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.
When Canadians use ‘Centre’ are they just being fancy, or do they always spell it that way?
I remember from my stamp-collecting days (before about 1961), when I had a particular interest in Canada because I had an aunt in Toronto who used to send me new stamps, that s spellings were often used in the little texts that accompanied new issues. I thought then that that was because they allowed mixed-language titles like Plan de Colombo Plan. I think there was one that mentioned the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation du Traité de l’Atlantique Nord, but I can’t find evidence of that now.
@Phil Jennings: “Centre” is normal in Canada. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_English#Orthography
I’ve heard some Canadians say that they attribute different shades of meaning to some spelling variants, like “center” for the mathematical sense and “centre” for a building. Even in the US you can see this with “theatre” (which according to the most reputable sources must be pronounced [ˈθɪətʌ] and be separated by no more than ten words from “dahling”).
Linguistic prescriptivism is a bad thing. So say all linguists. Except when it is trumped by Anglophobia, which is a good thing. It is interesting that US software companies will happily localise for any language, naturally including two versions of Norwegian, etc., except British English.
Linguistic prescriptivism is a bad thing. So say all linguists. Except when it is trumped by Anglophobia, which is a good thing.
What are you on about? Who exactly said Anglophobia is a good thing?
You can find the “centre” spelling in the U.S. in certain toponyms and other proper names, generally those which predated the standardization on “center” and could not be bothered to respell themselves post-standardization. There’s a “Centre Street” in Manhattan, for example, and the local Roman Catholic hierarchy boasts a Bishop of Rockville Centre, whose diocese includes most of Long Island outside the NYC municipal limits and is one of the most populous in the United States. (His cathedra is in the suburban community of Rockville Centre, which wikipedia asserts has borne that name since 1849.)
I have a vague sense (with no actual examples immediately at hand to substantiate it …) that some current American real-estate developers may use the “Centre” spelling in the proper name of projects they are trying to sell, presumably because they believe that as with “theatre” versus “theater” the -re spelling sounds more posh. It is IMHO rather vulgar to try to connote poshness via orthographical variation, but I am not the target audience of these marketing efforts.
Speaking by the way of French-style spelling, I am advised by internet sources that our English “centralize” and “centralization” were borrowed from the French “centraliser” and “centralisation,” which were both innovated in or soon after 1790 by those interested in destroying the existing social order, as witness the rather bracing statement (admittedly written several decades later, by Jules Michelet) “Les libertés privilégiées doivent périr sous la force centralisante, qui doit tout broyer pour tout égaler.”
Maintaining Canadian spellings (or indeed OED spellings) is Anglophobia now?
US software companies will happily localise for any language, naturally including two versions of Norwegian, etc., except British English.
Huh? Even my nowhere-near-the-bleeding-edge spell-checker [**] offers English USA or UK or Canada or Australia or South Africa. Possible keyboard settings include UK extended so I can get a pound sign.
Google translate is happy with either the -ise or -ize spelling, even used in the same sentence. (Though only one variety of Norwegian.)
[**] Open office vintage 2016.
Oh, I overlooked this. Good old Microsoft Word happily lets you choose English (UK) as well as English (US) and a dozen others, and I’m pretty sure it already did 30 years ago.
How good the spellcheckers are may be another question, though. Word 2013, at least, does not know weiters “further(more)” even if I set it to German (Austria) specifically; it’s not a rare word…
Without checking properly, to me “theater” is the stage, and a theatre is a structure for plays, movies, or other performances. Except where the former lends its name to the latter, so that houses dedicated to plays would be theaters, and movie houses remain theatres. Paradoxically, since stage plays in general charge higher admission than movie houses, and so are by one (very fallible) criterion more posh.
I could be very wrong, but that’s the image currently in my head.
I have a fondness for Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours a guide to Canadian spelling by Joe Clark*.
*not the former prime minister
@Y: In my American experience, some people use “theater” for places to watch films and “theatre” for everything to do with live plays. I suppose that in extreme cases the latter may be non-rhotic.
@J.W.B.: I have a vague sense (with no actual examples immediately at hand to substantiate it …) that some current American real-estate developers may use the “Centre” spelling in the proper name of projects they are trying to sell, presumably because they believe that as with “theatre” versus “theater” the -re spelling sounds more posh.
For a few decades, Shaker Heights, Ohio, has had a shopping center called Towne Centre.
It is IMHO rather vulgar to try to connote poshness via orthographical variation
I disagree with “rather”.
I have the vague sense that “theatre” is the art, and “theater” is a place when you perform that. Films are something completely different (I have never associated the word with films, in any case). Theater/theatre are only to do with live performing arts. I have no idea why, and I think that’s a relatively recent development in my idio(typo?)lect.
I will never cease to be amazed by the perceived need many people have to introduce semantic differentiation between spelling variants; this is something I did not become aware of until I was well into adulthood, and it seems perverse and yet human-all-too-human.
“Linguistic prescriptivism is a bad thing. So say all linguists. Except when it is trumped by Anglophobia, which is a good thing.”
I suspect Graham is speaking tongue-in-cheek.
Maybe, but I still fail to see what he’s on about. It’s like one of those New Yorker cartoons I can’t make sense of.
“Anglophilia” might sound more appropriate….
I dunno, it’s just that “theatre” sounds more agentive and “theater” sounds more nouny?
For some decades now, I have only ever used Windows when at work, and I have never aspired to be an expert in its unaesthetic designed-by-corporate-committee entrails, but Microsoft seems to treat the primary division in English as one between “English” (by which they mean “American English”) and “International English.” The latter seems, in practice, to mean “British English.”
