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Mark Carney Criticised For Using British Spellings In Canadian Documents (theguardian.com) 121

Posted by BeauHD from the called-out dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Mark Carney says that amid a fundamental shift to the nature of globalization, his government will catalyze the growth in both the public and private sector. But Canadian linguists say that's a problem. Language experts have called out the Canadian prime minister's growing "utilization" of British spellings in key documents -- including the recent federal budget and a press release issued following a meeting with Donald Trump.

Carney, who served as the governor of the bank of England for seven years, appears to have run afoul of Canadian linguistic norms, returning to his home country with a penchant for using 's' instead of 'z'- a hallmark of British spellings. In an open letter (PDF) chastising the prime minister, six linguists have asked his office, the Canadian government and parliament to stick to Canadian English spelling, "which is the spelling they consistently used from the 1970s to 2025." They warned that if governments start to use other systems for spelling, "this could lead to confusion about which spelling is Canadian."

Canadian English is a source of immense pride for the nation's pedants. But the country's distinct and somewhat arbitrary spelling reflects the legacy of how Canada was colonized. "Canadian English evolved through Loyalist settlement after the American Revolutionary War, subsequent waves of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish immigration, and from European and global contexts," the letter says, with the current accepted spellings of words reflecting "global influences and cultures from around the world represented in our population, as well as containing words and phrases from Indigenous languages." The linguists pointed out that Canada's distinct style of spelling was widespread in media and government documents, with this deliberate decision reflecting a desire to preserve a vital element of the country's "national history, identity and pride."
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Mark Carney Criticised For Using British Spellings In Canadian Documents More

Mark Carney Criticised For Using British Spellings In Canadian Documents

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  • Huh? (Score:3)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @07:35PM (#65862859)
    One thing I can say for the British is that they pronounce words exactly the way they spell them. (See aluminium/aluminum). So, while my Canadian coworkers pronunciation of "schedule" bothered me as an American, I cannot call it incorrect! Obviously, the Canadians still consider themselves to be British... er, with the exception of a bunch of francophile jerks in Quebec.

    • Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @07:36PM (#65862863)
      "Which spelling is Canadian?" Both, my friend, both!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Teun ( 17872 )

      One thing I can say for the British is that they pronounce words exactly the way they spell them.

      You forgot this little thing called The Great Vowel Change.
      It really fucked up the pronunciation.

      • Actually, English is one of the worst languages when it comes to being phonetic. When do you get the "guh" sound in "though" or "through" (I don't believe formal documents spell the latter as "thru"). Or words like "Leicester" or "Worchester" - you don't hear "chester" as a part of either word

    • "Lieutenant" (and numerous other words) wants to have a word with you :)

      • I'm not sure people would be proud of the title of "placeholder" . Admit it, "Lieutenant" sounds fancier ;)

    • Re: Huh? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Ogive17 ( 691899 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @08:07PM (#65862937)
      Can I borrow some worchestershire sauce?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Whatever you do, don't Google what that stuff is. You don't want to know.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Can I borrow some worchestershire sauce?

        Worcestershire isn't even that bad once you sit down and actually look at it, it's just long. Leicester is far more confusing and then we have names that are spelled like common English words but are pronounced differently like Reading.

        • Actually, "Reading" is pronounced 2 different ways, depending on whether one is talking about the verb or the place

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mjwx ( 966435 )

            Actually, "Reading" is pronounced 2 different ways, depending on whether one is talking about the verb or the place

            Erm... that was the point. Hence I referred to the "name" Reading.

            Someone who was not native to the UK wouldn't know unless someone told them that Reading was pronounced differently to reading.

    • Francophile jerks? An other American jerk who thinks the planet speaks American English? Yo bro ?

      • Well, that's why OP didn't call them "osties de tabarnak".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skam240 ( 789197 )

        There are plenty of countries where it's American English that is learned and spoken when taught as it's just more practical given the US' greater global reach. The only reason British English has legs outside of neighboring Europe is the UK's colonial history. If you look at a global map of who speaks which it looks a bit like a British colonial map from the 19th century.

        • aye but if you Learn British English then you can learn to bastardise it to speak USian , However USians haven't managed the reverse in 250 years.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by skam240 ( 789197 )

            I don't think Americans are wholly ignorant of British English but I do get what you're saying about Brits being more familiar with our dialect than we are with theirs. It's probably a function of American media given how successful it is globally. Brits make great movies too but at much smaller volumes and we get a bit culturally insular when it comes to cinema.

