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murphyslablast Tuesday at 6:54 AM3 repliesview on HN

One persistent problem is that there isn't a Canadian English spelling option in most software with spellchecking functionality. Often we are forced to choose between US English and British English spelling defaults, when neither is quite right. I suspect that this was a stylistic choice not of Carney himself, but whoever proofread the document. There has been considerable erosion in Canadian orthography in of late, which has only been made worse with the widespread adoption of UFLI English language learning materials in our schools' elementary curricula, which emphasizes American spelling and pronunciation.


Replies

jandrewrogerslast Tuesday at 7:44 AM

The reality is quite complicated. Canadian English is a version of North American English, with a distinctive pronunciation and sub-dialect, but still has vestiges of British English that are lost in America.

I feel like Canada is of two minds, awkwardly and indecisively straddling North American English and British English. It wasn’t until I worked overseas that I realized North America has a very distinctive English that imprints on people, even if they lived there a few years. As in Londoners who spent a few years in North America as toddlers have obvious North American tonality, which is baffling to me.

I have native relatives in Canada and the UK and I find the language dynamics across the anglosphere fascinating.

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lucraftlast Tuesday at 5:31 PM

I'm British and I have sometimes chosen Canadian English as my OS language so that it will not constantly try to correct my usage of z in words like this.

kimoslast Tuesday at 10:49 PM

en_CA is used for localization but I have almost never seen it for dictionaries or language, unlike fr_CA.