revised and expanded version from my book Casselmania
Imagine this statement by a gentleman of the Canadian persuasion fresh from a psychiatrist’s office: “So I go to this shrink, eh, and he goes like I don’t have no confidence, eh? I go, ‘No way, man.’ He goes I should take assertiveness training. Weird, eh? Like I’m always supposed to be seeking approval, eh, from, you know, other people? I felt like he could kiss my Royal Canadian, eh? But, sayin’ it woulda been too pushy. Dyuh think?” Eh comes in two basic flavours, two broad categories of usage: final interrogative eh? with a rising intonation, and narrative eh with a sustained or flat intonation and found in the midst of spoken Canadian English sentences. Pop culture icons like Bob and Doug Mackenzie, those two hosers on SCTV played in the 1970s to the 1980s by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, popularized and used eh? repeatedly as a marker of Canadian speech. The two actors were simply reproducing what they heard in everyday Canadian life. But the popularity of SCTV in the United States also helped some Americans and more Canadians become aware that eh was a characteristic of Canuck talk. Long before the hosers, of course, academics were writing their eh-says too.
What is Eh? In the magisterial words of the Oxford English Dictionary, eh is “an exclamation of instinctive origin. . .an interjectional interrogative particle often inviting assent to the sentiment expressed.” Wordy, eh? An interjection is a marginal lexical item like oops, ouch, wow, tut-tut, tsk-tsk, ugh, and yuck. It is a part of speech thrown into a sentence for emotive effect. Compare its origin in the Latin word interiectio ‘something thrown in between’ from inter Latin ‘between’ + iectio, iectonis Latin ‘a throwing.’ Professor Harold B. Allen in “Canadian-American Speech Differences Along the Middle Border” (Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association, 5 [1959]:20) wrote “Eh?. . . is so exclusively a Canadian feature that immigration officials use it as an identifying clue.”
It is natural that we Canadians share a proprietary need to claim certain speech habits as our own. Differentiating ourselves from Americans is important to our notoriously fragile sense of self. But we cannot go too far and claim eh is exclusively Canadian. Chaucer used it, eh? That’s Geoffrey Chaucer, poet, author of The Canterbury Tales, written between A.D. 1387 and 1400. Chaucer used the Middle English form ey? and variants in some of the same ways Canadians still do. The interjection is well over six hundred years old. I know it hurts but, no, three rink rats did not meet in a secret cellar under a hockey arena in Sudbury one night back in the forties after a game and too many brews to coin the evocative particle. Yeah, but only Canadians use it, eh? Oh, right! Check out these famous Canadian usages:
“And who is to look after the horses, eh?” (Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 1847)
“So you think he might be hard on me, eh?” (Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1852)
“I suppose you’re a smart fellow, eh?” (Henry James, The American, 1867)
“Breakfast out here, eh?” (George Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man, 1894)
“Breathe—fresh air. Good, eh?” (Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, 1903)
“Didn’t come, eh?” “No.” (Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926)
“So this is Brooklyn, eh?” (Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, 1949)
“Oh, she’s coming, eh, Ma?” (Paddy Chayefsky, Marty, TV script, 1954)
“Not like some people we know, eh?” (J. D. Salinger, Zooey, 1957)
“Let this cup pass from you, eh?” “Right.” (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960)
“Eh, Nat, ain’t that so?” (John Fowler, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969)
Canadian cannot claim eh? as a form that originated in Canada – no matter what you heard from some suds-sucking ignoramus at a hockey game. Of course Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, Stephen Leacock, W. O. Mitchell, Farley Mowat, Mordecai Richler, and dozens of other Canadian writers use eh as well. W.O. Mitchell wrote one of the novels of childhood that I most cherish: Who Has Seen the Wind. If you have not done so, do read it.
as I remember him when I worked with Bill at CBC Radio in the early 1970s as senior producer of “This Country in the Morning.” Eh in Canadian Speech Eh has many functions in everyday Canadian talk. By itself it often asks the listener to repeat something not heard: “Eh? Yes, my hearing aid works. Isn’t it wonderful about those Dead Sea squirrels? They found more of them. People were putting them in desserts. What did you say?” Canadians use it very frequently as a spoken question mark, inviting the agreement of the person they are speaking to. “Stephen Harper, the Mother Teresa of Parliament Hill, eh?” It is a question tag much like the French terminal n’est-ce pas? or the German nicht wahr? Of course, eh? along with eh bien and hein? has been an interrogative tag in Parisian and Québécois French for centuries. In English, subtle shades of expressive connotation occur in the manifold uses of eh. Avis distinguishes eight main categories of usage. Here are three examples chosen by Professor Avis from the short stories in Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House (1970):
1. There is the eh which seeks agreement after an elliptical statement of something observed by the speaker. “Taking life easy, eh?”