    • Obviously, the Canadians still consider themselves to be British...

      Er, no. Canadians do not see themselves as british. They see themselves as canadians. So you've worked with a handfull of canadians and you think you know everything about us and Canada. Typical american arrogance.

      er, with the exception of a bunch of francophile jerks in Quebec.

      So, trying to preserve and protect one's culture and language from assimilation is being a jerk now ? Take a little trip down to Louisiana and tell the cajuns there that they are jerks. See how that goes.

      Moron.

      • Take a little trip down to Louisiana and tell the cajuns there that they are jerks. See how that goes.

        Either that, or spend some time in the Southwest, and meet some of the hispanics who want their children to have American citizenship but don't want them to learn English.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by skam240 ( 789197 )

          Living in California which has a huge Hispanic population I've never seen any evidence of this in action. What I do see all the time is kids who speak English far better than their parents and are used as interpreters.

          As far as I can tell claims like yours are just another right wing myth used to demonize immigrant populations they don't like with as much supporting evidence as Trump's fake immigrant crime wave. Maybe a few anecdotes with no broad supporting trends.

          • As far as I can tell claims like yours are just another right wing myth used to demonize immigrant populations they don't like with as much supporting evidence as Trump's fake immigrant crime wave. Maybe a few anecdotes with no broad supporting trends.

            All I can say is that I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I don't like the idea of children growing up in America and as citizens who aren't allowed to learn the dominant language.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by skam240 ( 789197 )

              I'm sure there are a few nutters out there because there always are. That being said my company employs a lot of Hispanic folks and on employee appreciation day when they show up with their families the kids don't seem to have any problems communicating.

    • Please excuse my laughter, my daughter. I really ought to toughen up.

    • Except for Center/Centre. I have never heard the latter pronounced as it's written.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by CormacJ ( 64984 )

      As a UK expat, I confused my American co-workers with my flexible pronunciation of "schedule".

      To me, a timetable is schedule with a soft C.
      As a manager when I'm assigning hours to someone to work, that's schedule with a hard C

      I don't know why its that way, but it seems wrong to do those the other way around,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      Not really, they just have different words they don't pronounce phonetically. Not to mention there's plenty of words both the US and UK use that aren't. They don't pronounce the 'k' in knife for instance just like we don't.

      There's also no globally "correct" way to speak English, there's only "correct" ways to speak it within countries.

    • One thing I can say for the British is that they pronounce words exactly the way they spell them. (See aluminium/aluminum).

      Err... so do Americans... They literally do not say or pronounce the 'i' they remove, it's one of the reasons it's spelled differently.

      British are not better or worse than Canadians, Americans, or any other English speaker in their spelling to pronunciation likeness.

    • Francophile jerk here. Va chier.

      To address the subject, if our main problem is that our PM has a "British writing style", I guess we're in a far better position than our US neighbors.

      • Touché.
      • Don't tell me where to go. By "jerks", I mean the people responsible for replacing bilingual street signs with French-only street signs, at the expense of taxpayers. Because being bilingual wasn't good enough, they have to have FRENCH ONLY! If you're not one of those jerks, then I wasn't referring to you. (I have tremendous respect for the people that speak multiple languages fluently. People that refuse to learn the language skills needed to communicate with the people around them? Not so much.) As far as

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      One thing I can say for the British is that they pronounce words exactly the way they spell them. (See aluminium/aluminum). So, while my Canadian coworkers pronunciation of "schedule" bothered me as an American, I cannot call it incorrect! Obviously, the Canadians still consider themselves to be British... er, with the exception of a bunch of francophile jerks in Quebec.

      Granted we don't horribly mispronounce words like "solder" (it's "sole-der" not "sod-her", there's an L in it and don't even get me started on Jaguar) however there's a whole swath of words in English that are not pronounced the way you think, Sean Bean for example. there's at least 7 ways to pronounce the "ough" sound. Hell, just try to pronounce a lot of English place names like Bicester, Leicester or Worcestershire let alone the sizable London commuter town of Reading (for the uninitiated, it's pronounce

      • Not proto-German, but old Low German. Modern standard German has its roots in old High German instead.

