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Canadian English

edit David Janes 2004-02-05 11:44 UTC 1  comment  ·

Amritas points to this comparitive list of British, Canadian and American spellings. A few notes:

  • This explains why I'm always fighting the spell checker: I always want to spell "harbour" with the O-U spelling.
  • Spell checking is driving Canadians to the American spelling, except noting the political point below.
  • Where there's a choice between single-L and double-L spellings in Canadian column, I almost always see Canadians choose the double-L spelling.
  • Canadians prefer the "-ize" spelling (over "-ise"), though I've seen both in use. In general, when I see blatant British spelling choices, it's often related to the speller's politics.
  • I work in a very multicultural environment, with people so smart it's scary. I'm not even at the ground floor with some of these people (though they're all very nice to me). So I see the British spellings here often, since many of them are European or South African.
  • I've never seen "chilli" spelled with a single-L here, though maybe I'm not paying attention.
  • "Colour" with a "ou" is drilled into us at school. Same with "Centre" with the French-"re" spelling.
  • I've always heard "fulfil" pronouced as if it had an "r" in the middle (same as Chicago).
  • "Among", "amongst" and "between" lead to an hour long debate with my parents at the dinner table several months ago. See this and this (it's very interesting).
  • Since I've moved to Toronto, I've regularized my pluralization of "shrimp" to "shrimps". This is because I spend most of my lunch times in cheap Asian restaurants. I suspect this is the story of how the English language got to be the way it is.
  • As a personal note, these are my most obviously Newfie-isms:
    • I have a very difficult time pronouncing or hearing the differences in these sets of words: "air/ear", "bear/beer/bare" (i.e. mainly the difference between the German "e" and "i" sounds). Needless to say, this makes speaking and understanding German a nightmare for me.
    • People here laugh when I say "roof" and "huge", though I'm not entirely sure why.
    • When I came to Toronto, I pronouced "H" with a "H". Now I don't.
    • I pronouce words with "TTL" in the middle — "little", "kettle" — strangely: ket'-ul, lit'-ul. I could change this but I choose not to.

Comment #1Alan

2004-02-05 20:48:02
The greatest divide in Canadian UK and US usage is on the sofa/chesterfield/couch debate. WHen I taught English in Poland with a yank and some brits we figured couch was US, sofa was UK and only Canadians called them generically chesterfields.