Per Vjosa Isai, reporting from Toronto for the NY Times, “Canadian Linguists Rise Up Against the Letter ‘S’” (archived):
Canadian linguists and editors are not pleased.
Words using British spellings have suddenly appeared in documents published by the Canadian government.
Gone was the “ize” construction standard in Canadian English in favor of the “ise” spelling used in British English. So “emphasize” became “emphasise,” and “trade liberalization” became “trade liberalisation.”
“At first we thought it was an aberration,” said John Chew, the editor of a forthcoming Canadian English dictionary being produced with the help of the Society for Canadian English. But the examples continued to pile up, both in a recent news release and, perhaps more notably, the federal budget […] Hundreds of words were spelled the British way: “de-industrialisation,” “amortisation,” “catalyse,” “digitalisation” and so on.
The choice undermines Canadian English, a group of linguists and editors said in an open letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney this month. They noted that the English adopted by Canada has been used by the federal government for half a century.
I could have gone with the similar story from CTV News, “Canadian English supporters urge Carney to abandon federal shift to British spelling,” but how could I resist the “Linguists Rise Up” hook? Thanks, Eric and Nick!
Apparently spellchecking software exists that will try to enforce a theoretical Canadian norm. E.g. https://www.lingofy.com/lingofy-cp/ Although maybe using that rather that installed-by-default software that just has an “American” option and a “British” option requires some conscious thought?
Should it be ““Canadian linguists rize up…”?
Although the designers of M$ Word seem to think that British usage requires s in all these words that is nonsense. Insofar as there is a generally accepted standard for British usage it is the Oxford English Dictionary, which prefers z for all these words (apart from catalyse, for which the z spelling is regarded as illiterate). I always use the z spellings myself, and just grin and bear it when software puts a wiggly underline under perfectly correct British spellings. Even software that owes nothing to M$, like TeXShop, does this.
May I suggest a nice Solomonic compromiſe…
Off with the shackles of convention!
I want to see nationwide public protests by all non-pedantic linguists, grammarians and editors.
“What do we want?”
“More free variation!”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
IETF has a language tag en-GB-oxendict, but support from commercial spellcheckers is patchy
There has always been a small group of Canadians who regard any US influence as unfortunate, and presumably this is seen as a low effort way to demonstrate support for the prime minister’s efforts to reduce reliance on the US.
However, instead of running back to the former colonial power for spell checks, I would suggest proactively adopting the phraseology of a country that has successfully gained independence.
Baby steps: start by incorporating lakh and crore into budget publications.
Thread won, I can go to bed.
The “s” variants here may not be completely dominant in the UK but one thing you can say about them that might be relevant in the Canadian context is that they are often closer to the spelling of the etymologically-related French word than the “z” variants are. The question would then be whether minimizing orthographic differences from French is a bug or a feature in the Canadian-English context, and one can imagine plausible arguments pointing both ways.