Canadian English: A study of variation in Canadian English spelling and the spelling policies of Canadian newspapers

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics grade: 14/20 course: Variation in Canadian English spelling language: English abstract: 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