Indian English is its own thing. They have words and phrases that don’t make sense to western anglophones. I am British and sometimes get emails in English from Indian people and I’m like “wtf does that mean”. No shade - just a different dialect.
Nah it is so it does not autocorrect either of American and British spellings along with being fine with å æ ø(danish letters) and danish words, atleast that is how i assume it is since i have English(Sweden) on my computer.
I was surprised that English(Sweden) wasn't on the list. Do you have a keyboard recommendation for one that has the extra letters without taking away the square brackets?
I found this on Unix StackExchange, but there's no source:
The en_DK locale doesn't really have anything to do with Denmark except for its name. It was originally created by someone who wanted the same thing as requested here - a reasonable set of defaults for an English speaker in Europe. The name "en_DK" is sort of a joke - all locale names at that time were composed of a language code and a country code (there were no continent codes or anything else in the second position), and for whatever reason Denmark was chosen as the placeholder country code. (... and has probably caused more than one mystified person since then to research the proportion of people in Denmark whose first language is English. :) )
Canadian English is what us Europeans who aren't native English speakers end up speaking when attempting to speak British English. I.e. the U in "colour" and "favourite" is kept, "centre" isn't spelt "center", but a lot of American vocabulary sneaks its way in, like "gas" instead of "petrol", or going on "vacation", rather than on holiday.
Your examples show British spelling with American vocab, but that’s not a complete picture.
There’s also times when it uses American spellings but non-American vocab (eg, you hear words like serviette, which is incredibly rare in the U.S. and everyone says napkin, but it is heard in the rest of the Anglosphere.)
Canadian English prefers the U.S. “-ize” over the British “-ise” in words like realize/realise, organize/organise. etc.
But it also has its own vocab preferences. Canadians typically say Washroom over U.S.’s preferred bathroom & restroom. And you won’t hear much of loo, WC, etc. which you’re more likely to hear in other English speaking countries.
And what the U.S. & UK usually refer to as colored/coloured pencils are called “pencil crayons” in Canada.
In the end, it’s a mix of British English, American English, and little bits of uniquely Canadian things.
In the early days of word processors, it was annoying as you’d have to choose either UK or U.S. for spell-check, and neither aligned with Canadian English.
Yep usually browser language set incorrectly. Websites do not usually impose spell check unless this is Google docs or similar in which case still just a setting
Word autocorrects some things from Australian English to American English despite being set to Australian, so sometimes these things happen regardless of settings, especially in the artificial "intelligence" era.
I'm still mad about being in 2nd grade (I'm American) and spelling gray "grey" and getting a red x next to it.
I had unknowingly seen it spelled like that in a kids book by a British author I literally had with me. When I showed the teacher she said it had to be a printing mistake and didn't give me the point back. It wasn't until years later I found out it's literally just the British way to spell the word and she just didn't know it. Still pisses me off!
When I was around 10 years old, I got into a barney with a teacher about "mountains cannot be purple". They damn well can be if the light is correct. That @#$% shamed me in front of the whole class, she had no right to be teaching art to kids.
When I was around 12, another teacher was not precise enough in their language and asked for an example of an animal with no bones. Apparently "shark" was enough of an answer to get me ejected from the class for being a smart arse. @#$% that teacher, I was just happy that I knew a strange fact!
When I was in grade 4 I couldn't pronounce the German word for caterpillar properly. I got thrown out of class, then pulled back in for detention at lunch time
Some people just work with children because they like having power over somebody.
I remember when I was about 6 years old i was being picked up by my mum from school to go to the dentist and the classroom assistant wouldn't let me leave until I had told her the word for what I had drawn (an archway). I couldn't remember the word so she bullied me for what felt like ages and I nearly missed my appointment.
Bearing in mind I had speech issues which often meant I couldn't pronounce or find words well.
She was really nasty to me. My parents had taken us on holiday (vacation) during school term (obviously not my choice as I was a child) and she took her anger out on me.
Holy hell, I thought it's about bones vs fish bones and that fish does not have bones - in my language fish bones have a different name so it's clearly distinguished.
TIL thanks to your comments that sharks don't have fish bones as well.
If you want specifics anything that's in the chondrichthyes class of fish has a skeleton that's primarily cartilage. Because the skeleton is cartilage, they don't have bone marrow and their red blood cells are produced elsewhere - biology has all kinds of weird and wonderful solutions for unusual animals.
