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2022, Vol. 19 (1), 15-27(126)
journals.uni-lj.si/elope
https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.19.1.15-27
UDC: 821.111(71).09-32Munro A.:81’38
Michelle Gadpaille
University of Maribor, Slovenia
“Country Speech”: Regional and Temporal 
Linguistic Layering in Alice Munro’s Fiction
ABSTRACT
Foregrounded reports of remembered speech habits typify Alice Munro’s short fiction. In one 
story, the author refers to this, almost casually, as “country speech.” I will examine instances 
of generalized speech tags (such as “As they used to say”) to explore their relation to the 
creation of spatial and temporal depth in the fictional landscape. Distinctions are established 
between types of these foregrounded speech tags, and the category of “country speech” is 
extended to include a related concept of “country manners.” These combine to help create the 
subtly layered distinctions between place (city, country, small town) and time (decades and 
generations) that add texture to Munro’s narratives.
Keywords: Alice Munro, Canadian Literature, short fiction, stylistics 
»Podeželski govor«: regionalna in časovna jezikovna 
večplastnost v kratki prozi Alice Munro
IZVLEČEK
V kratki prozi Alice Munro je v ospredje postavljeno poročanje o govornih navadah, ki se 
jih junaki zgodb spominjajo. V eni izmed zgodb avtorica to – skoraj brezbrižno – imenuje 
»podeželski govor«. Prispevek analizira primere generaliziranih spremnih stavkov (npr. »Kot 
so včasih rekli«) in razišče, kakšna je njihova vloga pri ustvarjanju prostorske in časovne 
globine v fiktivni pokrajini. Prispevek prav tako vpelje razlikovanje med različnimi vrstami 
spremnih stavkov in razširi kategorijo »podeželskega govora«, tako da le-ta vključuje soroden 
koncept »podeželskih manir«. Oboje skupaj ustvari tenkočutno večplastno razlikovanje 
med prostorom (veliko mesto, podeželje, malo mesto) in časom (desetletja in generacije), ki 
pripovedim Alice Munro dajejo teksturo.
Ključne besede: Alice Munro, kanadska književnost, kratka proza, stilistika
16 Michelle Gadpaille “Country Speech”: Regional and Temporal Linguistic Layering in Alice Munro’s Fiction
1 Introduction
“As they used to say” or “As people said” – these phrases or similar variants pass virtually 
unnoticed in Alice Munro’s fiction. Since Munro’s oeuvre is rooted in place (predominantly 
southwestern Ontario) and time (specific decades of the 20th century), it is unsurprising to 
find overt references to the distinctive idiom of a region or a generation, the “country speech” 
(Munro 1998, Love of a Good Woman, 47) that may need introduction, apology or even 
decoding for the reader.
However, these suspension phrases, or generalized speech tags, mark an overlooked feature 
of Munro’s fiction, whether they appear in the past or present tense. Phrases like “as they 
say” and “what people around here are apt to call” introduce polyphony into the narrative 
discourse, allowing alternative voices to break through. These voices often, but not invariably, 
represent what Munro herself has called “country speech.” Such moments evoke the stylistic 
and syntactic phrasing of another, usually unnamed, speaker, often collective, and take 
various forms, which will be defined, illustrated, and explicated to explore their layering 
effect in Munro’s narratives. I will consider the stories as a text corpus rather than interpreting 
them individually. 
2 Narratives of Place and Time
In an interview with Geoff Hancock, Munro denied being a regional writer (Hancock 
1987, 200); this demurral must be negotiated by any critic discussing region or place in 
her oeuvre.1 Nevertheless, Reingard Nischik (2007) affirms “regional attachments” as being 
among the three main characteristics of her writing. Maria Löschnigg also confronts the issue, 
maintaining that place constitutes “the major linking device” (2014, 21) in groups of Munro 
stories. This is especially relevant for the collections that have been read as “story cycles” 
(Who Do You Think You Are? (1978) and Lives of Girls and Women (1971)). From the more 
distanced perspective of European critics such as Nischik and Löschnigg, it could be easier to 
interpret the narratives as providing a “map” of a particular Canadian region, southwestern 
Ontario bordering Lake Huron (Nischik 2007, 203). However, the two-dimensional concept 
of mapping needs to be corrected with the addition of the dimension of time. Munro’s 
narratives commonly offer the illusion of a credible voice telling an autobiographical story 
about something that happened not just in another place – a rural place, long left behind – 
but also in a distant time –  a childhood similarly distant. The sense of distance is imbricated 
with both the spatial and temporal removal, which produces, as in stories told by migrants, 
a preoccupation with a personal story of origin. Löschnigg identifies this as an “almost 
obsessive engagement with places of origin” (2014, 46), which includes analysis of individual-
community interaction and issues of otherness (2014, 47). 
