I use a mix of the two depending on the word.
Hello, may I introduce you to Canadian English?
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
41 points (93.6% liked)
No Stupid Questions
39695 readers
1942 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Yup. I use whatever feels best, which is usually American words, British spelling (except for the -ze instead of -se for words that end in a "z" sound).
Also, there are our own Canadianisms, like "washroom".
Wait, everyone else doesn't call in a washroom?
Heathens!
Washroom promotes the incorrect assumption that people wash their hands. Any time spent in a public latrine will show this to be inaccurate.
Water closet, on the other hand, tells you exactly what to expect. Cramped, likely too dark or too bright, and riddled with moisture of both expected and occult origin.
Water closet is the way.
Yeah, and bathroom suggests that there are baths or places for bathing.
Water closet really is the right thing to call it!
Compelling argument.
Even some places in the US are switching over to calling them WCs.
We call them bathrooms in the us
Eh?
Do you by any chance know where I could read a good introduction to Canadian English?
I can write fluently in UK and US English but Canadian sometimes has me stumped.
I'm not sure about online sources, but this is a solid reference book: https://editors.ca/publications/editing-canadian-english/
Thanks!
Wait? Do you guys not say your aed bed ceds?
Either is right for me and it entirely depends on whatever I'm vibing with at the time!
It's "grey" not "gray". I don't know which side prefers which, I just know what I prefer.
They're different words. Grey is more of a dark white, while gray is more of a light black.
But for real, to me grey is a name and a feeling, and gray is a color. And I have no idea why.
I prefer Traditional English over Simplified.
I prefer one L in traveling. There's an unstressed shwa sound and it makes no sense to double the consonant after. It almost implies the stress falls on the vell part.
I propose a combined American, British, Australian vernacular only using the word with fewer syllables. (New Zealand and Canada are welcome too)
British Wins:
- lift not elevator
- chips not french fries
- bin not trash can
- torch not flashlight
- loo not toilet/restroom/bathroom
- pram not stroller/baby carriage
- tap not faucet
- petrol not gasoline
- chemist not pharmacy
- sweet not candy
- jug not pitcher
American Wins:
- fall not autumn
- hood not bonnet
- truck not lorry
- pants not trousers
- cart not trolley
- subway not underground
- eggplant not aubergine
- sink not washbasin
Australian Wins:
- thongs not flip flops/slippers
Since your Australia section is lacking, here’s a couple:
transport > transit
ute > pickup truck
bogan > redneck
metro > subway
cyclone > hurricane
"Thongs" could be misinterpreted in a hilarious way though.
Re fall/autumn - is there a US equivalent for the work autumnal? Falllike doesn't seem quite right, nor fallish, nor fallumnal.
I've only ever heard Autumnal used for the equinox. Otherwise Autumn and Fall are also used as adjectives in American English. Fall colors. Fall planting. A cool autumn breeze.
That makes sense, but they wouldn't work so well with the adjective at the end of a sentence.
Eg
"Today feels very autumnal" 👍
"Today feels very fall" 👎
Not remotely important, I know, but I find stuff like this interesting.
But how do I differentiate between visiting the chemist and visiting the chemist?
When I am talking about fibrous material, like individual strands of carbon in a composite, I naturally type “fibre” but when I talk about nutrition or the internet it’s “fiber”
I also tend to spell armor armour and color colour despite being American.
Oh and I write grey instead of gray.
I also catch myself writing units like metre and litre instead of meter and liter sometimes.
It really all depends on if there’s a spellchecker turned on that will tell me I’m spelling things wrong.
Colour and armour is insane especially if you’re American lol
Strong chance op is a millennial who grew up reading Harry Potter.
Nope, gen z, and I haven’t actually read any of the Harry Potter books myself.
But you’re on the right track; I think it was reading The Hobbit that did me in lol
A big shout out to Oxford spelling which mixes American and English spelling and is incredibly hard to find a spell check for. It gives you all the extra u's and z's you could ask for.
Oxford spelling, Oxford comma: what's not to like?
Anything with a United Nations style spellcheck will sort it for you.
Somehow even as a kid in America I always had a preference for the OED at my library. It just exuded this sense of supreme rightness to me.
Never occurred to me that normal grade school kids don't all have a favourite dictionary. Ah well.
Herbs, because there's a frikking h in it.
Thanks Eddie Izzard for her skit, that still stuck with me.
load more comments
(3 replies)
like I spell it as “centre” and it seems perfectly fine even though phonetically it doesn’t make much sense
Thanks to coding, I see center as a position and centre as an object. But for the most part, I find US spelling to be lazy spelling for poor pronunciation. Like people just started saying the word wrong and rather than fixing that, just started spelling it wrong too.
Aluminium is prob the weirdest. Like everything on the periodic table ending with -ium; the Latin morpheme in chemistry. But the US just-...like, how?!
load more comments
(2 replies)
The most noticeable for me are privacy /ˈpɹɪv.ə.si/ and urinal /juːˈɹaɪnəl/. I can't say I feel any of them are right or wrong, though, it's just a bit of colour in the language.
I will spell out aluminium, but when I have to pronounce it I go with aluminum.
It was found in alum, so it should really have been alumium all along.
Advertisement sounds better in British pronunciation. Adver-tis-ment (/ədˈvɜː.tɪs.mənt/) as opposed to the American Adver-tize-ment (/ˌæd.vɚˈtaɪz.mənt/).
I'm British and have never said the first one you mentioned and don't think I can recall hearing it. Nearly everyone one will use the second version - adver-tize-ment, although it's most common to hear ad or ad-vert.
Edit: just asked my great granny who is 99, and she pronounced it adver-tize-ment, so not a generational thing.
Huh! Weirdly, it was definitely pronounced ad-VER-tiz-mint on a lot of the '70s UK TV shows we imported to the US in the '80s. Britain is a big place, though, in terms of dialects, so you and your great granny don't necessarily rule it out for everyone. Out of curiosity, do you then shorten it to ad or advert?
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›