Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 January 2

= January 2 =

Regarding English variations
what would be a quick way to determine whether something uses British or American English? ideally, I could ctrl+f common words like "gr[a/e]y" or colo[u]r, but many articles may not have these words, so if I were to use this, I'd probably have to sift through a couple words with variants before I determine which one the article uses. what would be quick tells of English variation, including common words that are different between British and American English? &#128156; melecie   talk  - 03:55, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I find "organis(z)ation" a useful one. It's a word that crops up in a lot of our articles. HiLo48 (talk) 04:02, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Many words that end in -ize or -ization in US English end in -ise or -isation in British English. Searching for those strings can give a quick answer. Of course, many articles (I assume you're asking about Wikipedia articles) are not conformant with WP:ENGVAR and contain a mixture of British and US English. Another complication is there are other English varieties besides these two, such as Indian English, Australian English, Canadian English, etc. which share some features with British and/or American English and complicate identification of the English variety in an article. Ideally (IMHO) every article would be required to contain a template identifying the English variety. Unfortunately that is not the case, but if there is such a template, that is good information. We have an article Comparison of American and British English which might give you some more ideas. CodeTalker (talk) 06:13, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * To complicate matters there is Oxford spelling, which is British English with z in words like organization. TSventon (talk) 09:50, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I really wouldn't worry too much about this. If the spelling variety is not obvious then just use whatever variety of English you are most familiar with. Very few people know the full range of spelling differences anyway. If anyone thinks you've got it wrong they can just fix it themselves. Shantavira|feed me 11:06, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Alansplodge (talk) 11:32, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * US spelling should be used for US-centric topics, British spelling for UK-centric topics, and so on. This rule trumps the convention of following the already established spelling variety of an article. So the issue of determining the variety used only arises for topics not clearly connected to regions with a specific variety of English. The use of -ise, -ising, -isation, implies Commonwealth spelling. But, as noted above, the spelling organization may be Oxford spelling, so this works one-way only. Perhaps the easiest giveaway after that are words ending on -or (US spelling) or -our (Commonwealth spelling), such as behavio(u)r, colo(u)r, labo(u)r, hono(u)r. Longer articles often do not conform to the guideline of consistency in the use of the English variety anyway. --Lambiam 12:18, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * But don't forget about the Australian Labor Party. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:23, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * @Lambiam Are you sure that the "US/UK topic" rule supersedes the "don't change the variety that is already there" rule? I thought it was the other way. David10244 (talk) 09:50, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
 * While the list of subsections at MOS:ENGVAR does not explicitly assign priorities, I interpret it as being arranged from most important (Consistency within articles) to least important (Retaining the existing variety). The last subsection even explicitly mentions strong national ties as a valid reason for changing the variety. --Lambiam 11:28, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
 * You could also copy the text into a word doc, and scan what errors it identifies when you select Review-->Spelling/Grammar. I guess that's no more time-consuming than ctrlF-ing one by one for "ise", "our", "mme", "ence", etc. (If these error flags disappear when you switch the proofing language (Options-->Language) you can more definitively determine if the text is matching English (UK), English (Canada), English (India), etc.) 70.67.193.176 (talk) 18:21, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

I guess I should've put this in the OP, but I was primarily asking this to distinguish between new editors changing engvars to fit MOS:ENGVAR or because they're unaware of it (or the concept of English variations as a whole), but I guess most of the time it doesn't matter, and if it does it's likely already obvious which one should be used. nonetheless, this should still probably be useful. thanks all, and happy editing! &#128156; melecie   talk  - 05:51, 3 January 2023 (UTC)