The nexus of time and place forms the main topic of a recent Canadian monograph, Ryan 
Porter’s You Can’t Get There from Here: The Past as Present in Small-Town Ontario Fiction (2019). 
1 Although, as Joanne McCaig points out, Munro once bowed to pressure in an interview and admitted that IF she 
were a regional writer, then that region aligned with the American south because of the rural setting and the Scots-
Irish origin of the inhabitants (McCaig 2002, 39-40). 
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Dealing with Munro alongside Stephen Leacock, Robertson Davies and Jane Urquhart, 
Porter defines the common features of memorialized distance:
Small towns in Ontario’s literature are often portrayed as repositories of time-honoured 
values, as natural or organic communities, as antiquated counterparts to a degraded, 
urban modernity, and as places infused with traditional wisdom that stretch back into 
the mists of time: places that harbor a qualitative difference from life in the modern 
city. (Porter 2019, 8)
In further analyzing Munro’s work, Porter highlights the phrase “country life” in the story 
“Simon’s Luck.” To Porter, this phrase, used by the characters with ironic self-mockery, 
“bookends” the life stories of Rose and Simon (Porter 2019, 135). “Country life,” as we 
will see, constitutes the acceptable, cosmopolitan version of what will be analyzed here as 
“country speech” and “country manners.”
3 Generalized Speech Tags 
The pattern of country speech can be introduced with three clear examples of generalized 
speech tags, the syntactical structure to which I am referring, which are indicated in bold 
below:
 “Wal if a feller took a notion to, they said. They really said that. (“The Beggar Maid” 
in Who Do You Think You Are? 1996, 107) 
“Talking back” it was called. (“Dear Life” 2013, 306) 
Or beating the tar out of me, as people would cheerfully say back then. (“Dear Life” 
2013, 317)
In each of these cases, the phrase produces the illusion of realistic linguistic reporting. Some 
people, even many people, perhaps even almost everybody said this phrase. The past tense is 
another commonality in these three examples; whatever the wording, this is something that 
people no longer say, according to the story’s narrator. Past tense is expressed with the simple 
past, or with the modal formation “would say” to indicate habitual usage in a past time. The 
second example from “Dear Life” even provides the time frame: “back then.” This vague 
indicator covers a vast potential sweep of past time. The only real time location is that the era 
exists in the past of the narrator, probably during their lifetime, because memory is invoked. 
By relying on auditory witness, the narrator cements their intradiegetic position, and implies 
distance in time and, less tangibly, in place.
There are three distinct ways of identifying the utterers of these tags: 1) the passive voice (“it was 
called”); 2. the third-person plural pronoun (“they”), and 3) the noun “people.” With slight 
variations, these three types cover almost all examples from Munro’s stories. This linguistic 
feature establishes the “qualitative difference” that Porter found between remembered life in 
small towns and adopted life in the metropolis (Porter 2019, 8). It is necessary to grasp the 
function of these speech tags and sample their range of usage and occurrence.
Quirk et al. set out the structure and semantic functions of these comment clauses (Quirk 
et al. 1985, 1114); not all of these functions are evident in this sample from Munro’s work. 
18 Michelle Gadpaille “Country Speech”: Regional and Temporal Linguistic Layering in Alice Munro’s Fiction
The following five further examples of distancing suspensions display the usual pattern: the 
generalized speaker, the auditory memory, and the capture of special habits of speech: 
“Going to Morrisville, they say.” (“Before the Change” in The Love of a Good Woman 
1998, 331)
“So-and-so digs with the wrong foot, they would say. She digs with the wrong foot. 