    • How exactly are Canadian spellings different from American ones? The only thing uniquely Canadian I can think of is the date format. While the Brits use DDMMYY and Americans use MMDDYY, the Canadians go w/ YYMMDD. Actually, that happens to work great when sorting files in any filesystem, which is why it's one of the few things Canadian that I admire

      Other than that, I do know that there are words that Canadians prefer to use, like serviettes, which neither Brits nor Americans use. But I still don't get

    • One thing I can say for the British is that they pronounce words exactly the way they spell them.

      Ghoti [wikipedia.org]: pronounce "gh" as in "enough", "o" as in "women", "ti" as in "nation": fish.

  • Both are inconsistent and irritating, and by preserving spellings through linguistic shifts, they make it essentially impossible to generalize a phonetic system. Add to that the Latin alphabet, even with various digraphs, is insufficient to cover English's phonemes.

    And at once instance we'll spell something with a letter we no longer pronounce, out of tradition. And another we'll swap HW in the beginning of all Old English words and start pronouncing them like "white" or "whey". Absolutely ridiculous langua

    • Re:British English and [North] American English (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @07:51PM (#65862901) Homepage

      If we changed spellings so that they followed how words are pronounced:
      * We would have words spelled differently in different countries and also different parts of the same country.
      * Over time spelling would change, this would make it hard to read old texts. By old I mean 100 or 200 years; even older would be worse.
      * Dictionary compilers would have a harder task than they do today.
      * Mechanical (ie computer) analysis of texts would be harder, more errors.

      If anything we should use a single world wide English spelling. I am English and so I think that it should be the King's English as spoken & written in England. I do not expect those in other countries to agree with me but it would be good if they saw sense.

      • ChatGPT says:

        - William Clark's Lewis and Clark diaries show that significant spelling variation can exist even as recently as the early 1800s.
        - Despite this, the journals remain readable to modern readers with little effort.
        - This suggests that standardized spelling is helpful but not essential for comprehension.
        - The costs of spelling change over time are often overstated.

      • Memorising a bunch of spelling in order to read some 18th and 19th century documents that are otherwise modern English seems inconvenient, but not as inconvenient as teaching millions of children and English as a second language students a bunch of spelling variations that should otherwise be obsolete.

        None of us can read Old English without significant training. And even Middle English (~400-500 years) is troublesome for a layperson without an annotated student book for the text you want to tackle.

        I don't a

        • but not as inconvenient as teaching millions of children and English as a second language students a bunch of spelling variations that should otherwise be obsolete.

          That really isn't a big deal. Usually the ESL teachers explain the differences very early on and recommend to choose one standard and stick with it, because mixing different spelling variations in one text will result in lower marks.

      • We already have this. Dictionaires draw endless distinctions in differences between regional spellings and even go to the effort of pointing out some use of a word may be archaic in one region vs another.

        It's not nearly the complexitly problem you make it out to be, not much would change if we for example called it a "nief" rather than a "knife". Or if we called the big brown animal a "bair" so it reflects "hair" you "tair" out of your head, and then left "fear" and "ear" to sound the same.

    • Re:British English and [North] American English (Score:5, Informative)

      by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @09:50PM (#65863119)

      Your comment subject seems to imply a homogeneity in North American English which is non-existent. For example, for Canadians a cheque is a financial instrument; a check is an inspection or process of confirmation. Nite and lite are merely misspellings of night and light. Also, the last letter of the alphabet is and always will be zed and not zee.

      Colour, flavour, and valour are usually spelled with the 'u' here in Elbows Up land, whereas in the US I'm pretty sure the 'u' almost never appears in those words.

      And of course, in America the word meter may refer to either a unit of measure or an instrument for measuring. Here in Canuckistan, the unit of measure is the metre.

      • Even in the US the only homogeneity is if your education background uses Websters as its standard reference, which I suspect is above 99% of US schools.
        The dictionary situation in Canada has historically been less one-sided. Depending on province is the most common dictionary, with Gage being the only truly Canadian dictionary I ever saw growing up. But I suspect OUP Canada is the dominate one now (I haven't been over there in decades).

        Years ago, at least in the northern US, metre and meter were both common

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Your comment subject seems to imply a homogeneity in North American English which is non-existent. For example, for Canadians a cheque is a financial instrument; a check is an inspection or process of confirmation. Nite and lite are merely misspellings of night and light. Also, the last letter of the alphabet is and always will be zed and not zee.

        Colour, flavour, and valour are usually spelled with the 'u' here in Elbows Up land, whereas in the US I'm pretty sure the 'u' almost never appears in those words.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pjt33 ( 739471 )

          North American English kept using words that ended up being deprecated in England.

