By any other demonym
I might not have been born under Newfoundland skies, but after twenty-five years, I’ve put in enough time on this rock to care deeply about getting its terminologies and stories right.
Bad grammar, worse geography. There is a phrase I keep encountering these days that never fails to irritate me: “Newfoundland and Labradorians.” I hear and see it in news reports, press releases, and the sort of official language that emerges whenever an institution decides that ordinary English requires improvement. Whoever came up with this linguistic monstrosity apparently thought that attaching a suffix to the province’s official name would produce a convenient collective label for everyone living here.
It does not.
It only produces an ungainly expression that is linguistically awkward, culturally insensitive, and entirely unnecessary. The suffix -ian attaches to Labrador, leaving Newfoundland dangling awkwardly at the beginning of the expression. Whatever grammatical justification someone might devise for it, the result is hardly natural English.
We already have a perfectly good expression: “Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.” It is clear, sensible, and acknowledges the distinct histories of the people it describes.1 Why anyone feels compelled to replace it with something so ridiculous is beyond me.
Textbooks don’t tell the whole story. I came to Newfoundland from the Philippines more than twenty-five years ago, bringing very little money and only a modest understanding of the place where I was about to make a new life. Back then, the province was still officially called Newfoundland, abbreviated as NF or NFLD. I knew Newfoundland existed, of course. I had encountered it in an old encyclopedia, which was hardly sufficient preparation for understanding an island, much less its people. What I discovered through years of living and working here was something no encyclopedia could have adequately explained: Newfoundland possesses a character, a language, and a cultural heritage unmistakably its own.2
I have lived in this province long enough to appreciate how deeply its history remains woven into everyday life. I hear it in the accents and expressions that change from one community to another, in the stories people tell about their families, in their humor, and in their stubborn attachment to the places they call home. Newfoundland’s history is not simply something preserved in museums or commemorated on anniversaries. It continues to shape how people understand themselves and their place in the world.
We didn’t start as Canadians. One of the most important facts about Newfoundland is that it was not always part of Canada.3
Newfoundland was a separate British colony with its own political institutions long before it became Canada’s tenth province. It acquired representative government in 1832, responsible government in 1855, and Dominion status in 1907.4 For a time, it stood alongside Canada as a self-governing Dominion within the British Empire.5 Responsible government was suspended in 1934 and replaced by an appointed Commission of Government, but Newfoundland remained politically separate from Canada until March 31, 1949.6
For generations, Newfoundlanders were not Canadians. They had their own government, their own political arguments, their own economic struggles, and their own understanding of who they were. When Confederation was put to the vote in 1948, it was a fiercely contested decision, not some inevitable administrative formality.7 Newfoundland entered Canada with a history already centuries old.
Joining Confederation changed its constitutional status. It did not erase its language, music, storytelling traditions, communities, or the particular ways of life that had developed around the North Atlantic fisheries and the island’s geography. These things did not suddenly become Canadian inventions in 1949.
Newfoundlanders were Newfoundlanders long before they were Canadians. I find it absurd that an identity with such deep historical roots should now be linguistically mangled merely to accommodate a provincial name adopted more than half a century after Confederation.
Labrador is not an island footnote. Labrador, meanwhile, is not an extension of the island. Its Indigenous peoples, including the Inuit and Innu, have connections to the land that span thousands of years. Labrador is also home to other distinct communities, including the NunatuKavut Inuit and generations of settlers whose lives and traditions have been shaped by a very different geography and history.8
The political association between Newfoundland and Labrador developed through colonial administration and territorial decisions. In 1809, Britain transferred jurisdiction over the coast of Labrador from Lower Canada to Newfoundland. The extent of Newfoundland’s territorial jurisdiction was subsequently determined by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1927, following a boundary dispute with Canada concerning Quebec.9 None of these administrative arrangements made Labrador culturally identical to Newfoundland, nor did they extinguish the histories and territorial relationships of Labrador’s Indigenous peoples.
In 2001, the province’s official name was changed from Newfoundland to Newfoundland and Labrador through a constitutional amendment.10 That change gave Labrador explicit recognition in the province’s name, something that had long been sought.
I find it particularly ironic, then, that we should now adopt a collective expression that obscures the very distinction the name change was intended to recognize.
Places are places, people are people. “Newfoundland and Labrador” is the official name of a political jurisdiction. “Newfoundlanders and Labradorians” refers to its people. These are two different things, and I cannot understand why anyone should find the distinction so difficult to maintain.