That was what they would say about Nora. (“Walker Brothers Cowboy” in Dance of 
the Happy Shades 1988, 14)
“Maiden ladies, they were called. Old Maids was too thin a term, it would not cover
 them. (“Chaddeleys and Flemings” “Connection” in The Moons of Jupiter 1986, 1) 
“That’s what they say here, isn’t it? Steamed up?” (“Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux” in 
The Progress of Love 1995, 90)
“Up and down,” they used to say in her childhood, talking of the health of people 
who weren’t going to recover. “Ah. She’s up and down.” (“Dulse” in The Moons of 
Jupiter 1986, 59)
The first two examples involve specific cultural usages that might be opaque to outsiders 
and to younger generations. Morrisville is where people are sent for mental problems, thus 
the dismissive tone of “Going to Morrisville.” The phrase encapsulates a prudish attitude 
towards mental illness, a smug community agreement that out of sight could be out of mind. 
“Digging with the wrong foot” is an even more obscure reference to being a Roman Catholic. 
The Protestant/Catholic divide often hovers in the background of Munro’s southwestern 
Ontario, nowhere more obviously than in this coded slur against Nora. These two speech 
tags allow the narrator to create both small-town attitudes and a safe distance from them. 
The third example from “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux” clearly indicates a difference in 
place with the word “here” (“That’s what they say here” my emphasis), while the fourth 
one emphasizes temporal distance instead. The tag “they used to say in her childhood” is 
unusually forthright about the narrator’s relation to this remembered snippet of local speech. 
The homodiegetic narrator with a retrospective point of view underlies all five instances of 
distancing speech tags but is most prominent in the fourth one. 
4 Speech Tag Variants
The first variant of this linguistic feature is the personalized speech tag, where an actual person 
is identified as the habitual speaker of the phrase, as in the three examples below: 
the kind that Enid’s mother called “potato Irish.” (“The Love of a Good Woman” 
in The Love of a Good Woman 1998, 32)
She always called her cigarettes ciggie-boos. (“Family Furnishings” in Hateship 
2002, 78)
Relations performing. 
That was Flo’s word for it: perform. (“Privilege” in Who Do You Think You Are? 1996, 31)
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Despite their identification of a speaker, these speech tags resemble the ones with a generalized 
speaker because they share some of the function of spatial and temporal distancing, while also 
contributing to characterization. These three deserve careful analysis. 
the kind that Enid’s mother called “potato Irish.” (“The Love of a Good Woman” 
in The Love of a Good Woman 1998, 32) 
“Potato Irish” belongs to a class of derogatory labels used against various waves of immigrants 
to Canada, in this case to southwestern Ontario. The “Potato” part of the phrase invokes 
the Potato Famine of 1847–52, which sparked heavy Irish emigration, much of which was 
to Canada. Irish Catholics entered on the bottom rung of the ethnic and socio-economic 
ladder. Additionally, the phrase associates the person so labelled with lowly agricultural 
pursuits and, invariably, rural poverty with its concomitant monotonous diet. In these 
stories, it probably also connotes Roman Catholicism, since this was perceived as hostile to 
the dominant Anglican/Presbyterian/Methodist/United Church belief systems (see the early 
story “Walker Brothers Cowboy”). Through this phrase, we learn something about Enid’s 
mother, her thoughtless prejudice and snobbery, and much about the dominant attitudes of 
the time and place. Enid’s mother could not have used the descriptor unless it also reflected 
a common community usage and attitude. The distancing here emerges as not just time but 
also attitude. Society at the time the narrator speaks has undergone an attitude adjustment, 
not just to the Irish Catholics, who moved up the immigrant ladder long ago, along with the 
Protestant Irish, but more so to prejudicial ethnic stereotypes. Even in the present tense of the 
story, Enid’s mother is singled out for her usage, and from the point of view of the narrator, 
the phrase needs corrective distancing. 
