Learning English, Again

27 March 2009 by alex | 4 comments

British English

Over the past three decades, I have lived for extended periods of time in three different countries.  Each, however, have been English speaking.  The first being my beloved U. S. of A. — my homeland and my place of birth.  The second being Canada, where I found my beloved Betty.  And now, I find myself in the third, England, where I have lost my beloved sanity in pursuit of a PhD.

Yet, as I have moved to these various places, I have learned that English is not the same in all three.  When I was in Canada, I resisted any pronunciations like “a-GAINST” instead of the American “a-genst” and “zed” instead of “zee.” As I wrote my thesis, my spelling maintained its American sensibilities.

But then coming to the UK, I have found myself needing to repeat myself a lot since I have been misunderstood so much (I thought American English was like the de facto standard!).  I have tried to resist the temptation to use British spelling (which, incidentally, is actually slightly different from Canadian spelling which is sort of a hybrid of American and British English).  But then, a few months ago I was applying for a bursary and was informed that my American spelling may be subtly seen unfavo(u)rably, though it should not really impact the results.  So, alas, I have changed my computer’s default language to British English now and am trying to get the hang of the Britishisms… <sigh>  My PhD thesis is going to have so many misspellings!


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  1. Candy on 27 March 2009 at 5:19 pm

    British English is so colourful albeit pretentious at times :)

  2. -man on 27 March 2009 at 7:34 pm

    What?!

    I apologise good sir but I could not follow this post due to the excessive and unnecessary use of poor English spelling and grammar. Might you be from lands afar over the seas? A place where language, including the standardised English language employed in its place of origin, England, has taken a back seat to hedonistic American slang? Might you be an American per chance my good sir?!

  3. Anson on 27 March 2009 at 10:20 pm

    That’s what I struggled with too, when I learned British spellings growing up in Hong Kong and when I studied in the states, my U.S. MSWord spell checker kept saying that I spell things wrong…. urgh….

    There seems to be a nice summary of the differences here:
    http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwesl/egw/jones/differences.htm

  4. david on 2 April 2009 at 6:01 am

    next you’ll need to move to Singapore or Berlize.

    have you seen some of the comic comparisons btwn singlish and british english?