves about a people they know nothing about. No term refering ot Canadians in general is offensive. FFS There's a Hockey team called the Vancouver Canucks, not a local one either, they're NHL.Blind leading the blind, I swear.

So this American keeps calling me a canuck, and I wondered what it meant. Well it may sound dumb, but I thought about this myself. Doesn't make much sense why this word would be used, but it's amazing to me, think about duck. Most of us know of course what a duck is, and the French word for it is canard. Just makes me think of it as a portmanteau of canard and duck, it's in both official languages. But of course, the ones in the main article make much more sense. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.240.133.0 (talk) 06:04, 13 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

--Just wanted to make sure I was spelling it right and came across this article. Seems a bit Canadian-centric in tone to me. Obviously a Canuck wrote most of this. It IS derogatory if you aren't in the group...such as "yankee" or "dixie" or "guido" or "hippie" etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wontonotnow (talk • contribs) 16:31, 6 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, what's with that? A Canadian-centric article about the word 'Canuck'. Otta be a law, or at least a wikirule. Here is my theory, entirely without any evidentiary basis.

The first Europeans that would have had regular land-based contact with the French in Canada were the Dutch in New Amersterdam who had established a fur trading post at what is today Albany. There was a rivalry between the French and Dutch that was carried on by the English after New Amsterdam was captured by the English.

If the French in Canada were calling themselves “Canadiens” or “Canayens” in this time period (which I don’t know for certain); then it is possible that the Dutch would have had a pejorative name based on “Canada” or “Kanada”. “Kanuk” or “Kanuck” might have been. I don’t know whether the Dutch ever coined words like that; but other pejoratives and slurs make use of similar endings. The word sounds less French than Dutch, although I suppose “Canouque” might have been a French original. Once the British took over New Amsterdam, they came into contact with the French and their allies, and they might have borrowed the Dutch pejorative for the foreign colonists to the north, just as they borrowed other Dutch words that have entered our vocabulary (cookie; stoop; Santa Claus; possibly Yankee).

The Kanaka thesis is untenable. The Kanakas were here in British Columbia before BC joined Confederation in 1871. British Columbia was in no way synonymous with Canada before that time, so there would have been no sensible reason to call Hawaiians living on Vancouver Island ‘Canucks’ and then have that name travel all the way back east (via Cape Horn?) to become applicable to English/French folk living in the St. Lawrence Valley or along the Great Lakes. Kanakas were Kanakas. There's a coincidence in the sound, but it's too far-fetched to be more than coincidence. Corlyon (talk) 23:37, 8 May 2009 (UTC)Reply

This article proposes a theory that Americans picked up the common phrase "Quelle canule", but it never explains what Quelle canule means, or why it would be a common phrase. 76.21.120.118 (talk) 19:07, 22 February 2010 (UTC)Reply

Addition : I am French (from France), and have absolutely never heard the so-called "common french expression" "quelle canule", nor am able to guess what it could mean. A "canule" in french is "a small flexible tube inserted into a body cavity for draining off fluid or introducing medication" (definition of the english equivalent "cannula" on WordReference.com (http://www.wordreference.com/definition/cannula), and I can't see any relation to the context. Melttogether (talk) 13:02, 29 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

"Quelle canule" supposedly translated (in the American Revolution era) to "What a bore!" according to this collection of possible origins, (as collated by Bill Milner the first secretary to the Canadian High Commissioners to Australia (according to his email sig)), might be the origin of those paragraphs in our article. Just noting, no opinion. -- Quiddity (talk) 20:43, 29 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

I am French also, and I either don't know what means "Quelle canule" but it might be in fact "Quelle canicule" which means "What a hot weather", which might have been a joke on the bad weather in Canada. JPLeRouzic (talk) 18:27, 24 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

Comments moved here from article.

All of the below seem very far fetched. Isn't it more likely it was derived from 'Canadien' and 'Chinook', the Indians who populated much of what is now known as Canada? Canadien-Chinook could easily become 'Canook', or it could have originated as a derragatory (considering how natives were looked down on at the time) slang word equating the French and British living in Canada with the native Chinook 'savages'.