2. There is the eh which reinforces an exclamation. “Gee_what a night, eh?” “What an admission, eh?”
3. There is the eh which reinforces an imperative. “Yeh, I know,”Aunt Edna sounded annoyed. “But let me say it, eh?”
(1926- 1987) a much-loved Canadian author and one of the great novelists of the twentieth century
All those uses caught by Margaret Laurence’s ear for Canadian speech also display a quality in the way Canadians overuse eh which Professor Avis neglected to mention.
Other Canadian & Foreign Uses of Eh? The many ways we toss eh into sentences show us constantly attempting to involve the persons being spoken to, to draw a response from them, to seek their agreement. It is a residual, uniquely Canadian, pioneer bashfulness, a polite hesitational spacer in daily discourse: “What do you think, eh? Sure, I can keep right on spieling like a snake-oil barker selling Kickapoo Joy Juice, eh, but I’m also very concerned that you are listening, that you are not offended, and that you are in general agreement with the drift of my conversation. It’s a way of being nice, eh?” One must not fail to include the ehs repeated ad nauseam in the slovenly speech of the unlettered oaf and the shambling halfwit. That use is not nice. Professor Avis put it well and more temperately: “Its frequency of occurrence is high generally — among some individuals so high as to pose a threat to communication.” Moreover, some of the British immigrants who first brought eh to Canada had been taught over home that using eh was rude — and, sir, a damned If the particle spoken was eh, a variant Cockney response was: “ ‘Ay is for ‘orses.” All forms of eh and hay continued to be branded vulgar well into the 1930s in England. Thus, as Eric Partridge reports in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1984), we have a British RAF retort: “Eh? to me! Why, you’ll be saying ‘arseholes’ to the C.O. next!” Later British army slang had “Eh? to me, you offensive little twit; next you’ll be saying ‘balls’ to the Queen. GET OVER HERE!”
ExtraCanadian Usage of the Interjection The international English usage of eh? is widespread. Australian and South African novels contain the interjection. The examples from British and American authors quoted above, which demonstrate many of eh’s categories of usage, were collected by a great Canadian lexicographer, the late Walter S. Avis; and they appear in his definitive article “So eh? is Canadian, eh?” (Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 17, no.2 [1972]: 89-104). It is well worth perusal. Professor Avis’ view is the scholarly and the commonsensical one and I quote it: “Eh?. . .did not originate in Canada and is not peculiar to the English spoken in Canada. . . On the other hand, there can be no doubt that eh? has a remarkably high incidence in the conversation of many Canadians these days. . . in Canada eh? has been pressed into service in contexts where it would be unfamiliar elsewhere. Finally, it would appear that eh? has gained such recognition among Canadians that it is used consciously and frequently by newspapermen and others in informal articles and reports.” Eh may be obsolescent, even dying out utterly as a distinctive marker of Canadian speech. The latest linguistic usage surveys show that fewer and fewer Canadians under the age of 30 are employing eh. Like the rest of Stephen Harper’s twilit Canada, it too may soon be out of work.
© 2009 William Gordon Casselman
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Eh? True Story of a Canadian Interjection Eh Canada's Speech Marker: Becoming Obsolete? Eh: It's Origin and True History Canadian, Eh?
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impertinence! We know this from centuries-old expressions of reproach that became common in Britain. In fact, in print as early as Jonathan Swift’s A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation (1740) is a catch-phrase said by their superiors to vulgar persons who used eh or hay. Upon having her ears affronted with such a low interjection, the pearl-encrusted dowager would shake her wattles, look with scorn through her tortoise-shell lorgnette at the varlet who had dared to utter the particle, and dismiss him with: “Hay is for horses.” 
