Tuesday, February 16, 2010

American, British and Canadian ENGLISH?

I was in a meeting the other day and I was displaying to my team an Audio Video Presentation for the magazine and one of my team members said she had found some grammatical error in it. I asked her to point it out to me and she showed me the word "Focussed" and said it was spelt wrong. 

She's from Austria and seems to have been brought up with the American method of spelling. Now which one of these are correct? I've been brought up in India where we have been taught the British way of spelling and many of my words now may appear to be spelt wrong with the Americans. The more and more we deal with Americans and Microsoft Office for that matter - the more and more words we come across that are no more spelt the way we always spelt them. So do I draft a different letter for the Americans, a different one for the British and yet another one for the Canadians?

I take this opportunity to blame the Americans for this one. They find a spelling difficult and they just change the way its spelt to suit their purposes. I guess they run away from the "Spelling Bee" competitions and go away to create their own rules so that they can win the game!

However, since we're dealing with so many American people in our lives, we still have to abide by their rules. But this is not for long. A friend of mine said to me a few months ago, "In a decade, one person out of five would be Indian and 2.5 on 5 would be Chinese". Here comes Asian domination. Our economy is growing stronger while theirs only seems to be looking at new problems arising as a result of trying to correct old ones. I wonder where this is heading and when we would see a shift in the way we think... and perhaps SPELL?

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