If it's origin were slang, it wouldn't make it into the written language for some time, explaining it's transformation to 'Canuck'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.52.218.8 (talk) 00:16, 8 October 2010 (UTC)Reply

Chinook is a western Canadian word and term, and Canuck I'm quite certain originated in Ontario and Quebec. At that time western lingo would not have been known or influenced things in the east. Also "Canada" as a term, concept, etc. didn't apply to the west until significantly later ( we were separate colonies) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.183.57.148 (talk) 20:07, 16 July 2011 (UTC)Reply

And, for the record, Chinook are not "the Indians who populated much of what is now known as Canada." Diverse group of people, lots of different groups. Wikipedia only shows people by this name as existing in the US Pacific Northwest, it seems logical that they may have been along the Columbia in BC as well, or possibly in southern Alberta, but I'm not aware of any group existing by this name now (the jargon, the fish, the wind currents, are exist in current usage). In any case, definitely NOT a national group, and with no proximity to the "Canadiens" at that point in time. That the words for French Canadien (initially Canadien referred to Quebeccers specifically) and western indigenous would come together to become slang for the whole country seems exceedingly unlikely. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.183.57.148 (talk) 20:11, 16 July 2011 (UTC)Reply

The Chinook ("Tshinuk", not "Shinook" as in Alberta) lived only along the lower reaches of the Columbia in Oregon and Washington. There are no Chinook in Canada. There were Hawaiians who married natives at Fort Vancouver; some may have been among the HBC staff who moved to Fort Langley in the 1820s, along with those who were Metis or other franco-canadiens (as Iroquoians often were, and they were HBC staff as well). As with the Kanaka/Canuck theory commented on below, this "Chinook=Canuck" thing is not born out by any evidence whatsoever, even less so than the many gaffes in the Kanaka/Canuck theory....(see below).

In German, the letter g has a k sound especially at the end of a word. At the beginning of a word, it sounds more like the g in game. It never has a j sound. The letter e has more of an a sound. The word genug sounds like ganuk. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.179.84.92 (talk) 11:24, 2 May 2011 (UTC)Reply

Content added to the article by 162.136.192.1, and moved here by me, as unsourced and un-googlable (and the lead should summarize the article, not contain unique info). —Quiddity (talk) 22:58, 20 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

The Term has been used among many French-Canadian Americans -- sometimes as a derogatory term, sometimes as a term like 'my countryman'. It was spelled to those as 'Quenoc', because it was used to refer to those who came from Quebec province down into New England and New York. It was also implied that it was reference to a mixed breeding, like the Creoles and Cajuns in Louisiana. So if people called you a 'Quenoc' in a non-friendly manner it took on the meaning that your family had interbreeding with the native population. The 'Canuck' term was derived from the English way of spelling the same word. And yes, both are slangs.

The first provenance of this term is 1835, and indications in other section are that it dates from the 18th Century. Kanakas and French did intermingle in BC during fur trade days; many Metis families have both parentages/ancestries.....but the term was long established long before the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush in other parts of Canada. The cite is fringe, IMO, speaking as someone widely and deeply read in British Columbia history. Spurious; I've taken out the false claim, apparently in the cite, that it dates from the Klondike Gold Rush, which began in 1898, LONG after the term was already in wide use. Doesn't matter what such a source says, sources can be wrong; this one definitely is.Skookum1 (talk) 07:51, 16 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanoeka is the VLamisch/dutch name for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanukkah are the 'dutch/francs' people jews people, or connected? Are they 'people of the candle' ?? just a thoughed 85.149.83.125 (talk) 17:38, 12 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

The Origin section needs to be rewritten, distinguishing more recent empirical work from more traditional texts (e.g. Orkin 1970). It seems clear today that "origin uncertain" does not longer hold, at least according to the 2017 Edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. MinTrouble (talk) 01:54, 28 August 2024 (UTC)Reply

For the longest time the word has been claimed as a term with an unknown origin however, that no longer appears to be the case. According to The Etymology of Canuck by Jacob Adler with contributions from Mitford M. Mathews (DCHP-2 def. 1a), the word Canuck connects back to the term kanaka, which is defined as someone indigenous to Hawaii. The term spread beginning in the 1800’s however, the term kanaka acquired a racist connotation, and was used to refer to Polynesians with darker skin tones negatively (Dollinger, 2006). ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} (On behalf of Dgounder) 21:19, 11 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

If the 1835 reference to "Kanuk" by Henry Cook Todd represents the first example of this word in print, how encyclopedic is it to not include a single word mentioning Henry Cook Todd in this article? Please fix this situation. Source: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canuck 98.123.38.211 (talk) 04:23, 8 November 2024 (UTC)Reply