Canadian Culture and Orthographic Word Forms: A Survey of Cultural Identity and Spelling Preferences

Abstract

Unlike most English speech communities with well-established spelling standards, historically English-speaking Canada has been split between British and American standards (Gregg, 1989), or has in some cases combined the British and American spelling structures (Pratt, 1993). As any native speaker of Canadian English could attest, some American standard forms, such as jewelry or story, seem ready to replace their British counterparts in the Canadian spelling lexicon, along with much older cases such as curb or tire. On the other hand, some researchers (Heffernan, Borden, Erath and Yang, 2010; Lipski, 1973) have pointed out the hostility toward American spelling forms since historically anti-Americanism is present in the Canadian linguistic landscape (see Pratt, 1993). This paper reviews the spelling choices of 26 Saskatchewan university students with respect to a group of 25 words known to be spelt differently in British and American English. The results are then correlated with those from a survey on attitudes toward Canadian culture (see section 3.1.3) and with the results from a brief "regional spelling test" (see Appendix B). Two questions are explored. First, to what degree can a correlation be found between the participants' preferences for the British spelling standard and positive attitudes toward Canadian culture? Second, what relationship can be discovered between the participants’ spelling preferences and their knowledge of British and American spellings?