She always called her cigarettes ciggie-boos. (“Family Furnishings” in Hateship 
2002, 78) 
Alfrida, the “career girl” cousin from “Family Furnishings” is the user of the flip phrase ciggie-
boos. The infantile nickname conjures a complex of attitudes on Alfrida’s part to her nicotine 
addiction, and her use of it to construct a persona of careless, cynical sophistication. However, 
the young narrator has reached the point where she can deconstruct the projected persona 
and its linguistic script. This instance shows that a Munro reader must carefully distinguish 
between usages like this and places where direct speech from the past is simply reported. This 
word is not allowed to exist on the same plane as the other dialogue; the narrator singles it 
out, raises it above the flow of dialogue, distances it from the narrator’s own usage and thus 
from our sense of normative linguistic usage in the setting. In this case, the word becomes 
part of Alfrida’s idiolect, which in turn is part of her life-long performance. Alfrida aspires to 
a chic, cosmopolitan self and uses such phrases to distinguish herself from small-town speech, 
attitudes and socio-economic realities. Self-mockery can be afforded by those who have moved 
away from what Porter calls the small-town “restrictive behavioural code” (Porter 2019, 135). 
Relations performing. 
That was Flo’s word for it: perform. (“Privilege” in Who Do You Think You Are? 
1996, 31)
20 Michelle Gadpaille “Country Speech”: Regional and Temporal Linguistic Layering in Alice Munro’s Fiction
In the third example, the speaker is a major character in the story and the story cycle. This 
is Flo, the stepmother around whom many fictional episodes swirl. The normally taciturn 
Flo has begun to speak, and her flat locutions need special foregrounding. The narrator 
cannot be satisfied with the first utterance but must repeat the odd usage and attribute it 
to Flo specifically, as with Enid’s mother in the potato Irish usage. The verb perform as used 
by Flo describes both the juvenile, incestuous sex act taking place in the school toilet and, 
according to Flo, all the perverse conjunctions to be found in remote country districts. The 
diction choice strips the sexual act of romance or pleasure and reduces it to spectacle. In the 
case of Shorty and Franny McGill, the brother and sister “performing” for money in the 
schoolyard, it has become literally a spectacle, one at which the narrator herself was present. 
In Flo’s mouth, perform becomes more than a euphemism current within a community that 
cannot say have sex, or copulate or their coarser four-letter relatives, but a dismissal of the 
ontological presence of the act. As performance, the act signifies the gender performance 
that marks the normative heterosexuality of the community but calls into question the very 
existence of the reality that is being performed. This goes beyond mere country speech to 
indicate a broader set of country attitudes, ones inimical to the rose-tinted “country life” of 
“Simon’s Luck.” Rose, the narrator, notes the odd usage, attaching it particularly to Flo and 
not to the wider community. A word like this allows Flo to discuss the unmentionable with 
her stepdaughter, while capturing the negation associated with the absence of sex as a social 
experience in that small town. 
Elsewhere, Flo is reported using non-standard grammar in other ways – an incorrect past 
participle, for instance:
… another man who hanged himself using a chain, the kind of chain you hook on a 
tractor with, so it was a wonder his head was not torn off. 
Tore off, Flo said. (“The Beggar Maid” in Who Do You Think You Are? 1996, 208)
As in the case of perform, the narrator deliberately allows the echo; the verb first appears in 
standard form, then is repeated to capture the flavour of Flo’s discourse, since these are her 
oral stories that the narrator is reporting. This clarification creates immediacy and evokes the 
force and authenticity of Flo’s storytelling by allowing her dialect to surface briefly within 
the flow of standard English. The pattern is not derogatory to the character; instead, it does 
justice to Flo by permitting her voice to emerge from the substrate of the past and the country. 
This variant of the Munrovian speech tag personalizes the usage, while still separating it 
from the narrator. The attributed locution becomes part of characterization, in some cases 
of a distinctive idiolect (as with Flo and Alfrida). In each of the three examples, the narrator 
foregrounds the usage with the distancing speech tag, allowing the reader the impression of 
a parallel linguistic universe running behind the narrator’s own plausible voice. This makes 
the narrator into a type of interpreter, a translator of lived idiolect into the voice of the story. 
These speech tags, therefore, create the effect of layered voices almost of heteroglossia, where 
the idiolectal country speech functions as a substrate to the narrator’s safely cosmopolitanized 
discourse. Munro’s technique differentiates her practice from that of the local colour story of 
the American short-fiction writer Kate Chopin, for instance. Were an entire Munro story to 
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have been narrated by Flo, it would shift decisively towards local colour. Instead, this usage 
of well-placed speech tags assists in constructing the multiply textured voice of the Munro 
stories, what Löschnigg calls “counter-realistic deep mapping” (2014, 21).
