TORONTO — Since taking office in March, Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced new policies on trade, foreign affairs and energy that he has cast as necessary for bolstering Canada’s economic resilience amid President Donald Trump’s assault on the historically close U.S.-Canadian relationship.
But among linguists and editors here, a different Carney shift is drawing attention: his spelling.
From his earliest days as prime minister, a raft of official government publications — including his mandate letter to cabinet, social media posts, statements about meetings with world leaders and 493-page budget — are full of words rendered in British, not Canadian, English.
Most prominent has been his predilection for the British “ise” and “yse” endings over the Canadian (and American) “ize” and “yze.” Canada would be “recognising” a Palestinian state, his government announced in September. Officials unveiled a new accounting method to “modernise” the budget, and said they are being “recognised” for navigating global challenges.
Among Carney’s favorite such words has been “catalyse.”
The plethora of -ises and -yses in the budget was the catalyst for a letter from a group of editors and linguists to Carney this month. They noted that governments here “consistently” used Canadian spellings “from the 1970s to 2025” and urged him to continue the practice as “a matter of our national history, identity and pride.”
The prime minister’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
University of British Columbia linguist Stefan Dollinger, one of the letter’s signatories, asked a Washington Post reporter to consider a world in which a U.S. administration suddenly adopted British spellings (imagine a secretary of labour or a department of defence) or King Charles III began to use American ones (he’d go “traveling,” not “travelling”).
“What outcry would that trigger?” Dollinger asked in an email. “It’s similar in Canada. Language and language use shows who we are.”
Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, his questioning Canada’s viability as a country and his threats to make it the 51st state have provoked a surge of nationalism among a people not known for flag-waving patriotism. It’s been a year for asking: What does it mean to be Canadian?
James Walker, a linguist at the University of Melbourne who has studied variations in English around the world, said many differences, such as alternate pronunciations for a single word, are “fairly arbitrary.” Seeing “ise” instead of “yze,” he said, is unlikely to impede one’s understanding of the information being communicated.
“But the fact is that a lot of these differences are important in terms of questions of identity,” he said. “If you want to show you’re Canadian, you can do it through the way you’re pronouncing your words or through the words you use, but you can also do it in terms of spelling.”
Carney’s academic and professional careers have given him exposure to several varieties of English. He has been a citizen of Canada, Ireland and Britain; studied at Harvard and Oxford, where he met his wife, a Brit; and served more than six years as governor of the Bank of England.
“I think the concern around the prime minister is that he’s the leader of the country,” Walker said, “and even though he has spent a lot of his life outside of Canada, I think a lot of people would be concerned that the prime minister is using spelling practices that aren’t considered to be standard for Canadian English.”
Canadian English is a product of Canada’s history and geography. “Like many things Canadian,” Dollinger said, its evolution “was a long, drawn-out process whose outcome can be described as a blend of U.K. and U.S. ways, with considerable Canadian innovation.”
Canadian English incorporates regionalisms (in Newfoundland, an irritable person is “crooked”; in Saskatchewan, a hoodie is a “bunnyhug”), Indigenous influences (“skookum,” from Chinook, for strong, great, formidable), loanwords from French (“toque,” a knit winter hat) and words not used much elsewhere (“chesterfield,” for couch). Its differences from English in the United States and Britain are apparent in its syntax, spelling and vocabulary.
Margaret Atwood once said that she changed “hand cream” to “hand lotion” in her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” so it would be comprehensible to Americans.
Canadian English evolved over several waves of immigration from English-speaking countries.
After the American Revolution, tens of thousands of Loyalists fled north to what was then known as British North America. Some became teachers, lawyers and bankers, and their variety of English influenced the national argot.
In some areas during the 19th century, amid shortages of teachers and textbooks, generations of pupils were taught by Americans.
Some visiting Brits were shocked by what they heard.
“It is downright melancholy,” wrote one Englishman who visited in the 1830s, “to traverse the province and go into many of the common schools; you will find a herd of children instructed by some anti-British adventurer … and American spelling books, dictionaries and grammar, teaching them an anti-British dialect and idiom.”
In an 1857 address to the Canadian Institute in Toronto, the Rev. Archibald Constable Geikie, a transplant from Scotland, lamented the “corrupt” dialect of his new home, with its “combination of letters and phrases” that do not contribute “in any sense to the enrichment of the language.”
“A man in England possesses notable capacity, and people style him capable, or able, or great,” he said. “In Canada he is designated first-class. To speak of a first-class carriage, or a first-class prize, or even a first-class ox, may be right enough, but why apply phrases with such poor associations to men of splendid intellect? Is it not enough that a man be great? Will he seem any greater when indissolubly associated with a railway van?”
Moreover, he said, “In England it occasionally happens that great offenders are hanged, but in the States and Canada, criminals are never hanged; they are all hung,” he added. “In England, beef is hung, gates are hung and curtains are hung, but felons are hanged; in Canada, felons, beef, gates and curtains are all treated in the same way.”
Britain encouraged migration to Canada in the 19th century, particularly after the War of 1812, in hope that the newcomers would act as a bulwark against American expansion. They, too, influenced Canadian English.
“It’s our history that makes the spelling system and makes our pronunciation system, makes our phonology and determines a lot of other things like our [system of] government,” said University of Toronto linguist J.K. Chambers, who co-signed the letter to Carney. “All of those things are the result of us being at the confluence of two mighty nations, and now we’re a third mighty nation with a personality of our own.”
Debates about language and language purity are not unique to Canada.
In France, the Académie Française and its 40 “immortals” have tried since 1634 to safeguard the language of Molière from what a member once called “mindless Globish,” fighting encroaching Anglicisms, weighing in on the permissibility of gender-neutral pronouns (“a mortal danger” for French, it warned in 2017) and declaring the correct definite article for “covid” (a feminine noun, it ruled in 2020).
The French academy was modeled in part after the Accademia della Crusca, founded in Florence in 1583. Its name is a metaphor: “Crusca” is Italian for “bran,” and the group’s emblem is the “frullone,” the tool millers use to separate bran from flour. It aims to separate good Italian from bad — carefully, in a country where Mussolini’s harsh language laws left a sour taste.
But when language concerns arise in Canada, they typically center not on English, but the country’s other official language: French. Quebec, long concerned about the survival of the French language and culture in this Anglo-majority country, has a history of passing controversial language laws enforced by the Office Québécois de la Langue Française.
More than half the province’s population can converse in English, census records show, an all-time high. The language is ubiquitous in Montreal. But French is the sole official language, and is required on public signs and advertising. A recent law requires some businesses to disclose what percentage of their staff cannot speak French.
In a case that drew national attention, Montreal city buses that flashed “Go! Canadiens Go!” during the National Hockey League playoffs drew a complaint to the language police. The cheer was replaced with “Allez! Canadiens Allez!”
In a reversal months later, the watchdog said that “allez” was preferable, but the use of “go” was “partially legitimized.” But by then, the team had long since been eliminated by the Washington Capitals.
The National Post reported in May that Carney expected the English-language versions of government documents to be written using British spellings.
Walker said it was amusing to see people “targeting the British spelling of the prime minister. … Usually they’re more concerned about Americanization of Canadian English” than its “Britishization.”
Editors Canada President Kaitlin Littlechild, who co-signed the letter, said Carney’s use of British spellings risks creating confusion “when people look to government sources as the authority on how to spell things and it deviates from what we consider to be Canadian English.”
But in a broader sense, she said, Canadian English “is a very uniquely Canadian aspect of our identity, and that is something that we really feel should be acknowledged, respected and honored.”
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