What are the important differences between Canadian and American (USA) English?

Spelling

Canadian English tends to combine aspects of American and British spelling. Here are some highlights:

• Some nouns take -ice/-ence while matching verbs take -ise/ense. eg. practise / practice and license / licence
• Canadians tend to use the British -our ending rather than -or in some words like colour, flavour, labour, neighbour.
• Generally, words with Greek roots end in -ize while those with Latin roots end in -ise. eg. realize, paralyze. American English tends to standardize on -ize.
• You draw money from the bank with a cheque not a check.
• French derived words like theatre and centre tend to retain the -re ending. Although when used as a verb or in the sense of being "in the middle" it remains center.

Vocabulary

Canadian English uses generally the same vocabulary as American. There are a few regionalisms and quirks.

• A multi-level parking facility is a parkade.
• Poutine is delicious.
• In winter, you want to wear a tuque to keep your head warm.
• You wear runners on your feet, not sneakers.
• Generally, you go to the washroom when nature calls. That term's generally been replaced by restroom in America and it's a public toilet or lavatory in Great Britain. In Canada, toilet is somewhat indelicate and avoided.
• A pond in farmland is a slough. (Rhymes with brew.)
• You book off work to go on holidays.
• My favourite from where I live: it's not a hooded sweatshirt, it's a bunny-hug.

Pronunciation

Pronunciation has American and British influence. There is some regional variation, and for some words, Canadians vary between British and American patterns. There are many little quirks, here's a few:

• The last letter of the alphabet is zed.
• Borg are Canadian. Futile, fertile, fragile etc. usually rhyme with "tile".
• Adult, composite -- accent is on the first syllable.
• Roof and hoof rhyme with "goof".

What sets Canadian pronunciation apart the most is the phenomonon known as Canadian Rising. Certain diphthongs are "raised" before voiceless consonants (eg. f,k,p,s,t). While most Americans discern no difference between writer and rider, in Canada, the vowel sounds are distinctly different.
Canadian Rising causes the illusion of about sounding like "aboot" to American ears.

Canadian English has many differences from American English. But it also has many differences from British English.

• Spelling tends to favour the British way, such as putting the U in favour.
• Except for words that Americans end in -ize instead of ise; in that case Canadians often use -ize.
• Much of the word choice is closer to American. We say truck and elevator, not lorry or lift.
• Canadians drink a can of pop, not a can of soda.
• The last letter of the alphabet is Zed, not Zee.

In general where there is a difference between American and British you can guess that half the time Canadian goes one way and half the other. Occasionally we go our own way.


Of the main branches of the English language, Canadian English is the closest relative to American English, which, given history, makes a lot of sense: In 1607 brave men got off the boat in what is now Virginia to form the first permanent colony in North America for England and not long after that there were forays into New England and the Maritimes. Thus the foundations of the two are bound in the settlers that came from England, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, and Wales in the 17th century.
And then, after that, it gets tricky.
Canadian English obviously has more contact with Canadian French, itself the descendant of how people learned to parler français in the 1600s-1700s. Canadian French is the descendent of dialects and sociolects present in France before it was more standardized, which is why it has features more in common with a peasant from Poitou, Normandy, or Maine than modern bog standard French based on the Parisian dialect. When it mixes with an Anglophone substrate, weird things happen, like occasionally using French numbers for English street names, like in Quebec. When it goes in the other direction, not uncommon in Eastern Canada, the pronunciation sounds nothing like anywhere else in the world and if you want to know what this sounds like, go to Youtube and look up a boy who is trying on ballet clothes in Montreal. He is obviously bilingual but his speech sounds like what happens when you put the two dominant tongues together and threw them in a blender.Consider that he is only about nine or ten. A definite sign of evolution.
Canada was obviously more receptive to the Johnson dictionary than Webster's and to this day remains loyal to it. Bluntly the stubborn facts are that America voted itself off the island in 1776 and for a long time was disinterested in following certain trends in Europe: hence, we stil, like stubborn mules, stick to units of measurement that the British used in the 1750s for its navy and don't change to SI units unless we absolutely must lest mayhem result (scientific papers, medicine, international shipping, the army, border areas so we don't cause car crashes.) Canadian raising is a feature found in most of Canada but absent in large pockets of the US. The prairie provinces have a rounder o than their southern neighbors, like in the infamous word "hoser". Mary marry and merry are distinctly different words in all forms of Canadian English, but not in the Southeast US or some forms of black English.