5 Regional Dialect and Accent 
Having established Munro’s distinctive use of speech tags in creating temporal and spatial 
distance between the narrator and remembered experience, we can now enlarge the view of 
“country speech” to include the plainest level at which she represents regional accent and/or 
dialect. As established, there is no place in her fiction where there is anything like the extended 
evocation of regional language varieties that characterized the regional writers of the early 
20th century, no extended passages of country characters speaking in country dialect. The 
most direct representation of the phenomenon is the occasional reference to non-standard 
pronouns and verb forms. In the story “The Eye,” for instance, there is talk of teaching Sadie 
the hired girl not to say “youse” (Dear Life 2013, 260), and in “A Queer Streak” the narrator 
suddenly notices how her family speaks: “Weren’t they saying ‘youse’ on purpose, to sound 
funny?” (“A Queer Streak” in The Progress of Love 1995, 283). In another story, the second-
person pronoun emerges as “yez”: 
“In the town I come from,” Rose said, exaggerating, “everybody says yez. What’ll yez 
have? How’re yez doin.” 
“Yez?” 
“Youse. It’s the plural of you.” 
(“Mischief” in Who Do You Think You Are? 1996, 126) 
Another pronoun appears in non-standard form in the speech of the narrator’s father. This is 
a reflexive pronoun: 
Till my father would say with embarrassment, and oblique reproach, “He seems to 
get on all right by hisself.” 
If his relatives had not been present, he would more likely have said “himself.” (“Family 
Furnishings” in Hateship 2002, 80)
This example offers an explanation for the non-standard usage: it is conditional on the 
presence of family. The father reverts to a usage from his childhood, one that mimics a usage 
common among his family and community. For him, this represents a word from the past 
but for the relatives, hisself is a commonplace even in current discourse. Presumably, the 
father’s usage is partly diplomatic, as he avoids making a distinction between his way of 
speaking and theirs. It is an expression of solidarity, not just with language, but with values, 
too. Löschnigg discusses this pronoun variant at length, interpreting it to indicate the father’s 
fear of being considered arrogant (2014, 44). This identifies the situation as revealing one of 
the “merciless codes” that must be observed in the rural community (Löschnigg 2014, 44). 
The existence of such codes, of self-censorship or even silence, marks the difference between 
country speech and its opposite.
22 Michelle Gadpaille “Country Speech”: Regional and Temporal Linguistic Layering in Alice Munro’s Fiction
Differences are not always syntactical or lexical: sometimes “country speech” emerges in 
pronunciation. For example, “White Dump,” a story set in the Ottawa Valley (one of the few 
Canadian locations west of the Maritimes with a distinctive local accent), singles out some 
local usages as marked: “they talked as they did, saying, “We-ez goen to towen,” and “bowt” 
(“White Dump” in The Progress of Love 1995, 389). In this case, it is primarily the accent that 
is non-standard. 
6 Country Discourse
As previously hinted, the matrix of country speech in Munro’s fiction is country discourse, 
a phenomenon sometimes evoked directly in her stories but just as often reflected through 
its antithesis, the urban, educated discourse of people who have left the small town or rural 
district for wider horizons. Many critics have noted and commented on this, for example 
Nischik, as she discusses the family “stuck in conventional thought patterns” in the early 
story “Boys and Girls” (Nischik 2007, 210). Marlene Goldman (1990) also touches on the 
familial discourse that conspires to delimit girls’ opportunities. Löschnigg identifies silence as 
the defining element of this discourse: “Codes of silence, and absences of signifying meaning, 
also play an important role in Munro’s depiction of difference against the backdrop of closely 
knit small-town communities” (Löschnigg 2014, 28). Munro’s narrators call attention to 
discourse in the form of marking difference; only where discourse differs is there a need 
for comment. As the narrator says about their visitor, Mr. Florence, in “The Progress of 
Love,” “he [an outsider] wasn’t used to our way of talking” (The Progress of Love 1995, 16). If 
the generalized speech tags first discussed could appear inconsequential or contingent, then 
their placement within this wider framework cements their importance as boundary markers 
in the mapping of “here” and “there” both temporally and spatially in Munro’s oeuvre. As 
Raymond Williams reminded us, “‘country’ and ‘city’ are very powerful words, and this is 
not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of 
human communities” (Williams 1973, 1). Moreover, it is in language and discourse that 
such polarities are created and negotiated. Country speech only becomes manifest when a gap 
has been opened between it and its opposite: the cosmopolitan world of Standard Canadian 
English and normative readerly expectation. 
