The thing aboot (!) Canada is that there's a steady stream of recent (and educated) British immigrants as with Australia, maintaining the standards. I would not be surprised to find Americanisms more a feature of urban working-class Canadians near the US border.
On 19/09/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Gerrit Holl wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
Compared to that, American vs Commonwealth differences seem tiny.
A point that has not yet been remarked in this threat is this: most people who learn English as a foreign language learn to write the traditional, commonwealth spelling.
This really depends on who you're talking about, and I'm not sure it is "most". Most *Europeans* who learn English as a foreign language learn the UK spellings; most Asians, in my experience, learn the US spellings.
Asians - you mean Indians? Pakistanis? Bangladeshis? Of course, you mightn't know that in Britain "Asian" means "south Asian" and the American usage of "Asian" (East Asian) is covered with the word "Oriental". Yes lots of Japaneses, Koreans and Filipinos talk like Americans; lots of Sino-Asians, Thais, Malays, don't.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Commonwealth English", since Canadians
are in the Commonwealth and use a mixture of US and UK spellings ("colourize" is a nice hybrid word). The term seems to mostly have been invented at [[en:Commonwealth English]], and is not widely used elsewhere.
You might see it as an invention, I see it as a spelling error - as would an American no doubt.
-Mark
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