Should Canadian English exist?
Is that a stupid question? It would be hard to change the speech of 18 million people.
But people write fewer words than they speak. Maybe that would be easier to change. So: Should Canadian spelling exist?
It’s unnecessarily complicated. It’s also unnecessarily different from two other systems, British and American. This, at least, is the argument that could be made, and it too is a popularity contest of a sort: There are more people who write British or American and our spelling is almost the same as theirs, so shouldn’t we “harmonize” with one of those?
In this thought experiment, first let’s dispense with the fiction that British and American are equal candidates. Barely anybody in the country would unreservedly advocate adopting American spellings. If there’s one thing Canadians aren’t, it’s American. (Americans deny this: “You are Americans – North Americans.” They never quite apply this reasoning to Mexicans.) Perhaps, if stereotypes hold true, Conservative Party members or Albertans would be OK with going American.
But in reality, a proposal to adopt somebody else’s spelling is a restatement of the denial of Canadian spelling. “There really isn’t any agreement on what ‘Canadian spelling’ is,” this denial begins. “We have to standardize on somebody’s spelling,” it continues. “And it can’t very well be the Americans’,” it concludes, at least if the speaker is being honest.
Canada is founded on the myth of two original peoples, the English and the French. (It’s a myth not because it is an oft-told tale but because it is false: The land we now know as Canada was already home to many peoples by the time the English and French showed up.) We learn this founding myth in school, but then we separate along linguistic lines: English-speakers more or less pretend the French founders did not exist, and French-speakers do the converse.
As a result, English-speakers hold a vague image in the back of their minds of a direct lineage from the United Kingdom to Canada. Even if you aren’t ethnically British or Irish, you still had this connection drummed into you in school. If you’re a third-generation Polish-Canadian or a descendant of one of the black families that have been in Canada since the 1600s, somewhere deep down you think there’s a thin but resilient historical thread that joins Canada to England.
You probably can’t imagine a similar historical thread linking Canada to the United States. In fact, you might decry the undue influence the U.S. has on Canadian culture, entertainment, and politics.
Hence, in the thought experiment of adopting some other nation’s spelling, I wager you will unconsciously gravitate toward choosing England’s spelling. Canada is essentially British, you feel. That’s true, or it was true once – but Canadian English is not essentially British. It’s essentially American. You were never taught that in school. At best, the arrival of the United Empire Loyalists around 1783 was half-explained, with no mention of the chief legacy of their exodus to Canada – our speech.
If we had to standardize on another dialect of English, the dialect you’d recommend – British – is the one that sounds less like spoken Canadian English and has fewer common terms. And to be consistent, you’d have to adopt the dominant British house style for quotation marks (‘use “single quotes” first’).
A month after this changeover took place, you’d think you were in another country, as every professionally-produced document you read would appear to have derived from the British Isles. By replacing Canadian spelling with British, we’d prove Canadian spelling really existed all along.
In the opposite case, there would be fewer overtly noticeable differences. Our new all-American Canadian spelling would continue to end verbs in -ize, but would drop a few Us and regularize a couple of common words, like center. At that point, it would be perplexing to take a vacation that included a visit to the National Arts Centre or the Confederation Centre. It would be like visiting a relic of a former time.
Nonetheless, the adoption of American spelling could possibly work. It appeals to a deep-seated fear that “integration” with the United States is inevitable. (Writers like Diane Francis openly advocate consideration of a common currency, either the existing U.S. dollar or a new amero.) If Canadian publications began to use U.S. spelling across the board, you might think to yourself, “Well… it had to happen someday.”
But the elimination of Canadian spelling is a non-starter for one obvious reason: Canadian spelling really does exist. We really do spell words differently from the Americans and the British. Without fail, those who claim there is no consensus about Canadian spelling simply haven’t done their homework. It is a way of saying “Spelling confuses me and I’m not totally sure how to do it right.”
That’s fine. But it’s dishonest to make the leap to denying that Canadian spelling exists. It is an effacement of the existence of Canada, of its importance. We are a “mere” 32 million people – small in comparison to the 60 million in the U.K. and tiny in comparison to the 301 million in the United States. We’ve been told for decades that Canada is “a small market.” But languages aren’t markets, and all it takes to make a dialect are two people who agree. We’ve got 18 million Canadian English speakers who broadly agree.
Just as Canada is unique in combining U.S. and U.K. forms, we are unique in using a “minority” English whose existence some deny in the first place. (Recall the scenario of the writer who thinks nobody is really sure what “Canadian spelling” is.) You’d never hear the same argument from speakers of English in countries with even smaller populations, like Australia and New Zealand. Barely as many people speak New Zealand English as speak English in the Golden Horseshoe. But even that dialect is distinct from Australian, which in turn is distinct from Canadian, British, and American. Those three dialects together outnumber the total of Australian and New Zealand English-speakers.
But – again – the Australians and the New Zealanders do not deny they speak their own dialects, nor do they (even idly) propose standardizing on somebody else’s language. Even more importantly, Canadians do not deny that Australians and New Zealanders speak a dialect different from Canadians’ own, even if Canadians cannot distinguish Australian from New Zealander.
Educated people can differentiate British, Scottish, and Irish accents. Some educated people can spot a Canadian accent in a sequence of seemingly identical American voices in an instant.
Canadians, then, are more than willing to accept that some speech will sound different from Canadian speech, and, some of the time, we are willing to accept that Canadian speech sounds slightly different from American. But there seems to be a residual core of doubters who believe the way we write isn’t different from the way the Americans, British, Irish, Scottish, New Zealanders or Australians write. But it is – demonstrably.
That residual core of doubt continues to haunt the Canadian psyche. It’s another variation of the fear that, while we may speak English, we don’t speak it right, well, or properly. Only the British do, of course. How embarrassing and tawdry that we’d end up sounding like Americans. But we don’t sound exactly like Americans, we don’t sound at all like the British, and we don’t spell exactly like either of them.
Spelling reforms, even in autocratic countries, are always contentious. Whether the spelling change is as profound as the use of a different writing system (Serbo-Croat, Tajik) or a reduction in the complexity of non-alphabetic characters (Chinese), or as modest as dropping a few accent characters (Greek) or simply changing the order of words in the dictionary (Spanish), there are always people who doubt the need for the reform and others who simply never play along. Old spellings continue to be used even if someone insists that new ones be used. A reform of Canadian spelling would be deceptively complex and would work out as well as other English spelling reforms have tended to do – not very.
Were this kind of reform ever seriously proposed, it would immediately lead to name-calling in blog comment fields and, presumably, on mainstream talk shows. Proponents of British spelling would be called snobs; proponents of American spelling would be called sellouts. Curiously, I doubt there would be a split along classic liberal/conservative lines; I think people would be surprised at who ends up in which camp.
But the mere act of proposing a Canadian spelling reform would be like proposing the secession of Quebec. The question would be vague. The benefits would be unclear or modest. Otherwise-calm people would turn on their friends and relatives. Minorities within minorities (like Americans and British living in Canada) would demand the same treatment. And the whole thing would die on a tie vote.
Canadian English spelling is like Canadian English speech: It exists because it has centuries of precedent and because it has been proven, not least by this book, that people use it. People are not about to stop using Canadian English because of nebulous claims that another nation’s dialect is “better” or “simpler.”
← Previous: Advice from the style mavens