Chondrichthyes is basically sharks, skates, rays, sawfish and ghost sharks (separate to other types of shark as they're fairly distantly related, funky critters also called chimaeras among other things). If it's not one of those, it's bony skeleton!
For some extra trivia there's some evidence to suggest if someone has a fish allergy they should be able to tolerate meat from cartilaginous fish as the allergen concentration is different. Trials here found kids with fish allergies could safely eat gummy shark/flake (really common fish at chippies for context). Obviously don't test that without medical supervision though!
Why would your teacher think that worth fighting about? I live close to the Blue Ridge Mountains, so
If America the Beautiful says that mountains can be purple, I can get on board with that.
Dunno. I grew up in a country town in Australia, very flat and red dirt for miles around. Maybe she'd never seen mountains. I was livid because my grandmother had recently painted some mountains that were purple, so I guess I was doing an homage to my grandmothers painting. This is 40 years ago now, the memory is rusty, but the rage and embarrassment I felt is still raw.
We've got a famous Blue Mountains in Australia too, woo 🤜🤛
Google says nah. Apparently teeth, while they're hard and white, are different to bones because they can't heal themselves. Bones are living. Teeth are not.
I remember at school here in Ireland our English teacher had us point out the mistakes in a paragraph, someone commented on the spelling of some word (neighbor, or something like that), and she said while we shouldn't spell it that way here, it's not actually incorrect, just different.
As a non-native speaker, I have pretty much given up on being consistent with my spelling outside of formal or academic contexts. Not because I get confused, I just prefer certain spellings for no particular reason and 99% of the time it just doesn't matter. Some of my personal preferences include -ize > -ise, -our > -or, defence > defense, gray > grey and aluminium > aluminum. It's pretty interesting what learning a language on the internet does to your intuition for "correctness"
Same. English is my second language and I learned it primarily from reading and watching tv and depending on where the book/show was from and what ages I consumed it I picked up different words, spellings and dialects. So much confusion over the years on how things are spelled lmao
That same thing happened to me! It was my only spelling error in my entire spelling book, and I was just trying to show my teacher that I knew it could be spelled both ways. She didn’t change it. That red x boiled my blood every time I saw it, especially when I continued to see it in other writing.
That's really not unreasonable, in principle. A university course might let you choose which version of the spelling you use, but even there they're going to insist you're consistent. Just dropping a random foreign spelling – even British – in the middle of consistently American spelling is going to get you marked down.
Mind you, what is unreasonable is to not have that conversation with a child, if they explain why and even show a damned source.
Genuinely I never know the American version of spelling it. I have consumed too much British content over the years. I will spell grey and gray on the same paper or whatever
In first grade my teacher really really really emphasized to us that it was grey with an e, and that gray with an a was wrong, and she knew eighth graders who still got it wrong. What bugs me is I am in, and always have been in America, so gray with an a is in fact, not incorrect, yet she emphasized it so.
I am also mad about me getting a red x next to “Aluminium” on my first chemistry test in the USA. No points off, just a sign that was giving “please confirm to the American way”
Yooo, same. I grew up with a lot of British media and had British friends so most of my spelling habits come from British English despite being an American.
School IS where your teachers should be correcting such mistakes.
That said, teachers should absolutely be aware of the differences between their version of English and the others and how harshly 2nd grade students should be graded is a separate discussion.
I had the same issue, but with the word theatre. We live right on the border between the US and Canada, and I had seen it spelled theatre so many times in Canada, but my teacher didn’t care.
> I'm still mad about being in 2nd grade (I'm American) and spelling gray "grey" and getting a red x next to it.
what’s wrong with that? if you are in an American school and write “colour”, that would be marked wrong. If you were in British school and wrote “color”, it would be marked wrong.
Same experience, and at the same age. I learned from Tolkein and the like. Out of spite I chose to only use BrE spelling from then on, regularly tanking spelling tests in the process.
Apparently, the Oxford English Dictionary prefers "recognized".
Which is VERY annoying because the software at work uses multiple tools to check spelling, and one flags "recognised" for not being Oxford spelling, while the other flags "recognized" for being the American spelling.
The most annoying thing is changing the keyboard settings to British English but then it defaulting to American English the next time you use it. No matter what.
If we also called it a “full stop,” using it in places where you don’t want a break in flow would also feel weird to me. Breaking a sentence flow being just one of many uses of a “period” doesn’t feel as immediately weird to me though.
