Talk:English in the Commonwealth of Nations

Canadian English

by no means is CanE included in AmE; many will argue that CanE is halfway between BrE and AmE; and that's not even the reason why there's no "Commonwealth" dialect[1]

Would you expound, JackLumber?

My understanding is that whether by direct lineage or by comparing modern attributes, Canadian English is a variety of American English and not of British English (while English spoken in the remainder of the Commonwealth represents varieties of the latter). Even much of the “British” spelling and vocabulary of Canadian English date back to North America before Loyalists fled the thirteen colonies.

Do linguists consider Canadian and American English (“U.S. English?”) to be two branches of “North American English?” Even if that is so, although there is English in the Commonwealth, there isn't a single or collective variety of English representative of the Commonwealth. It should be made clear that this is a geographic survey article, and may examine some commonalities of English throughout Commonwealth countries, but that “Commonwealth English” isn't a recognized branch of the language. —Michael Z. 2008-10-14 01:25 z

In response to Michael: While the verbal pronunciation of English in most of Canada is closer to the most common English pronunciation in the United States than to, for example, the Received Pronunciation form of English in England, I can assure you, living in Canada and having attended the Canadian (British Columbia) education system, that the accepted written form of English in Canada is the Commonwealth form. American influence attenuates standard Commonwealth spellings to a degree, but if you spelled centre or metre as "center" or "meter", as an example, in a Canadian school, you would be marked wrong. What's more, the "we're not Americans" pride in Canadian nationalism, combined with national media institutions like the CBC and the Canadian Press style book, reinforce the Commonwealth spelling conventions in Canadian society beyond school graduation.

For those unfamiliar with spoken English in North America, it is important to note that as one moves westward in both Canada and the United States a sort of default pronunciation dominates in each country, and those pronunciations are similar. In the eastern part of the continent, pronunciations of English are much more localised and idiosyncratic. Since the English language has been established longest in the east, it has had a longer time to develop local accents and dialects. Compare, for example, coastal southern, New York, Boston/New England, Canadian maritimes and Newfoundland pronunciations.

96.50.0.245 (talk) 23:01, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Dialects

There are very few differences in English between countries of the Commonwealth. It is not true to say that they have "developed their own native varieties of the language". There are not different "varieties" of English. These are not even dialects, as properly defined. There are regional and national differences, but these are only slight. Much less pronounced than the differences between counties of England in previous centuries. The only national variation that could be considered a different dialect is Indian English. That has some obsolete and unique words and bizarre sentence forms that are peculiar to India. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.197.15.138 (talk) 02:39, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree that the claim made is strange, and is extraordinary enough that it would require extraordinary sourcing. It can probably be moderated to something more sensible, like "have developed in ways that make them somewhat distinct, mostly in the form of localized vocabulary variances", or something to this effect. But the entire point of this article is that, in fact, the English of most Commonwealth countries and other former British colonies is remarkably consistent, in grammar and in written form, and in certain aspects of pronunciation, and in the majority of its vocabulary aside from things that are very regional, like cuisine terms. Especially when compared to the variants which have sharply forked from British English (notably American English; and Canadian, which is mostly a mish-mash of British and American; perhaps, to a much more limited extent, Australian English, for which there are some separate dictionaries and style guides, but which do not differ much from British ones).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:49, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

This article should not even exist. The term commonwealth English is meaningless as the differences between them are too huge (eg Indian, British, Malaysian, Canadian, and Australian English are all as different as English varieties get). As an example, Canadian English resembles American English much more than it does British English, as does Australian English resemble New Zealand English far more than it does British English. As such grouping "commonwealth English" on one hand and "US english" on the other is totally meaningless as the varieties are, in the cases of Canada and Australia, as distinct from UK English as US English is, and in the cases of Indian or Singaporean or Malay English considerably more different again. It is misleading not to mention pointless to have this sort of an article. Saruman-the-white (talk) 11:32, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

