Commonwealth English

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

Commonwealth English is intended as a collective term for the perceived standard English language used in the Commonwealth of Nations, applying in theory to Australian English, British English, Irish English, Caribbean English, Canadian English, Hong Kong English, Indian English, New Zealand English, Pakistani English and South African English. But Canadian English in particular does not fit well with the others. The term is little used, and when used is most often synonymous with British English in its narrower sense or with International English in a specialised sense which excludes North American English.

Rationale for the term Commonwealth English

The term perhaps comes from a desire to recognise that "Standard English" of Britain, distinguished from American English, is just as much owned by those who use it in Australia or New Zealand or India or South Africa as by those who use it in the land of its origin and that this use in multiple countries should appear in its name.

Canadian English fits poorly

Words and idioms

But outside of the Unix world and open software world, the term has not caught on greatly. One difficulty is that in Canada, the country with the largest native-born English-speaking popular outside of Brtain, vocabulary, idiom, and accent naturally agrees with that of neigbouring speakers in the United States far more than with usage in far-off Britain or in the rest of the Commonwealth.

Canadian orthography

There are also orthographic system. Although Canadians generally follow British spelling conventions, at least in published writing, some words are also commonly spelt in U.S. fashion. In particular, words such as colour and favour are often spelt color and favor and this is recognised in Canadian dictionaries, although newer dictionaries give priority to the colour and Canadian Press Stylebook changed its recommendations from color to colour in 1998. However program is more commonly used than programme, airplane is unversally favoured over aeroplane, and so with many other forms.

Australian borrowings

Australian English also borrows from both British and American spellings, though less so now than once.

Internal spelling differences

To futher confound, within British English and its Commonwealth variants there is disagreement as to proper spelling of words such as organise/organize. Both -ize and -ise are generally accepted as correct. But though the -ise forms are very rarely used in Canada, they are the choice of the majority in Britain (though most British dictionaries prefer the -ize forms). See British English for more details. According to Pam Peters (1994: -ise/-ize), based on British National Corpus data, in Britain:

... the -ise spellings outnumber those with -ize' in the ratio of about 3:2. In Australian English, the difference is still great (often 3:1, by frequencies in the ACE corpus), and the tendency has been reinforced by official endorsement of -ise by the Australian government Style Manual since 1966.

The English Academy of South Africa website uses -ize forms on some pages and -ise forms on other pages.

Independent standards within Commonwealth English

The more extensive forms of Commonwealth English and even some of those less used have their own separate, recognised dictionaries. The Dictionary of Canadian English: The Senior Dictionary was first published by the Canadian textbook publisher Gage Learning in 1967 and updated versions have appeared regularly, the most recent being the Gage Canadian Dictionary in 1997. For South Africa there was Charles Pettman's Africanderisms, a glossary of South African colloquial words and phrases published in 1913. Philip Branford's A Dictionary of South African English was published in 1978 and the most recent edition in 1991. Australian English has had the Macquarie Dictionary since 1981. In 1996 Oxford University Press published the Concise Ulster Dictionary. In 1998 they went much farther afield by releasing A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles, The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, and The Dictionary of New Zealand English. In 2000 they published The Australian Oxford Dictionary. All these used previous Oxford English dictionaries as a basis to be modified by research on the native varities of English. Carribean English has Frederic G. Cassidy and Robert B. Le Page's Dictionary of Jamaican English and John A. Holm and Alison W. Shlling's Dictionary of Bahamian English.

Possible usage

Commonwealth English as therefore neither a distinct dialect. Microsoft Encarta appears in four English versions, an American English version, a British English version, a Canadian English version, and an Australian English version, indicating that Microsoft did not feel that one Commonwealth English version would serve, though there are likely to be few differences between the British English version and the Australian English version. A fifth version could be have been introduced as well: British English with Concise Oxford Dictionary spelling (IANA value en-GB-oed). It makes better sense if referring to orthography alone, but then means nothing more than British English orthography, accepting that Canadian orthography is not so purely Commonwealth.

References and external links

• Peters, Pam (2004). The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052162181X.
• English Academy of South Africa (Website.)