International English spelling means writing English words in their most common or acceptable worldwide forms. Most words are spelled one way everywhere, like dog and table, but some are different from place to place, like colour/color and recognize/recognise.
For example:
- The BBC in London writes words this way: ageing, aluminium, analyse, centre, foetus, fulfil, haemorrhage, honour, judgement, recognise, spelt, travelling, yoghurt.
- While the New York Times writes them this way: aging, aluminum, analyze, center, fetus, fulfill, hemorrhage, honor, judgment, recognize, spelled, traveling, yogurt.
There is not even a single British spelling. Unlike the BBC:
- The Economist uses aluminum, fetus, judgment and spelled.
- The Oxford English Dictionary prefers fetus, recognize, spelled and yogurt.
“The Cambridge Guide to English” (2004) knows all about this. It lists the spellings that would be the most acceptable worldwide, part of what it calls international English:
- abridgement
- acknowledgement
- advertise
- prefer e to ae in words from Greek: eon, archeology, encyclopedia, hemophilia, anemia, etc.
- aging
- balk
- burned – as verb form, burnt as adjective
- catalogue
- cauldron
- prefer -se to -ce: defense, offense, pretense, etc.
- prefer -ed to -t for verbs: burned, dreamed and learned not burnt, dreamt and learnt, for example.
- encyclopedia
- enroll
- fetal
- fetus
- fulfill
- homeopath
- installment
- prefer -ize to -ise: baptize, recognize, not baptise and recognise, for example
- judgement
- prefer -l- to -ll-: traveling and modeling, not travelling and modelling.
- medalist
- plural of -o is -os: mangos, heros, ghettos, Negros, etc.
- prefer -e- to -oe-: diarrhea, ameba, estrogen, etc
- prefer -or to -our: color, glamor, favor, honor, etc.
- pedophile
- prefer -re to -er: centre, theatre, etc
- skeptic
- prefer -ward to -wards: toward, backward, forward, etc.
- prefer -y to -ey: shaky, smoky, pricy, etc.
- prefer -yze to -yse: analyze, paralyze, etc.
It tries to strike a balance between British and American spelling, but fails:
- Like the BBC: centre, judgement.
- Like the New York Times: aging, analyze, fetus, fulfill, hemorrhage, honour, recognize, traveling, spelled
English has become a world language. Over 900 million people know English as a first or second language. Most are neither British or American:
- USA: 27.5% of all who know English as a first or second language
- India: 25.4%
- Nigeria: 8.6%
- Britain: 6.5%
- Philippines: 5.4%
- Germany: 5.0%
- Canada: 2.8%
- France: 2.5%
- Pakistan: 2.0%
- Australia: 1.9%
Another 12% live in other countries, 48 of which have at least a million people who know English (mostly Commonwealth and EU countries).
Here are the preferred spellings at the world level if you take into account India, Nigeria and so on:
- Like the BBC: aluminium, centre, honour, travelling, yoghurt.
- Like the New York Times: aging, analyze, fulfill, judgment, recognize.
- Too close to call: hemorrhage, spelled, fetus.
The Oxford dictionary is closer to this than the spelling you learn at school in either America or Britain, particularly in the case of the two most noticeable differences: -our/-or like in honour and -ize/-ise like in recognize.
The spelling common in Canada, Nigeria, Jamaica and Pakistan is even closer, but closest of all is the spelling in India since it is often the tie breaker between different spellings.
See also:
I find the evolution of language fascinating. I have a professor who has explained extensively the reason for the difference in the spellings from middle English to modern English and who was able to write and who wasn’t, which pretty much tells the story of the variances between England and the US in addition to world wide.
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Wait, it’s not spelled “wreckonize”?
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Canadian spelling is an amalgamation of British and American spellings. While Canada uses “our” and “re” and double consonants when forming gerunds (travelling vs. traveling), it prefers American “ize” and “program” over “programme,” and “fetus” over foetus, or “encyclopedia” over “encyclopaedia.” Canada uses American grammar and punctuation, also.
Also, American spellings are increasingly popular in Canada, which means it’s not uncommon to see “er” end-spellings over “re” end-spellings, as in center vs. centre, etc.
Anyway, British spellings have many redundancies that I don’t like. The extra vowels and letters are well, unnecessary.
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Hmph! And Americans throw a hissy fit about immigrants not knowing English.
Abagond,
You just showed why English is one of the hardest, if not the most difficult, languages to master. There are different rules for spelling, two words can be spelled exactly the same but have different meaning based on the context, and why do some words such as “Colonel” always get pronounced as “Kernel”? I’m sure people can already see how hard English can be to learn.
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English is a bloody hard language to learn, I mean you have the words bear and bare, bat and bat (as in vampire bat and baseball bat) etc.
Damn I forgot what you call those things too.
I really do have a lot of respect for non native english speakers who learned how to read write and speak it. Damn
Oh on my youtube page somebody obviously American was basically saying I was an idiot because I spelled Maths yes with a S on the end. I am British alright we like our S’s on out Math and our u’s in words like colour. LOL
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English really IS difficult to learn. I have no idea how anyone does it if they haven’t learned as a child. There’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to anything. Old English hardly looks like anything we’d recognize today and was further influenced by the Scandinavians. The Normans moved into England in the mid 1000’s and French becomes the language of the government, law, print, etc. English documents were transcribed into French, much of the population spoke French, and for about 200 years this goes on. But later the French are withdrawing and you see books start to crop up about teaching your children French (meaning, it’s no longer spoken in the home). But the English that emerges after that is not like Old English anymore. It has adopted many of the French spellings and even words for things previous English didn’t have a name for like the names of military ranks, legal terms, and words with latin roots. This is Middle English, and it evolves for several hundred years as modern English starts to form on the end of it, but it’s based on old spellings of things so that people can still read and understand the meanings.
