This is a research unit of the Department of English devoted to the study of written and oral English in Canada. It produced the Guide to Canadian English Usage (Oxford University Press, 1997) and is currently involved in electronic dictionary research.
The unit has a computer corpus of 18 million words of Canadian speech and writing. It also has collected the Canadian sample for the International Corpus of English project, co-ordinated at the University of London. The unit publishes a series of occasional papers on English in Canada well as a series of undergraduate working papers in linguistics.
It was founded in 1981 after Queen's alumnus J.R. Strathy left the English department a sum to produce an authoritative guide to English usage in this country.
Learn more about the Strathy Language Unit...