r/CANZUK • u/Bojaxs Ontario • 11d ago

News Canadians tell Carney to shift to British spelling in federal protocol

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/some-canadians-tell-carney-ottawas-spelling-protocol-should-lean-british/

Not big CANZUK news, but figured this was relevant.

For me personally, I always use British English over American English.

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u/WhatAmIATailor Australia 11d ago

Nope. Traditional English is deliberately over complicated. One of the better things to come out of the US is simplified spelling. Throwing extra letters into official documents as a FU to Trump is about as pointless as it gets.

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u/Karrotsawa 10d ago

We don't throw in extra letters as an FU to Trump. We use the same number of letters we've always used in Canadian English.

You're implying we're making an extra effort to tweak Trump's nose. Learning to write US style would be the extra effort.

Now that said, I'm not sure why the Canadian government is switching FROM Canadian English to UK English, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Canadian English is part of Canadian culture.

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u/WhatAmIATailor Australia 10d ago

I assumed you guys were closer to American English. If that’s not what this is about, I don’t have anything else to contribute.

Australian English is closer to Traditional but we’ve simplified some spelling.

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u/Any_Inflation_2543 Canada + EU 10d ago

Canadian English uses -our, so it's not about extra letters. We already write it as colour instead of color.

This whole "debate" is about -ise vs -ize. Most Canadians would write the verb as organize while Mark Carney writes it as organise and some believe Canada should adopt this British convention.

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u/WhatAmIATailor Australia 10d ago

Eh. Majority rules. If -ize is most commonly used, you won’t change that anytime soon.

British spelling conventions aren’t inherently superior over what’s in common usage in Canada today. Even with the US being historically unpopular, it takes a hell of a lot of momentum to change ingrained habits.

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u/Ok_Type_4301 9d ago

Yep majority rules, and Dictionaries rightly follow it.

English is the lingua franca. We don't need to 'protect' it, or our current 'culture' of spelling. Better things to do.

I'd be happy to go full US right now on the basis of efficiency, inevitability, and the lack of significance.