“Country speech” (“Love of a Good Woman” 1998) and country discourse in Munro’s work 
have a behavioural equivalent in the phrase “country manners” (“The Progress of Love” 
in The Progress of Love 1995, 1; “Hateship, Friendship” in Hateship 2002, 6), and even in 
“family ways”: “My father returned to family ways” (“Images” in Dance of the Happy Shades 
1988, 34). These concepts all coalesce around that gap between the narrative present and the 
memorialized past. Once beyond individual speakers and generalized speech tags, we can 
anatomize the phenomenon in a more holistic way. 
The distinctive elements of country discourse break down into three categories: verbal 
reticence; predictability (restricted and familiar usage); and proverbial wisdom to clinch 
arguments and represent ethical positions. We will take these in order. 
Verbal reticence: This feature of Munro’s stories can be difficult to pin down, requiring as it 
does the observation of what is not said rather than of what is. It receives considerable attention 
23ARTICLES
in Löschnigg’s discussion of “firmly established codes of silence and secrecy” (2014, 46). 
An extreme example emerges in the farm sisters from the two-part story “Chaddeleys and 
Flemings.” The sisters – Susan, Clara, Lizzie, Maggie, Annie and Jennet (who died) – center 
the second part, titled “The Stone in the Field.” “Work would be what filled their lives,” opines 
the narrator, “not conversation” (“The Stone in the Field” in The Moons of Jupiter 1986, 26). 
Since this category of discourse involves an absence, it is worth quoting an entire paragraph: 
What was to be said? The aunts, like those who engage in a chat with royalty, would 
venture no remarks of their own, but could answer questions. They offered no 
refreshments. It was clear that only a great effort of will kept them all from running 
away and hiding, like Aunt Susan, who never did reappear while we were there. What 
was felt in that room was the pain of human contact. I was hypnotized by it. The 
fascinating pain; the humiliating necessity. (“The Stone in the Field” in The Moons of 
Jupiter 1986, 27)
Although this taciturn, reclusive behaviour is acknowledged as extreme even for this 
community (and likely to have been pathologized in a contemporary setting), the story 
depicts it as part of a spectrum of silence and silencing, on which the narrator positions 
herself at the end of the twin stories. A life of verbal absence and avoidance leaves few records, 
not even the lost grave stone of the story’s second section. Munro’s narrators sometimes take 
up the challenge of voicing this community silence, often gendered, and of documenting 
what strangled substrate survives time and distance to document traces of this more genuine 
version of country life. 
Predictability: this category of country discourse refers primarily to lexis, although sometimes 
to syntax or even tone. Using the words and expressions that everyone knows marks one as 
an insider to the small community. Using fancy words makes one alien. The predictability 
of utterance is evident, for example, when the father in “Voices” engages in code-switching 
because “he understood that the thing to do was never to say anything special” (“Voices” in 
Dear Life 2013, 290). The restriction to the predictable can result in discourse that is opaque 
to outsiders. Here is the farm girl, Helen, from “Floating Bridge”:
“You picked a hot enough day to be out in,” she said. It was the sort of thing she 
might have heard people say to start a conversation. She spoke in a hard, flat tone 
of antagonism and distrust, but even that, Jinny knew by now, should not be taken 
personally. It was just the way some people sounded – particularly country people – in 
this part of the world. (“Floating Bridge” in Hateship 2002, 54)
Moreover, in the story “Fits,” we hear that in the country, “much of conversation is repetition” 
(The Progress of Love 1995, 140), which is later elaborated into the observation that “At that 
time he [the newcomer] had a very faulty comprehension of Gilmore vocabulary” (“Fits” 
1995, 141). 
