Observations from a Canadian visiting New Zealand:

(And as a Canadian, the idea that "tea" is the main evening meal definitely is hard to wrap my head around. While "tea" is not commonly used here as part of the daily meal schedule, the primary definition would be a beverage and a light bite mid afternoon.)

Matt Wilcox

@AmeliasBrain @sundogplanets Interesting. In the Midlands of the UK we use “breakfast, dinner, tea” for the three main meals. But other bits of the country would use “breakfast, lunch, dinner”.

It’s a mess of a language.

Amelia Bellamy-Royds :progress:

@mattwilcox It is. But the confusion is not even unique to the English language. In French, dîner can also be either mid-day or evening meal depending on what part of the world you are in. (In Canadian French, souper is more commonly used for the evening meal.)

Ken Butler

@sundogplanets I'm going to guess that NZ terms came from a different part of the UK than Saskatchewan, and in NZ it may be something like:

- supper = small snack before bed
- dinner/tea = main evening meal around 6pm or similar.

I remember hearing "supper" used in BC to describe the main evening meal, so that might be a Western Canadian thing. (Don't think I've heard it in Ontario.)

AlsoPaisleyCat

@nxskok

My sense is that it’s more about the timing of the agricultural to urban transition in Western Europe and the UK, and where and when the immigration flowed in relation to that.

Western Canadian usage can be quite different but my partner and I (both originally from BC) both grew up with supper as the usual evening meal while dinner was a formal event or a large midday meal among farm families.

BC had a very large wave of UK immigrants in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the early 1970s, over 40% of the adult BC population were UK immigrants. So, BC has quite a different history or English usage than elsewhere in Canada. Tea, or more specifically high tea, as a term for a late afternoon or early evening meal, was known and used among English expats but wasn’t as generally used.

English speakers who settled on the Prairies also were mostly directly from the UK, or in the case of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, were failed farming pioneers recruited from the midwestern and prairie United States.

Ukrainians and other Eastern European settlers kept dinner as the large midday meal and supper as the evening meal. Two breakfasts were a thing.

Meanwhile, in Quebec ‘diner’ remains the midday meal and ‘souper’ the later evening one, and déjeuner is breakfast in the old European tradition — also the usage in Belgium and Switzerland — while in France it’s petit déjeuner, déjeuner then diner.

@sundogplanets

Roy -- the dull one

@sundogplanets

In the South of the US, we called the noontime main meal "dinner", and the main meal at 6pm was "supper". We drank a lot of tea, but did not have a customary time called "tea".

Outside the South, "lunch" is the noontime main meal, and "dinner" is the main meal at 6pm.

In Brazil, we once saw a small restaurant called "Lanches Makdonaldo", which I took to be "Lunches kinda like McDonald's", but I just learned "lanche" is kinda like NZ "tea".

It's Lanche, not Lunch. And It's Amazing! • A Portuguese Affair

Lanche is an integral meal in Portuguese culture - and my favorite meal! But what exactly is lanche and why will it change your life?

A Portuguese Affair (www.aportugueseaffair.com)

Den of Earth

@sundogplanets
Sounds about as confusing as
the different French meal names
between Québec and France

Raymond Russell

@sundogplanets
The best type of supper is the Scottish version when you go to the chippy and anything with chips is called a supper as in a fish supper, a sausage supper, a chicken supper etc. This is irrespective of the time of day. So you could buy a fish supper for lunch

Wandering Adventure Party

Observations from a Canadian visiting New Zealand:

It's Lanche, not Lunch. And It's Amazing! • A Portuguese Affair