A government can change the name of a province through legislation and constitutional procedures. It cannot simply rearrange the histories and inherited identities of its inhabitants to suit an administrative designation. Quebecers do not cease to be Quebecers because they are Canadians. Acadians remain Acadians regardless of the provinces in which they live. We recognize these distinctions perfectly well elsewhere, yet somehow the names of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have become candidates for bureaucratic improvisation.
Even the federal government’s terminology database, TERMIUM Plus, recognizes “Newfoundlanders and Labradorians” as an established collective designation. The expression already exists, is perfectly intelligible, and does precisely what it is supposed to do. There is no linguistic vacancy waiting to be filled.
The lazy art of administrative meddling. I suspect “Newfoundland and Labradorians” emerged from a desire for institutional brevity or some misguided idea of inclusiveness. But I fail to see what is inclusive about replacing two established demonyms with a contrived expression derived from the province’s official title. The word and already does the necessary work. It joins Newfoundlanders and Labradorians without pretending that their histories are interchangeable.
And there is something particularly tiresome about this habit of manufacturing new language where none is needed. I have no objection to language evolving. It always has and always will. But replacing a natural, historically meaningful expression with an awkward administrative concoction is not linguistic progress. It is needless meddling.
Belonging without erasure. My own experience as an immigrant has made me particularly conscious of the importance of names and belonging. I arrived here carrying a history, a culture, and a language of my own. More than twenty-five years of living in Newfoundland have given me another home, but they have not required me to forget where I came from. I can belong here without pretending that my earlier life has ceased to exist.
That is one of the reasons I have grown so attached to Newfoundland. I recognize in its people a strong sense of historical continuity, sometimes expressed with great pride, sometimes with humor, and sometimes with the sort of stubbornness I myself possess. I have heard enough stories, lived through enough winters, and spent enough time among its communities to understand that Newfoundland is considerably more than an administrative subdivision of Canada.
I did not come to an anonymous territory whose inhabitants were waiting for someone in a government office to invent a suitable name for them. I came to Newfoundland, an island with its own history, its own culture, and people who already knew perfectly well what they were called.
Fix the roads, not our names. There is a peculiar irony in seeing public institutions enthusiastically celebrate Newfoundland’s distinctive heritage while simultaneously adopting language that reduces its people to an appendage of a government title. We are constantly reminded of the importance of preserving local traditions, dialects, historical sites, and cultural memory. Yet something as elementary as the name of the people themselves apparently becomes negotiable whenever bureaucratic convenience enters the picture.
I would rather our institutions devote their linguistic creativity to something that actually needs fixing.
“Newfoundland and Labrador” is the name of the province. I have no quarrel with that. But its inhabitants are Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, and their names should not be sacrificed simply because someone finds an artificially compressed expression more convenient.
Call Newfoundlanders “Newfoundlanders.” Call Labradorians “Labradorians.” When referring to both, say “Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.”
For heaven’s sake, leave our names alone! They’re neither complicated nor difficult to say.
1. Public Works and Government Services Canada, TERMIUM Plus: The Government of Canada's Terminology and Linguistic Data Bank (Ottawa: Translation Bureau, 2021), s.v. “Newfoundlander and Labradorian.”
2. G. M. Story, W. J. Kirwin, and J. D. A. Widdowson, eds., Dictionary of Newfoundland English, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 12–19.
3. David MacKenzie, Inside the Atlantic Triangle: Canada and the Entrance of Newfoundland into Confederation, 1939–1949 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 45–67.
4. Peter Neary, Newfoundland in the North Atlantic World, 1929–1949 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 11–24.
5. James Hiller and Peter Neary, eds., The Twenty-Five Year Scenario: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Twentieth Century (St. John's: Breakwater Books, 1980), 88–104.
6. Peter Neary, To Be or Not to Be: The Partition of Newfoundland and Canada’s Tenth Province (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1999), 3–15.
7. James Hiller and Peter Neary, eds., Newfoundland in the Making: Studies in the History of an Outpost Core (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 142–165.
8. William W. Fitzhugh, Inua: Spirit World of the Bering Sea Eskimo and Labrador Innu and Inuit Studies (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 77–95.
9. Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, In the Matter of the Boundary Between the Dominion of Canada and the Colony of Newfoundland in the Labrador Peninsula (1927) UKPC 25, [1927] A.C. 695.
10. Government of Canada, Constitution Amendment, 2001 (Newfoundland and Labrador), SI/2001-117, Canada Gazette, Part II, Vol. 135, No. 26 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer for Canada, 2001).