Whistling in the Wind

Is proliferation of American spelling inevitable?

I am prompted to write this from 3 angles:

• a focus on the social effects of computer technology
• a long-term personal interest in language and psycho-linguistics
• an "attention to detail" personality that has me noticing this stuff

First of all, let me clarify that I don't think there is anything intrinsically superior about "colour" over "color".  I admit I do have a preference, but I recognise it is because of my cultural heritage.

But this isn't about good and bad.  It's about the process of change.

So, fact #1 is that in Australia, and to a slightly lesser extent in New Zealand, the English language in common usage is becoming Americanised (or should I say Americanized).

And I know it is not a particularly profound observation to suppose that the American dominance of the computer software industry is playing a part in this.

For a start, even though spelling checkers often provide "proper English" dictionaries, for some reason they often seem to magically revert to US, and people tend to just give up trying to configure it how they want.

What is most interesting to me, though, is to notice what is changing, and what is not.  Here are a few casual observations and random comments:

• We are seeing the greatest degree of change in less formal writing - emails, blogs, local documents.  This is not surprising, I suppose.
  
• Magazines and newspapers tend to still adhere to New Zealand spelling.  I think the most frequent exceptions to this are in the use of -ize rather than -ise word endings.  I am curious as to why this is changing before other changes.
  
• One of the changes that has spread like wildfire is the use of the word "gotten".  This is a real word listed in American dictionaries, but has not generally been accepted outside the U.S.  But in the last week, I have seen it used by 8 Australians and New Zealanders in blogs or mailing list posts.  At a User Group meeting recently, I tried to make a joke about the speaker saying "gotten", and he didn't even realise it's not an English word!
  
• I think we are seeing "center" rather than "centre", but these same writers are still often sticking to metre and litre.  Curious.
  
• It is not surprising how often we now see "licence" misspelled as "license", what with software licences in our face all the time.  More interesting is seeing "practise" (verb) increasingly misspelled as "practice".
  
• One of the amusing technology-related misspellings these days, is how often you will see people write "site" when they really mean "sight".
  
• Here's a funny one... Americans commonly misspell "lose" as "loose".  We are increasingly seeing people in the Antipodes catching this affliction.  Why this one?  We used to mainly get it right, and now we start to copy others' mistakes.
  
• Here's one that is close to my heart, pronunciation rather than spelling.  "Data".  I work with databases.  The name of my company is Data Management Solutions.  Seems to me that the American pronunciation "day-da" is now in the majority.  I recently attended a meeting of the Wellington SharePoint User Group.  Ari Bakker was one of the presenters.  It was a great session.  But one of the things I really enjoyed was that Ari still pronounces data like tomato.  (Well, come to think of it, I think the Americans get tomato wrong too.)
  
• I also understand that the Canadians, who obviously have been more closely exposed to American spelling for a long time, because of their geographical proximity, have managed to preserve their own spelling of a lot of words.  So I am just fascinated to see what eventuates here.

 

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