This paper addresses the issue of variation in Canadian English spelling, which is a blend of British and American spelling conventions. The study combines theoretical and practical work. The theoretical part briefly defines the concept of Canadian English in general, that is, its historical background and characteristics. Moreover, it describes some major spelling phenomena in Canadian English and examines the ways in which several Canadian style guides deal with the variation in Canadian English spelling. In turn, the practical part of the present paper deals with the actual spelling practices. Based on the investigation of the spelling practices of Canadian journalists, the research attempts to identify whether the newspapers follow any prescriptive spelling norms. The corpus for the analysis was extracted from a sample of articles taken from the online editions of three national Canadian dailies: (1) The Globe and Mail (2) Metro and (3) National Post. The research gathered 277 tokens of words, where spelling varies between British and American English
Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. The origins of Canadian English
3. Canadian English as a unique mixture
4. Variation in Canadian English spelling: A bi-modal spelling system
5. Two competing models
5.1 Words ending in -our/-or
5.2 Words ending in -re/-er
5.3 Words ending in - ce/-se
5.4 Words ending in -ise/-ize/-yse/-yze
5.5 ae and oe diagraphs versus e
5.6 Doubling of final consonant before suffixes
5.7 -l or -ll in uninflected verbs
5.8 Miscellaneous
6. Attitudes to the notion of ‘standard’ in Canadian English spelling
7. Spelling variation in Canadian newspapers
7.1 Methodology
7.2 Results
7.3 Conclusions
7.4 Limitations of the study
8. Conclusions
Reference list
Appendix
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