A prescribed repetition and familiarity go together with a straitened vocabulary. This does not 
mean merely exclusion of the complicated and the Latinate. In the story “Wood,” for instance, 
even the commonplace word “forest” sounds strange to the rural protagonist; the simple six-
24 Michelle Gadpaille “Country Speech”: Regional and Temporal Linguistic Layering in Alice Munro’s Fiction
letter word was unthinkable until after his dangerous experience in the wood. The ordeal has 
altered that common assemblage of trees into “forest”: “Forest. That’s the word. Not a strange 
word at all but one he has possibly never used” (“Wood” in Too Much Happiness 2009, 245).
In the story “Jesse and Meribeth” the unspeakable word is “menstrual,” as distinct from local 
usage, which would refer instead to “monthlies” or even “the curse” (“Jesse and Meribeth” in The 
Progress of Love 1995, 223). Similar prudish diction crops up in “Accident” where the sister-in-law 
cannot say “penis” but has to use the euphemism “pecker.” “She had never heard the word penis, 
tried it but couldn’t get used to it. Pecker, she said. Whipped out his pecker, she said” (“Accident” 
in The Moons of Jupiter 1986, 95). These examples of restricted vocabulary are associated with 
the prudishness that accompanied church-going people in a small, vigilant community that self-
censored its conversation. As the narrator says in “Royal Beatings,” “we were all most prudish 
people” (“Royal Beatings”, in Who Do You Think You Are? 1996, 5). The words for sexuality 
and reproduction have a parallel lexicon in country discourse; country speakers may know the 
official equivalent but would not use it publicly. This is not mere prudishness but a strategy for 
policing gender boundaries and disallowing certain attitudes deemed citified. 
Proverbial wisdom: the third category within country discourse comprises sayings and 
proverbs. These sometimes occur in the mouths of Munro’s characters as strategies for 
shutting down argument, for having the last word. They suggest what Porter calls “reverence 
for the past” in his study of small-town Ontario fiction (2019, 8). “How I Met My Husband” 
offers a clear example, easily overlooked in our appreciation for the “digressive unfolding of 
the narrative” (Gadpaille 1989, 60):
“Have a house without a pie, be shamed until you die,” my mother used to say … 
(“How I Met My Husband” in Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You 1990, 46)
The finality of the pronouncement has the presumed effect of shutting down argument. It 
replaces discussion with an inarguable proposition. Munro’s narrators absorb the habit of 
quotation as a means of interpreting everyday experience, but these younger women often 
access other forms of verbal wisdom, poetry in particular. 
7 Contrasting Discourse Systems
In later stories, Munro sometimes offers clarifying summations of the difference between two 
kinds of conversational discourse: country speech and its cosmopolitan opposite. The story 
“Passion” devotes a whole paragraph to Grace’s careful observations about conversation. A 
smart but inexperienced country girl, Grace notes the distinction between conversational 
habits at the Travers’ house and those in her own small-town community: 
People [at the Travers’] told amusing stories, in which the joke was often on themselves 
(… Where she came from, most of the lively conversation took the form of dirty 
jokes, which of course her aunt and uncle did not go in for. On the rare occasions 
when they had company, there was praise of and apology for the food, discussion 
of the weather, and a fervent wish for the meal to be finished as soon as possible). 
(“Passion” in Runaway 2005, 168)
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This passage offers a clear distinction between a domestic milieu where verbal exchange is 
brief and restricted in subject, and another family milieu where conversation functions to 
express individuality and reveal wit and intellect. The difference lies partly in the city/country 
divide, partly in the level of education and class expectations. Young Grace, from a tradesman’s 
family, finds the discourse difference at the Travers’ a challenge at first, but discovers that she 
can learn the rules of this game with ease. 