I wonder if this might have a bearing on the Canadians’ problems here: an unthinking assumption by the office-drudgery monopolists that if you’re Anglophone but don’t speak American, you must be some kind of Brit? Has the Canadian government been economising on ENG-CA language packs? (No doubt Microsoft price-gouges for such fripperies.)
EN-CA, I mean. Whatevs.
Probably a good idea to avoid being dependent on US corporations for your software altogether*; technically, this is perfectly feasible, but politically (alas) probably a non-starter.
* As the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court can testify:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics
languagehat : “I will never cease to be amazed by the perceived need many people have to introduce semantic differentiation between spelling variants; this is something I did not become aware of until I was well into adulthood, and it seems perverse and yet human-all-too-human”
Surely aesthetic considerations had something to do with how the weakening of the small years in Old Slavic came along — anaologous to the Theater/theatre distinction.
I haven’t heard anyone say “theayter” /θi.ei.tər/ in a long time now. Is that just dialectal?
@DE: If you can overcome your disdain for Microsoft long enough to check out the spellchecker options on any computer running any version of that operation system from about the last two decades, you will find dozens of localized versions pre-installed, down to “English (Belize)” and “English (Zimbabwe)”. I have no idea whether most of those represent any subtle differences in spelling beyond catering for the symbol of the national currency, but this is certainly not the place where Microsoft makes money by charging extra.
As for the reason why Canadian government sources switched to British spelling, I assume Mark Carney is to blame; his years in England have brainwashed him into abandoning his native spelling for / making him see the light of the superiority of (pick your choice) British spelling 😉
My assumption has been that “English (Belize)”, “English (Zimbabwe)”, etc. is not about favouring particular variants of words with multiple spellings, but rather adding a bunch of locale-specific vocabulary, mainly proper names. Starting from your US or UK English wordlist and adding the names of Fooland’s president and ten largest cities might suffice to call it “English (Fooland)”.
Y: I think the difference mostly orthographic, but I think some differentiate between /θi’a.tər/ and /’θe.a.tər/. /θi’ei.tər/ I have heard, but I think is has a distinct mean from the other two.
It happened that a few Weeks later
Her Aunt was off to the Theatre
To see that Interesting Play
The Second Mrs.Tanqueray.
https://www.poetry-archive.com/b/matilda/
@mollymooly: If an English (Belize) spellchecker accepts “tommygoff” (which I’ve read means “venomous snake”), I won’t criticize it.
@Y and V: In my experience, /θi’ei.tər/ is just a stigmatized pronunciation of theater/theatre in all senses. The last time I’m sure I heard it was in the mid 1980s, when I got a friend to stop saying it. Her pronunciation was otherwise standard or even pretentious, so I really didn’t think she wanted to say something considered vulgar.
@DE:
In this Theayter they has plays
On us, and high-up people comes
And pays to see things playin’ here
They’d run like hell from in the slums.
—L. A. G. Strong, “An Old Woman Outside the Abbey Theatre”
@V: I have never heard /’θe.a.tər/ and can’t imagine anyone using it.
Nobody says either /θi’a.tər/ or /’θe.a.tər/. I don’t know where he gets those.
Same here, but it must be simple confusion with homophony.
How? That was an actual sound change.
Maybe, but I still fail to see what he’s on about.
Linguists don’t usually issue statements which are essentially ‘someone else spelt something differently from us, and we need it to stop’.
You don’t usually post approvingly about statements of that type.
Therefore some other force, strong enough to overcome the usual strong aversion to prescriptivism, must be in play.
Since the specific complaint was about the use of common UK spellings, Anglophobia was a perfectly logical possibility.
(I took it to be nationalism on the Canadians’ part and possibly amusement on yours, but I’m probably also wrong.)
Definitely amusement. I have no opinion on the actual issues involved, not having the good fortune to be Canadian.
Ha, David. You’ve driven me to drink. Well, not exactly, but the gin we are currently buying is Tanqueray, and when I saw your post I thought I needed to make myself a gin and tonic.
The play was in fact fairly notorious in its day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Mrs_Tanqueray
An example of Belloc’s fairly frequent use of
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalBonus
in the Cautionary Tales.
(The subtext of About John, who lost a Fortune by Throwing Stones was entirely lost on me until I was about forty.)
Athel Cornish-Bowden, in another life you could have been inspector Morse. In The ghost in the machine he figured out that a suicide note was fake because of -ize spellings. And he referenced OED too.
I don’t believe for a second that the linguists are really outraged. It’s clickbait. They have a dictionary to promote, and performative word rage is a tried-and-true way of getting press coverage. So is announcing a Word of the Year (maplewashing), which also got a post in Language Log. It’s been a long time since Katherine Barber’s Canadian dictionary, so I don’t begrudge the publicity push.
Yeah, same here.
I thought it was meant as a sort of pun on Canadian raising. Or maybe that it started as one, but got lost on the way to the final headline.
I’ve occasionally (though not for a long time) heard people in England say ‘theatre’ with stress on the second syllable, but it was always with a sense of faux-poshness or else mocking the same.
NY Times:
An awkward example, since the noun “practice” is spelled that way in every country; it’s the verb that’s supposed to be “practise” outside the US. (That’s what dictionaries say, but Separated by a Common Language found that there’s a lot of hypercorrect “practise” as a noun in British English.)
At the Canadian English Dictionary’s own site they showcase some samples from the letter Q. Perhaps they chose Q because it has a lot of loanwords where they can show off their ability to cite source words in their native scripts, e.g.:
(I expect kayak will also be in the dictionary with a corresponding note.)
Eat their dust, OED and every other commercial dictionary! (Wiktionary has been there long since.)
Yes, that’s impressive.