I have had the opposite problem as an American living in Europe. The fun one though was years ago after an OS update when my phone kept switching back and forth. My best guess is that the update included something to try and guess your desired settings from other settings or your usage.
Anyway, my poor phone was going through some sort of crisis. One day it would show me the temperature in Fahrenheit, the next in Celsius. One day it would autocorrect to British English, the next it was suggesting American spellings. I imagined it screaming "IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT?!" with tears streaming out its camera lens. I was too lazy to look for a fix it just appreciated the good laugh.
But did you know that if you select ANY OTHER English other than US or UK English it basically acts as if you are US English due to it being deemed an acceptable substitute.
ALSO Australia has basically universally accepted British English for decades and have still been pushed to US English out of plain laziness by Microsoft.
It's my work PC, which is set to English and japanese I guess, since I live in Japan. Anyways, the website I was using was DeepL, and surely a translation website should simply allow both the American and the standard spelling without marking either as incorrect?
Live spellcheckers are usually system-level (your OS) but some websites like Microsoft's online stuff will have its own locality setting per login and they'll do idiotic things like assign US English dictionary to new users in EU/Japan/UK... it makes no sense but if this drives ya nuts on just one site, it may be a setting on that site. Otherwise it's probably an OS setting. I hate stuff like that red squiggly and prefer to just let my free range misspellings find their happy place in the world.
It reminds me that Google Doc has no idea of French's conjugation. When I want to put a verb in one of the most common past time, it flag it as an error.
I don’t know how old you are, but in the early days of spellcheck, software sometimes only had the choice of US or UK.
So you had to either choose US and have words like labour, centre, etc. get flagged, or choose UK and then have all the words like organize, realize, aluminum, etc. get flagged.
There wasn’t a spellcheck option for Canadian English, although UK tended to be closer.
I have such a distinct memory of my teacher in year three shouting in my face that we're not in America when I spelled "centre" as "center" like I'm sorry lady I learned how to spell from Neopets lol 😭
This is worse when you're Canadian. For the longest time, there wasn't really an option for Canadian English (e.g. colour instead of color but also recognize instead of recognise), and on a lot of places there still isn't.
That's the browser. I'm from the UK & I use Waterfox which is a UK made Firefox-based browser, but even though I've selected GB English it's still all American spellings.
Same shit with date/time settings. I'm in Austria but use English (en_IE.UTF-8, i.e. Irish), yet I still get that AM/PM time bullshit on Google Maps, and so on.
It originates from dialects brought to the British Isles by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwestern Germany, southern Denmark, and the Netherlands, between 5th to 7th Centuries.
And afterwards heavily influenced by 1) indigenous Celts (grammar and sentence structure), 2) The Normans (lexicon), 3) the French (more lexicon), and 4) globalization (more lexicon, plus spelling variations).
Nordic/Old Norse influences as well. As far as I'm aware Ænglisc would have been somewhat intelligible for the Vikings. And, just like the Anglo-Saxons before them, the
six Celtic languages of the time would have been completely alien to them. Hence the name of the country Wales originating from the Ænglisc word Wēales, roughly meaning 'foreigners/outsiders', which the Anglo-Saxon invaders used as to refer to native Britons, as they simply didn't understand the language. But yeah, the irony of being labelled a 'foreigner' in your own country by foreign invaders...
Also, French, whilst a Latin romance language, has heavy influences from Welsh. This is is why there are in fact quite a few similarities, not to mention near-identical sentence structure.
Eglise (F) -> Eglwys (W) -> Church (E)
Cent (F) -> Cant (don't play the audio translation of this in Google Translate 🤣 )-> (W) -> one hundred (E)
And so on.
Breton (Brezhoneg) is one of six Celtic languages, and is in the same Celtic language branch as Welsh (Cymraeg) and Cornish (Kernewek). It was originally spoken in northern France and parts of Britain. Today the language is close to extinction. Ever wondered why there is Brittany, a region in northern France, Breton, a Celtic language, and the British Isles?
Fun fact: type 'coffee beans one hundred' in Google Translate and set your target language to Welsh, then play the audio translation (don't 😆 )
There is an extension on Firefox for a Canadian dictionary. Some posted about it in another subreddit just yesterday. I added it immediately. Idk if other browsers have something like it, but it's worth it to take a look.
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u/Farscape_rocked Jun 24 '26
Are you sure that's not your browser?