"Indian, British, Malaysian, Canadian, and Australian English are all as different as English varieties get" = patent nonsense. There's no evidence of such a thing, and a tremendous amount of evidence against the idea. Most obvious is that almost all these places use British-published dictionaries and style guides, and do not have any native ones from reputable publishers, other than dictionaries of colloquialisms. The two major exceptions are Canadian and Australian, and only Canadian (due to absorbing Americanisms) diverges much from British English. Spoken vernacular (slang and informalisms), and writing based on it (amateur blogs, signs in shops) tends to vary more, but this is also true of English varieties spoken within a country. There's more difference between the vernacular, spoken British Englishes of Scotland, England, Northern Ireland, and Wales, and even between multiple parts of England, than there is between neighboring varieties of South Asian, Southeast Asian, African, or Caribbean English). This is because of a "linguistically genetic" bottleneck effect, analogous loosely to a genetic bottleneck in biology: Only certain subsets of the English-speaking population of the relevant era had lasting effects on the English established in a given colonial territory, and much more limited time in which to do so, plus comparative isolation, thus usage (with various influences from local indigenous languages and sometimes other colonial languages) eventually ossified to an extent in each of them. By contrast, the literate class (which was one small in all of these places) were mostly reading the same material from the same (UK-based) publishers and mostly still are, and following the same rules, resulting in remarkable uniformity in written, formal English. It's only different where socio-political pressures have produced an intentional fork in the codified language an in publishing norms, as happened with American English, sharply, by the 1830s and Canadian English, weakly, in the late 20th century. In short, there's a reason that spoken Australian English shares features with Cockney, and Jamaican English shares features with Irish English, and these causes are well documented; but they've had virtually no effect on how professional-grade English is written in Jamaica or Australia. People who imagine otherwise are just F'ing hallucinating. Read a Jamaican newspaper; it not written in patois, nor will the average successful international Jamaican businessperson sound like he or she works on a banana boat; really distinctive local patterns of speech are sociolinguistic registers which people can switch between (and which often exist at the city level, not nationally); they are not dialects proper, and they become less and less close to being dialects the more the Internet and other mass media do what they do. People in New Zealand and Bermuda and Hong Kong and Zimbabwe listen to BBC and to British bands on the radio and watch Doctor Who and Coronation Street on TV and their mobile devices, not just locally-produced stuff in their own regional idiom (plus they pick up Americanisms from American media; lots of modern slang and jargon expressions, from bae to YOLO, are universal among English-speaking young people and are entering other languages, too). See below for why this article is really broken and is going to remain that way until re-scoped.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:49, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

OR and UNDUE concerns

This is such a funny POV Americo-centric article! This article should be deleted - unless someone who, 1) knows about linguistics, or 2) can reference this complete Americo-centric rubbish, and can write something of worth. It's a nonsense to try to gloss over "English as she is spoke" by referring to "native speakers" and other such rot. "Small communities of native English speakers can be found in Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia; the dialects spoken are similar to South African English". - I nearly fell off my chair! Francis Hannaway (talk) Francis Hannaway 22:10, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

I notice that in some articles (for instance biscuit) there is a reference to Commonwealth English. Shouldn't this be Standard English? There is no such thing as Commonwealth English, as English in India - for instance - is now very far from standard?203.184.41.226 (talk) 01:14, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

We do have a "Standard English." 37.47.16.143 (talk) 18:48, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

This is a stupid article, but it strikes me as more a UK-centric fantasy than an American one. It's basically an "Every English but American English" article, aimed at people who are tired of the dominance of AmE and want to increase the relative importance of BrE by expanding it into a mythical "Commonwealth English" that has more relative weight. jej1997 (talk) 09:28, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

I don't presently detect any WP:UNDUEWEIGHT problems, though the exact content of this article has undergone a lot of changes (not all of them for the better). This really needs a focused research session by someone with a big pile of relevant books (plus linguistics journal articles). Quite a number of books have already been published about World Englishes and their nature, including the strong connections between the Commonwealth varieties (most especially because BBC News remains a dominant cultural force is many of these places, and very few of them have produced any dictionaries or style guides of their own, and use the British ones, which produces a strongly regularizing effect on published output in these countries, whatever idiosyncrasies are going on at the colloquial speech level). However, a lot of these books are expensive university text books, not cheap mass-market paperbacks, so it will take someone with funds and commitment (or already in possession of such books for professional or academic reasons, or someone who lives next door to a major university library, or a city/county library with staff who are helpful with inter-library loan). Probably best done by someone at university (as a student or an academic), since the journal access will be free and broad at most university libraries, and via their online resources with a student or faculty ID.

At any rate, the concept of Commonwealth English as a label for the entire dialect continuum dates to at least the 1960s. It's not something made up by either jingoistic Brits or dismissive Yanks, despite the uninformed but directly contradictory opinions of some of the commenters above.