          Or popularised words which were previously only spoken in a regional dialect and which never spread beyond that region within England.

      • For example, for Canadians a cheque is a financial instrument; a check is an inspection or process of confirmation.

        Only because you approach the problem from the spelling rather than from the language. There's no reason to write words differently if they sound the same audibly, as demonstrated by Americans where a check is a financial instrument, and a check is an inspection or process of confirmation.

        Language needs context to be understood. There's no point of splitting word spelling, the context informs us what we are talking about. There's no reason written language needs to be more precise than spoken language.

        This

        • Written language is more precise than spoken language in many languages, and there is actually a reason for that. You cannot ask for clarifications or get additional information to resolve ambiguities on a sheet of paper...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The UK has multiple spellings too. At school they mostly teach the -ise spelling, but I prefer the Oxford -ize spelling. Either is acceptable, although a lot of spell checkers don't support Oxford.

  • he starts using the metric system. Then all hell is gonna break loose!!!!!,

    • he starts using the metric system. Then all hell is gonna break loose!!!!!,

      Too late. That was already a thing in 1970.

    • For scientific work, the US actually does use the metric system. It's only for commercial use that we go back to the American variants of the old imperial system

      So what do Canadians use for shoe sizes?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sebby ( 238625 )

        For scientific work, the US actually does use the metric system. It's only for commercial use that we go back to the American variants of the old imperial system

        So what do Canadians use for shoe sizes?

        Probably trump's dick length, per Stormy Daniels.

  • You must recogniSe and speak the Kingz English. Got It.

  • I love living in Canada (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @07:50PM (#65862897) Homepage

    When this is what passes for a scandal, things are OK.

  • Obligatory spelling humo(u)r (Score:5, Funny)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @08:36PM (#65863011) Homepage Journal

    Linguistic humor, English spelling reform [upenn.edu]
    Source: An old chestnut. In its globalized incarnation below, via Steven Gearhart.

    English in the Future

    Directors at Daimler Benz and Chrysler have announced an agreement to adopt English as the preferred language for communications, rather than German, which was another possibility.

    As part of the negotiations, directors at Chrysler conceded that English spelling has some room for improvement and have accepted a five-year phase-in plan. In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". Also, the hard "c" will be replased with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but komputers have one less letter.

    There will be growing kompany enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replased by "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20 persent shorter.

    In the third year, DaimlerKhrysler akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reash the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible.

    DaimlerKhrysler will enkourage the removal of double letters, whish have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"'s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.

    By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps sush as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" by "v".

    During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be droped from vords kontaining "o", and similar shanges vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

    After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis, and employes vil find it ezi to kommunikat viz eash ozer.

    Ov kors al supliers vil be expekted to us zis for all busines komunikation via DaimlerKhrysler.

    Ze drem vil finali kum tru.

  • Silly scandals (Score:3)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @09:42PM (#65863101) Homepage

    Oh, I long for the day when the US president had scandals about things like pronunciation, spelling, or clothing.

    Can we please go back to arguing about the lack of of a flag pin rather than war crimes?

  • I'm British myself but if you reside in a foreign country, you play by the host's rules. Especially in official situations. That's it.

  • Good call - object to people using the UK spelling of English words. You know that English comes from England right? Any guesses where that is? One point if you said "The UK."

  • I see what you did, right there in the headline. Clever.

  • O Canada, wherefore art thou Canada?

  • Can we have English follow a single standard?

    It seems every other country seems to have a slightly different form of English. It's a pain at times.

  • That the very title of this article uses the British spelling of "criticized".
  • Doughn't ewe nough awl dis cumplanin' iz phawkyn' stewpid. Trewli pherst wherld prawblemz.

  • The above is a (rather illogical) anerican construct.
    In canada the *official* notation is DD MMM YY. Few seem to understand this.
    I get my back up when anyone uses the american version here (banks seem to understand).

    Although the YYYY MM DD format is my preference.

  • I think complaining about using -ise endings instead of -ize is a bad example because British English now considers either ending valid. If the originators of the English language can accept both, why can't Canadian English?

    I must admit that I did chuckle when the most definitely American company Google (or Alphabet, take your pick) used the most definitely not US English spelling of Aluminium for its possible Android/ChromeOS merger project. Would only make much sense if the project was headquartered in Go

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