Australian English is the set of varieties of the English language native to Australia. Although English has no official status in the Constitution, Australian English is the country's national and de facto official language as it is the first language of the majority of the population.
The English language was first introduced to the Americas by British colonisation, beginning in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The language also spread to numerous other parts of the world as a result of British trade and colonisation and the spread of the former British Empire, which, by 1921, included about 470–570 million people, about a quarter of the world's population. Written forms of British and American English as found in newspapers and textbooks vary little in their essential features, with only occasional noticeable differences.
British English is the standard dialect of the English language as spoken and written in the United Kingdom. Variations exist in formal, written English in the United Kingdom. For example, the adjective wee is almost exclusively used in parts of Scotland, North East England, Ireland, and occasionally Yorkshire, whereas little is predominant elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English. The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken, so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to the spoken language. According to Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English, British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions in the word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity".
Canadian English is the set of varieties of the English language native to Canada. According to the 2016 census, English was the first language of more than 19.4 million Canadians, or 58.1% of the total population; the remainder of the population were native speakers of Canadian French (20.8%) or other languages (21.1%). A larger number, 28 million people, reported using English as their dominant language. Of Canadians outside the province of Quebec, 82% reported speaking English natively, but within Quebec the figure was just 7.5% as most of its residents are native speakers of Quebec French.
The use of the English language in most current and former member countries of the Commonwealth of Nations was inherited from British colonisation. Mozambique is an exception – although English is widely spoken there, it is a former Portuguese colony which joined the Commonwealth in 1996. English is spoken as a first or second language in most of the Commonwealth. In a few countries, such as Cyprus and Malaysia, it does not have official status, but is widely used as a lingua franca.
A dictionary is a listing of words in one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically, which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, sometimes known as a lexicon. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.
Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in corpora (samples) of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora collected in the field in its natural context ("realia"), and with minimal experimental-interference.
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. Covering topics such as plurals and literary technique, distinctions among like words, and the use of foreign terms, the dictionary became the standard for other style guides to writing in English. Hence, the 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, edited by Ernest Gowers, which was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition was re-titled as The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield, as a usage dictionary that incorporated corpus linguistics data; and the 2015 fourth edition, revised and re-titled Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was edited by Jeremy Butterfield, as a usage dictionary. Informally, users refer to the style guide and dictionary as Fowler's Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler's.
Linguistic prescription, or prescriptive grammar, is the attempt to establish rules defining preferred or correct use of language. These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes informed by linguistic purism, such normative practices may suggest that some usages are incorrect, illogical, lack communicative effect, or are of low aesthetic value. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use.
The Macquarie Dictionary is a dictionary of Australian English. It is generally considered by universities and the legal profession to be the authoritative source on Australian English. It also pays considerable attention to New Zealand English. Originally it was a publishing project of Jacaranda Press, a Brisbane educational publisher, for which an editorial committee was formed, largely from the Linguistics department of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. It is now published by Macquarie Dictionary Publishers, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. In October 2007 it moved its editorial office from Macquarie University to the University of Sydney, and later to the Pan Macmillan offices in the Sydney central business district.
The usage of a language is the manner in which the written and spoken language is routinely employed by its speakers; that is, it refers to "the collective habits of a language's native speakers", as opposed to theoretical or idealized models of how a language works or in the abstract. Fowler characterized usage as "the way in which a word or phrase is normally and correctly used" and as the "points of grammar, syntax, style, and the choice of words."
In the English language, there are grammatical constructions that many native speakers use unquestioningly yet certain writers call incorrect. Differences of usage or opinion may stem from differences between formal and informal speech and other matters of register, differences among dialects, and so forth. Disputes may arise when style guides disagree with each other, or when a guideline or judgement is confronted by large amounts of conflicting evidence or has its rationale challenged.
Xmas is a common abbreviation of the word Christmas. It is sometimes pronounced, but Xmas, and variants such as Xtemass, originated as handwriting abbreviations for the typical pronunciation. The "X" comes from the Greek letter Chi, which is the first letter of the Greek word Christós, which became Christ in English. The suffix -mas is from the Latin-derived Old English word for Mass.
Ancrene Wisse is an anonymous monastic rule for female anchoresses written in the early 13th century.
The Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English is an electronic collection of text samples of American English, the first major structured corpus of varied genres. This corpus first set the bar for the scientific study of the frequency and distribution of word categories in everyday language use. Compiled by Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis at Brown University, in Rhode Island, it is a general language corpus containing 500 samples of English, totaling roughly one million words, compiled from works published in the United States in 1961.
Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most recognised variations being British and American spelling. Many of the differences between American and British English date back to a time before spelling standards were developed. For instance, some spellings seen as "American" today were once commonly used in Britain, and some spellings seen as "British" were once commonly used in the United States.
Studies that estimate and rank the most common words in English examine texts written in English. Perhaps the most comprehensive such analysis is one that was conducted against the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a very large collection of texts from around the world that are written in the English language. A text corpus is a large collection of written works that are organised in a way that makes such analysis easier.
The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late 20th century from a wide variety of genres, with the intention that it be a representative sample of spoken and written British English of that time.
A style guide or manual of style is a set of standards for the writing, formatting and design of documents. It is often called a style sheet, although that term also has other meanings. The standards can be applied either for general use, or be required usage for an individual publication, a particular organization, or a specific field.
The Cambridge English Corpus is a multi-billion word corpus of English language. The Cambridge English Corpus (CEC) contains data from a number of sources including written and spoken, British and American English. The CEC also contains the Cambridge Learner Corpus, a 40m word corpus made up from English exam responses written by English language learners.