I do agree with the original poster that trying to arrange this article in terms of which groups are native (first-language) speakers versus second-language learners is going to have WP:OR problems. For one thing, it's generally going to vary widely even in the same area (i.e., some subset of the population will be first-language speakers, and others will be ESL leaners, but their usage isn't likely to diverge much between these artificial populations in the same place). It's just like English in New Mexico or any other place where English and one or more other languages are available as someone's first language, generally at a family or micro-community level (which neighborhood you grew up in, or which side of the river/traintracks). The idea that three people in, say, Zimbabwe are going to speak an encyclopedically different form of English just because one uses it in the home and the second learned it in school and the third picked it up informally as a lingua franca is likely to be nonsense, since these pseudo-groups are all going to be using English with each other, not just exclusively among people who learned English the same way that individual did. If there are two or more different forms of English in the same fairly localized area, they're almost certainly going to be registers of usage between which speakers can code-switch as need be, or they will be regionally divided (opposite sides of a mountain range, or whatever) and will not have anything to do with "nativeness" of the speakers. This article should cover to what extent the English-speaking population of a country is first-language versus ESL, but that's a simple statistical fact to research and report, not something from which to try to extrapolate (WP:SYNTHesize) a novel "meaningful" interpretation about the nature of the English spoken in South Africa versus Zaire or where-ever. If one African (or South Asian or Caribbean) English has particular features that distinguish it from RP "Queen's English" and from its neighbors, reliable sources will tell us so and perhaps why; it will not be because 62% of speakers in place X are first-language and 39% in place Y are.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:58, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Without any significant citations, this entire article is WP:SYNTH or WP:OR. jej1997 (talk) 10:42, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Varieties?

Disregard

 – Off-topic.

Variants....

• Pickaback (of piggybank)
• Mum (of Mom)
• Biscuit (of cookie)
• Crisp (of chip)
• Scone (of biscuit)
• Pram (of crib)
• Petroleum (of gasoline)
• Trolley

124.106.143.76 (talk) 03:27, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

Are you asking a question or making a particular comment? Mind reading doesn't work over the internet. - BilCat (talk) 03:39, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

This is not "List of words that vary between English dialects" or anything of that sort, so this is off-topic anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:00, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

The primary problem with this article

It's a faulty scope. The principal source of issues with this article is that someone moved it from Commonwealth English, a linguistic classification (a name, albeit not a perfectly accurate one, for the dialect continuum radiating out from British English to former colonies), to English in the Commonwealth of Nations (which is a bogus, artificial topic, like "English west of Ohio" or "English in countries established after 1872" or "English as spoken by tall people"). The article type that takes the form "English in X" only works as a topic when X is a discrete and well-defined thing pertinent to the topic and which does not change much. Countries can enter and leave the Commonwealth at any time, and there is no connection between linguistic matters and being a member of that international geopolitical organization. The term "Commonwealth English" is just a shorthand, like "British Isles" (not all of which are really British) or "Native Americans" (not all of whom live in the Americas, with some ranging into Siberia and Greenland). The Commonwealth of Nations does not determine anything about the English language, and English usage doesn't change when a country enters or exits or refuses to join. Don't mistake a proper name for a literal description (e.g. the Pacific Ocean is not always pacific).

This article is going to continue to have WP:OR and WP:UNDUE and similar problems because the scope is, frankly, completely fake. The scope of Commonwealth English, as a dialect continuum that mostly coincides with the Commonwealth nations but really includes most former British colonial territory aside from the US and Canada, is a valid topic which can be sourced. But there really aren't any WP:RS about "English in the Commonwealth of Nations" because it's not a real subject and thus no one publishes material about that.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:59, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

So what's your proposed solution? - BilCat (talk) 22:33, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree that there is a lot wrong with this article, but throughout Wikipedia links to it are used where it is necessary to differentiate US spelling of certain English words compared to the rest of the 'English as a first language' world where US spelling is not normally used.

"Commonwealth English" was a much better term as the current title more implicitly excludes Ireland and other countries not in the Commonwealth where English is used as a first language, although these countries are referred to in the text.

It would be much easier if the US Americans could agree that the rest of the 'English as first language' world rarely uses their spelling, so Wiki articles would use international British English first, where the article is not specifically about USA topics.

Anyway, we are where we are. Personally I would call this topic something like International British English, as outside the USA British English spelling is almost exclusively used where English is used as a first language. The term 'British English' could imply English as used only in Britain. I would prefer that in Wikipedia the term US English is used and not American English as America includes Canada and many other countries.

However I am primarily talking about spelling and there is a lot more to this than spelling.

In countries where English is used as a second language, US English and British English spellings are used and taught, approximately equally, e.g. China.Lkingscott (talk) 10:24, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Canadian spelling

This page suggests that Canada follows American spelling:

Written English in the current and former Commonwealth generally favours British spelling as opposed to American, with some exceptions, particularly in Canada, where there are strong influences from neighbouring American English.

This is untrue. While Canadian and U.S. varieties of spoken English are close cousins, in the written language Canada has retained most British spellings (colour, licence, fibre). There are a few exceptions; for example, Canada uses -ize rather than -ise for Greek-based verbs (at one time, both forms coexisted in both the Britain and North America); and with a few words you will find both the British and U.S. spellings in use (jewellery/jewelry, tyre/tire); and there are a handful of anomalies (Canadians rarely if ever write gaol or kerb). But it is a far stretch to say that Canada favours American spelling. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:601:e00:97f0:2dac:6285:990e:da46 (talk) 16:16, 19 September 2022 (UTC)