As the third most spoken language in the world, it’s no wonder English has so many accents and spelling variations. But for anyone who’s learned French, or any French who’s learned English, there comes a striking difference with both languages that is only noticed as you get really advanced, in either French or English, depending on your case; the English language has an impressive lack of standardization.
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While not talking of regional spoken differences like accents, but of spelling and form, the English language has no regulator. This is a situation most English writers take for granted. You write the spelling of the country you’re in. However, for a French speaker, this might come as a surprise, because there is no such thing as a different spelling of a given word in French between two different French speaking regions. Likewise, English speakers that learn French often get confused with this too, but the other way around, wondering if they should learn the Canadian way if they’re in America, or the French way if they’re elsewhere in the world.
But because French is regulated by the Académie Française, I answer that it does not really matter. What does is the accent you choose to speak the language, which, however, has very little to do with written language.
This is a strong point of French, as well as other widely spoken languages like Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, both of which surpass English with 2nd and 1st place, respectively, as most spoken languages. Note however that French has a more or less recognized second regulator called the Office Québécois de la Langue Française, located in the province of Quebec in Canada. The regulator does follow spelling rules of the Academy, but it exists to standardize Canadian specific styles, like not placing a thin non-breaking space after an exclamation mark, and, much as a mirror to the Canadian French population’s will to keep French alive in a majorly English-speaking continent, create new French words for English terms, especially in the field of Internet technologies, that the Académie Française has left in their English form but accepted in the language, as well as to define specific meanings of words that belong to Canadian French heritage or have diverged from the Academy’s original definitions, like Diner meaning Dinner in France and Lunch in Canada.
If you’re American or British, the answer is pretty straightforward; just use whatever they use in your country. But if you’re in Canada, where the spelling is so hybrid, the answer isn’t so simple. Spelling in Canada, although theoretically standardized, is far from being so. For example, even though the Oxford Canadian English dictionary spells color as colour, I haven’t seen once in my life any Eastern Ontarian, that is in proximity to the capital of Canada, spell color as colour. Comparatively, I’m used to spell humor as humour, even though my friends never do. This makes English, at least in Canada, a very unstable language in its written form, although the same could be said of its spoken form, which is also a weird hybrid in Canada, albeit being chiefly American.
Although this protest doesn’t present any way to solve the problem, even less decided which spelling to take (I can already hear the riots), I do believe that as an international language, English should be regulated. Afterall, it would make it easier on top of its already existing ease of learnability, a strong attribution, putting aside cultural history, to its rise as one of the most widely spoken language in the world., because even though French probably has the most reknowned regulator, it’s in my opinion at least one of the hardest languages to learn.