In Middle English each letter was pronounced. “Night” sounded like “nickt” (but with that throaty sound on the “ck”), and “moon” sounded like “moan” in Middle English. They kept the spellings the same, even though vowels shifted sounds, and certain letters went silent in speech to make reading consistent for people. But now it just makes English really difficult to make sense of if you don’t already know it. Take a previously Celticlike language, add some Scandinavian influence, infuse it with French, then try to return it to an English people thought it should be and you end up with this.
So the English brought to the US evolved separately from the English that stayed in England and was transplanted in various parts of the world. Most of the US English evolution has taken place here, but British English (and its spelling) exists in the places where the English colonized. Depending on the point in time of which the English were in different countries, or the dialect of the group doing the colonizing, the places that speak English are almost like time capsules of English because of this.
I used to wonder why w was call double-u when it’s clearly a double-v. The letters u and v were apparently interchangeable in Middle English due to the way people wrote back then. The V would appear at the beginnings of words that started with either a V or a U, the U would appear in the middle of words containing a V or a U. It was called a double-u then when V was also known as U. Plain to see why it’s such a pain now.
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I am a native English-speaker and I would be interested in the impressions of those who have had to learn English about just how hard it is. I have studied French, German, Spanish and Latin and my impression is that compared to most European languages, basic English grammar is very easy. Nouns have no gender, adjectives don’t accord, there’s not much declension (just objective/subjective … they/them) and conjugation is the same for all persons except the third (I go… he goes). As a result, learners of English can get to the point where they can communicate simple ideas more quickly than say learners of German or French. The other side of the coin however, is that the disconnect between spelling and pronunciation and the many irregular verb forms and other grammar exceptions make it a devilishly hard language for a foreigner (and many natives) to speak without constant little mistakes. Because English is a world-wide lingua franca, native speakers are used to foreigners using their language and are generally pretty tolerant of errors. Learners, do you agree?
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I prefer British English. It just seems to be more intresting…
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This is what a college professor wrote:
“WHY IS ENGLISH SO HARD TO LEARN?
The bandage was wound around the wound.
The farm was used to produce produce.
The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
We must polish the Polish furniture.
He could lead if he would get the lead out.
The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
I did not object to the object.
The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
They were too close to the door to close it.
The buck does strange things when the does are present.
A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
The wind was too strong for us to wind the sail.
After a number of injections my jaw got number.
Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren’t invented in England or French fries in France.
Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat.
Boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth beeth?
One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise
man and a wise guy are opposites?
How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while quite a lot and
quite a few are alike?
How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another?
How can your house can burn up as it burns down?”
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That was a nice comment, Calculator. I have one too.
Noses run and feet smell.
Many sentences can also have different meanings. For example, “I saw the man on the hill with the telescope” could mean that you saw a man that has a telescope on a hill or it could mean that you are using a telescope to look at a man on a hill.
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@Yamyam and Calculator,
Nice!
Obviously “contex” matters much in the English language.
Anyway, create one with live/live. We live real lives here?
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Don’t thank me. Really. It was written by a college professor.
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Do yourselves a favour adopt the real english langauge or create your own……………..
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English isn’t a particulary difficult language to learn. You should try Finnish insted, now there’ some challenge!
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J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings, actually invented a whole new complete language–elf language!
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I think that adopting International English conventions, as opposed to using the American ones, is an excellent idea and one that some companies and organisations ought to take to heart (I’m thinking of software ones in particular). Of course most of the large ones like the UN, Amnesty International and Al Jazeera already do use forms of International or Commonwealth English but that’s not universal, and I’ve seen a few Commonwealth-based companies and organisations adopt American conventions possibly to prevent the stereotypical ignorant American wondering why words are spelt ‘wrong’.
That Cambridge usage guide you mentioned is far too biased in favour of American conventions and doesn’t present the balance it seems to promote; if it were more balanced it would probably, at the very least, use ‘colour’ (and the remaining -our words like honour and glamour and splendour); omitting the U is markedly American and seems to be a bit contradictory to the internationalism that the guide is supposedly promoting. As there are only three British/Commonwealth forms and a large number of American forms adopted, it seems nearly pointless to concede ‘centre’ and ‘judgement’ and ‘catalogue’ and would make more sense to just use wholly American forms. I consider it unfair, actually, considering the large number of English-speakers outside the USA – it’s just another way of pandering to American cultural hegemony, which I think should be discouraged rather than encouraged. I do admit this is a personal bias. The US may be a large country but it is only one country, and when looking at the number of countries using English it’s outnumbered. (And the Commonwealth contains over a billion people, mostly because of large-population countries like India and Nigeria, as well as the UK itself. But even if you were to count only majority English-speaking countries like the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, that’s still a large enough population to allow for the use of International English as opposed to shoving the American conventions down everyone else’s throats.)
But then again, I have a strong preference for the Commonwealth forms (and dislike most American spellings on aesthetic and political grounds). I do lean towards ‘ise’ rather than ‘ize’ but otherwise my preferred forms tend to be listed first in the Oxford dictionaries.
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Bloke, cissy, biscuit, crisp, chip, pram, cuppa, naff or so.
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What about International Spanish?
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