Note that there is a terminological asymmetry here: what to call this “game” of cosmopolitan 
family discourse. Naming country discourse has been easy, largely because Munro herself 
provided the phrasings “country speech” (“The Love of a Good Woman” 1998, 47) and “country 
manners,” and addressed the phenomenon directly, as in this early story: “‘Well.’ This is a habit 
of country people, old people, to say ‘Well,’ meaning, ‘is that so?’ with a little extra politeness 
and concern” (“Walker Brothers Cowboy” in Dance of the Happy Shades 1988, 12). This brief 
passage unites temporal and spatial distance around one simple speech habit – not diction, but 
pragmatic usage; the pattern of country speech is evident. More difficult, however, has been 
naming the opposite type of discourse that throws country speech into relief. Occasionally, the 
citified form of discourse is mocked in Munro’s stories, as in the phrase “country life” from 
the story “Simon’s Luck” (Who Do You Think You Are? 1996). In context, this summarizes all 
the things that city people think life in the country will be like; it has a glossy, comfortable 
connotation that ignores the rugged reality of dirt roads and outdoor toilets. 
One convenient way of capturing the antithesis of country discourse appears in a surprising 
phenomenon: the compound or hyphenated words that Munro places strategically to signal 
values and attitudes. There exists a set of similar phrases that disparage anything not springing 
from country discourse. These include the use of “hotshot” in “Family Furnishings” to 
disparage the reading of classic novels (Hateship 2002, 89), and the closely related “High-
Hat” in “Powers”: “He somehow thinks it’s too High-Hat” (Runaway 2005, 282). “Airy-
fairy” conjures up the same level of contempt in the story “Soon”: “He might use the word 
airy-fairy” (Runaway 2005, 115), and in “The Bear Came over the Mountain” (Hateship 
2002, 277). A similar usage is the adjective “fangle-dangle” in “Postcard,” where one family 
betrays their outsider status by their choice of garment for a child’s christening: “one of them 
long fangle-dangle christening robes” (“Postcard” in Dance of the Happy Shades 1988, 131).
This list comprises the negative judgments of the ‘country people’ in the stories. The 
compounds drip with contempt and assign triviality to anything not comprehended within 
the allowed subjects of country discourse. Munro’s country is not isolated from the modern 
world; things intrude – classical music and literature, even paintings. Löschnigg offers an 
extended reading of the Chagall painting I and the Village that is rejected by the country 
family in “Soon” (Löschnigg 2014, 41–44). This is an instance where country discourse 
receives extended consideration in relation to one story, which is not my aim here, since the 
stories are treated as a text corpus. Across her oeuvre, Munro’s protagonists usually negotiate 
the switch between discourse types, often uncomfortably and with keen awareness of the 
“monstrous snobbery” that the switch can entail (“The Peace of Utrecht” in Dance of the 
Happy Shades 1988, 192). 
26 Michelle Gadpaille “Country Speech”: Regional and Temporal Linguistic Layering in Alice Munro’s Fiction
8 Conclusion 
Despite the terminological asymmetry, the binary between country speech and its foil emerges 
clearly when one considers Alice Munro’s fiction as a whole. Its existence and foregrounded 
nature are inarguable, given the author’s acute self-awareness in the matter.
“Country speech” (“The Love of a Good Woman” 1998, 47), though never the dominant 
narratorial language, yet shadows the stories, running parallel as a linguistic substrate that 
surfaces strategically to create temporal and spatial difference and to contribute to the sense 
of depth and multivocality in Munro’s fiction. Thus, even stories with single, homodiegetic 
narrative focalisation nevertheless radiate a sense of multiplicity in a voice that Nischik has 
called “Joycean” (Nischik 2007, 208).
I acknowledge the distortion that is the inevitable result of treating Munro’s oeuvre as a 
corpus of linguistic usages, rather than focusing on one story, one collection, or a set of 
related stories for a more nuanced analysis. However, the findings in this stylistic treatment of 
country speech deserve to be extended in future to explore their implications for individual 
stories. Moreover, the identification of this category, with the concomitant dialectal and 
pronunciation instances in some stories, has implications for future translation of Munro’s 
fiction. An awareness of the phenomenon of country speech could aid translators in capturing 
consistent target language equivalents. Overall, the identification of this pattern of speech 
tags leads to cognizance of the phenomenon of country speech, to the broader concept of 
country discourse and to its opposite. This alerts us to a conflict energizing these fictions of 
distanced reminiscence, one operating even in negation and absence. As the narrator says in 
the remarkable story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”: “She [Joanna] 
didn’t have country manners – in fact, she had no manners at all” (Hateship 2002, 6).
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