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August 17, 2026 
By Ryan Martin

Like many Maritimers, I adored the 2017 musical Come From Away (book, music, and lyrics by Irene Sankoff and David Hein). I cannot understate how exciting it was to see a part of the Maritimes represented on a Broadway stage. So, when the musical’s libretto was published in 2019, I flocked to the bookstore to purchase it and read it in its entirety the very same day. The experience turned out to be eye-opening, because what struck me most about the script was seeing the word “b’y” for the very first time in print. I am not sure how I conceived of the word – which means 'boy' or 'friend' and has a comfortable place in Cape Breton and Newfoundland English – before that moment; I am not sure how I would have spelled it, or, indeed, if I would have spelled it at all. But here, for the first time, I was seeing something I’d heard for my entire life in print. It is one thing to have heard a particular kind of English your entire life; it is still another to see that English be addressed in scholarly writing; but to see one’s accent and vocabulary reflected in art can only be described as cathartic.

I have selected the short story “The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum” by Sheldon Currie – later adapted into a movie starring Helena Bonham Carter – to use as a case study in how Cape Breton English appears in print. I chose Currie’s story in particular because of its modern-day, urban (1970s Glace Bay) setting, as well as its explicitly Cape Breton narrative voice. I will refrain from summarizing or analyzing the story in much detail; although this is quite contrary to my training in literary studies, I want to aim this discussion purely on the features of the language.

One area of Cape Breton English that I have neglected to address in my other blog posts is the employment of coal mining terms in everyday speech. Indeed, Margaret – the story’s narrator – has a vocabulary that is laden with coal mining references. For instance, she refers to a pan shovel – “a short-handled shovel with a large circular blade used to load and shovel coal” (Davey and MacKinnon 116) – in relation to one “fella’s” hands: “He had a huge hand. Pan shovel hands we used to call people with hands like that. We used to think you got them from loading coal with a pan shovel” (Currie 7). Margaret also variably employs such Cape Breton mining terms as “bootleg pits” (8) – which were illegal coalmining sites (Davey and MacKinnon 18) – and, of course, “the pit” (Currie 15). The coal mines are inextricable from the way many Cape Bretoners express themselves.

The story also makes frequent reference to Glace Bay nicknames for various places. Currie shortens “Glace Bay” to “The Bay,” references “Rabbit-Town” – which is not to be found on any map but is rather a name specific to residents of Glace Bay, and shortens “Reserve Mines” to “the Reserve.” Margaret also makes a rather insidious reference to a Cape Breton-specific place: “Sydney River, if you’re not from around here, is the cookie jar where they put rotten tomatoes so they won’t spoil in the barrel” (22). She is not, of course, referring to the town of Sydney River but instead the psychiatric hospital for which it was once known; the hospital is perhaps more infamously known by its somewhat mean-spirited nickname, “The Butterscotch Palace.”

In terms of the aforementioned “catharsis” that I found in reading “b’y” for the first time, Currie’s use of “Go on!” (essentially meaning “Nonsense!”) stirred a similar feeling in me. Currie very well might have written the phrase exactly like that, but he instead renders it as “Go whan” (16), highlighting the breathy “wh” sound that appears between the two words.

There are other little things that stand out to me. For instance: “Here it is here in the scribbler” (14). The repetition of “here” is actually a feature of the accent that had completely slipped my mind until I read Currie’s short story. Where I earlier wrote about the Gaelic influence on Cape Breton English, Currie here demonstrates that very emphasis: “Then we both of us laughed for two minutes” (10; emphasis added). The pet name “snooker” (9), the particular usage of prepositions – i.e., “We didn’t have a real road in” (12), and the omittance of the past participle in certain phrases – for instance, “I heard them enough since” (10), are all features in Currie’s story that are subtle and yet distinctly Cape Breton. In the aforementioned blog post, I wrote about the particular use of the preposition “after” in Cape Breton English; here, Margaret employs the word in precisely that way: “I was after sitting him up in place” (13), as opposed to “I had just sat him up in place.”

Currie’s narrative style always gets at something that occurs in Cape Breton storytelling: gapping. We gap words in our writing and our speech all the time. For instance: “He likes me, and I him.” Gapped here is the verb “like,” because the first clause gives enough context that the latter clause doesn’t need to repeat itself. However, Margaret of "The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum" employs gapping in a particularly Cape Breton fashion, gapping words and context under the assumption that her audience is up to date: “I took the scribbler out and showed it to Neil and he said he would” (14). What Neil “would” do is play the bagpipes, a piece of information that had been one or two paragraphs earlier – too distant to be a grammatically correct way of gapping – but a coherent way to orally tell a story, and therefore specifically a function of oral storytelling that has been transcribed into the text itself.

Works Cited and Consulted

Currie, S. “The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum.” The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum. Deluge Press, 1979, pp. 7-22.

Davey, W.J and R.P. MacKinnon. Dictionary of Cape Breton English. University of Toronto Press, 2016.