Prime Minister Mark Carney was criticised for using British spelling in December of last year and is now, according to several articles, being pressured to do exactly that by the Canadian people. It may be too subtle for our neighbours to pick up, but it is time for Canada standardise on the little things like the last letter of the alphabet being ‘zed.’ There will be nothing to zee here, eh!
Canadian English is an odd hybrid of British and American spelling. The loss of the ‘u’ in a number of words like colour and flavour south of the border is said to be an artefact of cost-cutting, when printing charged by the letter, while we savoured the 21st letter, though there are other contributing factors. We also tend to ‘Americanize’ the ends of some words, so we ought to keep the centre but galvanise the write.
To normalise the use of -ise over -ize would be to move Canada’s on-going boycott of the United States right into the dictionary, to remind ourselves that while we are proximate, we are not the same and assert our cultural independence from the United States, one cheque at a time.
It is often said that Canadians speak American and spell British. It is unlikely that when we open up the bonnet of the language we would begin describing lorries driving on our nation’s dual carriageways, but we could throw petrol on this tyre fire by considering it.
The use of written language as a tool of assertive cultural definition has precedent. The father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, switched the country and the language from Arabic-based to Latin-based characters in 1928 in an attempt to modernise and westernise the country in the years following the collapse of the Ottoman empire.
But he was hardly the first. Indigenous cultures across North America adopted writing systems starting with the Cherokee syllabary in the 1820s, inspired by European writing systems but deliberately distinct from it. Canadian syllabics followed within a generation and gained widespread adoption. All could have simply used or based their writing on the Latin alphabet, but opted to retain and distinguish their own cultures with the purpose-built writing systems.
Ukraine, now four and a half years into resisting Russia’s three day military operation, has a rising movement to consider abandoning their Cyrillic writing system, associated with Russia, in favour of a Latin-based written interpretation of their language. While it is not on the verge of happening, the existence of the discussion is a reminder of the profound role of the symbolism of written language.
Canada’s distinct flavour of English, with bits borrowed from both British and American versions of the language, is and has long been its own cultural statement. With the rising aggression of the United States, an appropriate defence is to overtly reject the insidious rise of Americanised spelling and verbiage. We must escape the grey zone of an ambiguous alliance where we are constantly attacked, then attacked again for pushing back, while being told we must retain a status quo no longer in our national or cultural interest. Our connexion with the Americans has been broken.
I encourage Mark Carney and the federal government to pursue their policy of diverging from American writing, American policy, and American dependence. It is a subtle but important way of showing that our subservience is being stuffed into our national boot, that Canada is further away from American statehood than at any time since Monroe. And it is being done in the most understated, Canadian way.