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American English is spreading unabated with computers and internet use levels growing world-wide.

Even as I write this, my Firefox browser will place little red lines under each word that I spell correctly in British English, if this is different from the American spelling. Microsoft Word is no better. If I ask a favour from someone, it will point out that it should be ‘favor’. And despite the fact that I constantly tell it to use British English, it still does this…

This idea struck me in particular yesterday, when I was dealing with quite a few Americans, and it raises a number of very interesting points, not least about whether the ‘English’ language will become more homogenised than ever before with the growth of the internet.

It is quite revealing to asses one’s own use of language in these instances. I myself have begun ‘ize’ing instead of ‘ise’ing at the end of certain words – probably because I only ever write them on the internet(?) – e.g. “monetize” or search engine “optimization”. Will this become the norm in English English? Very possibly, and I don’t see it as any great problem if it does. The Oxford English dictionary already carries American spellings, and I am sure that no cognitive difficulty can ever arise by using a ‘z’ in place of an ‘s’ or an ‘o’ for ‘ou’.

This does, however, bring us to an important idea: whilst it is still possible to understand something, if it is spelled incorrectly, many of us will automatically assume a lack of intelligence (or at the very least some sloppiness) on the part of the writer. This is an issue on the web, probably more than anywhere else, due to the potentially world-wide audience – it is impossible for something to be spelled perfectly for all readers! For example, in reading something I have written, if I don’t explicitly say that I am British, an American may well assume that I just can’t spell. It is probably less likely for the assumption to work the other way around (i.e. an British person accusing an American of poor spelling) as I believe that the British are more familiar with American spelling (on computers etc) than vice versa.

And this is my main point. We are. We see American spellings the whole time, so much so, that even I am beginning to adopt them in certain circumstances. If only to lose the unsightly jagged red line in an obsessive compulsive attempt to have a clear white background to the text I am writing, I now often choose American spellings over British.

I has actually got to the point where I can’t remember the correct way to spell some words. Spell-checkers in general make our lives much easier, perhaps too easy. I remember when I was at school a lot of people would say “ah but you have calculators, maths is easy!” Ok, I thought, you do these quadratic equations then. But the point is, calculators allow us to do the routine bit very, very quickly, which is a Good Thing. However, are we less able to do arithmetic mentally as a result? Undoubtedly, yes! Is this a huge problem? Probably not – calculators are widespread, so we rarely, if ever actually need to do things ‘in our head’. As I once heard in an episode of Scrubs, “I have a finite amount of brainspace” and doing all arithmetic in my head would probably push out an altogeher happier memory.

Spell-checkers are the same. I hear all the time, usually from people approaching middle age, writing on the internet, about how “young people carn’t spell anymore.” Quite frankly, they don’t need to. The computer does it for you. In fact, in many circumstances, one doesn’t even need to be able to type, as the computer will amend errors on the fly, fixing typo’s, capitalising ‘i’s and putting ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’, even if you didn’t remember the rhyme.

Is a spell-checker a bad thing then? No – it makes our lives easier, and perhaps even helps us to spell correctly in the first place as we become so sick of the red lines under every other word that we actually remember to get them right in the first place. The only problem is, all the spell-checkers are American, so I can’t remember how to spell anymore.

Do me a favo(u)r, make your own (i/e)nquiries, and then leave a comment.