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Comment by qart | Hacker News Reader

I use en-CA because it makes the most sense for me.

- I want spellcheckers to default to American (analyze vs analyse, etc.) because that's the default in computer science. This, despite en-IN using British conventions.

- Metric units

- A4, etc. paper sizes are the default in India

- Acceptable date format (anything but MM/DD/YY will do)

- I definitely don't want my file explorer showing sizes in lakhs and crores (the commas in Indian numbers) so en-IN is out.

I speak Kannada, but I don't think anyone who can speak English here will confuse Canada for Kannada, whether they are Kannadigas or not.

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French here who just defaults to American English on most devices: I never realized that you could have American English with sane unit and date defaults with EN-CA. Will probably use that from now on!

You could spawn the trend that leads to the article "Why are there so many Canadians in France?"

That's less crazy, esp. given the sizable populations in Canada that speak French to some degree and have ethnic and cultural ties to Francia.

> to some degree

That kind of hurts ;-)

Francia? Is that a thing or a typo? Never heard that used before.

Seems like a historical name for France. And also how we, Spanish speakers, call France :-p

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francia

> that speak French to some degree

What do you mean by that?

French is a requirement in school for English speaking Canadians... it's not very rigorous though. I've lost most of my French.

It is also a joke on how “French” Canadian varieties of French are.

There are pronunciation and vocabulary differences that get deeper the less formal people are talking.

Well not quite: colour, centre etc

The noun "centre" = stadium, etc. But the verb as used in css, etc is "center" - eg center the <div>.

It's also a noun as "center." "Vaccine-center" and etc.

Not in Canada.

I ended with en-DE that for some reason exists. This way my phone has an English interface rather than poorly translated Polish (or worse, one app had English support but displayed Chinese with Polish as system language).

And sane units/date formatting etc.

I would mildly prefer en-PL, but it does not exist.

That's smart! I use en_IE for the same reason. I for some strange reason assumed that en_CA used non-metric measurements and crazy American dates. Thanks for enlightening me!

I for some strange reason assumed that en_CA used non-metric measurements

Depending on the measurement, many actual Canadians do use non-metric units: https://www.bclions.com/roster/

If you're old enough, maybe you remember a time when Canada wasn't using the metric system at all. It wasn't that long ago that they were going through metrication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Canada

Remember: Canada is the state that didn't "unite". :)

Those reasons don't make sense though. In Canada the official spellings are a weird mixture of British and US English, and mostly British spelling is used. Additionally, the US standard sizes of paper are used in Canada, so that wouldn't be correct either.

What a bizarre comment! Since you already know what spellings work for me, which of the other locale packages, in your esteemed opinion, should I be using to make sense?

>I want spellcheckers to default to American

Literally in your comment you say you want American English spelling. Which Canadian English is not. Every point I made was directly in response to what you wrote.

> Literally in your comment you say you want American English spelling. Which Canadian English is not.

English orthography does not have a binary distinction from one dialect to another. It is absurd to talk about them in such a binary manner.

American spellings are gaining a lot of ground though, especially if you are not writing in a formal context. Maybe en-ca is accepting both variants?

this is correct

> a weird mixture

Nothing weird about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling

Canada doesn't follow the etymological principles behind Oxford spelling, though. For instance, it uses "analyze" rather than "analyse", even though this comes from a Greek sigma (unlike the -ιζω verbs which become -ize in OED). At least in common use, as well, "programme", for instance, is rare, although sometimes found.

Canadians themselves are also pretty inconsistent personally and often use American spellings, especially outside of the -our/-or and -re/-er series, which are the most well-known differences. Part of this is probably attribuable to the fact that Canadian media used American spellings until the 90s.

Canadians also may be found using hyperbritish forms proscribed by the OED, such as "honourary" for "honorary" and so on.

It’s a weird mixture when both colour and color are accepted spellings for the same word.

Does it bother you that the dictionary has both grey and gray?

Yup. It’s one of those “shit or get off the pot” type things.

Hehehehehe (laughs in German)

Well, I see the trend going the other way with google ditching millions for lakhs on YouTube...

But Canada mainly uses letter instead of A4 IIRC (correct me if I'm wrong, not Canadian myself).

You're right. But when I hit Ctrl-P from any page, it defaults to printing in A4. I guess the desktop locale settings are in charge of that.

Canada uses the same inch-based US sizes but denoted in mm (called P sizes, I think - I’m also not Canadian).

Canadian here, we use the US sizes and describe them in inches (or by name, so we say "letter" or "8.5 by 11"). Microsoft Office uses both inches and millimetres but I always thought they did that for outside of Canada too.

That is brilliant. I am switching to en-CA now.

Australian English is excellent too, because they use classy spellings too (I qualify as classy the English I’ve learnt at school in France, please no hard feelings ;) ) and metric system.

Tried that when I lived there.

Kept changing things to "sammo" and "arvo", and "beer" to "VB". /s

True story: the Aussie courts have ruled that "cunt" isn't a curse / vulgar word; e.g. he's a good- / shit-cunt is not offensive with regards to public officials. https://nswcourts.com.au/articles/court-rules-its-ok-to-refe...

As an Australian I will often use en-GB due to decades of Microsoft trying to force American spelling on us.

is there a subset or option for bogans?

Keep in mind that while some spelling in Canadian English matches the US (analyze in Canadian is spelled with the Z), other words match the British English (color is spelled with a U).

I really hope en-IN moves to American spellings and gets rid of the lakh/crore numbers and use million/billion instead (more scientific). Then it basically becomes en-CA with nice things like ₹.

Heh good luck with that, it would be as difficult as asking USA to move to metric. :D

A lakh is “1,00,000” not a million.

Yes, exactly. That is why they do not want to use it.

A lakh is 0.1 Million. What's your point?

> gets rid of the lakh/crore numbers and use million/billion instead (more scientific).

Million/billion is more familiar to non-Indians, but I don't understand how that system's more scientific.

Also, from your lack of milliard, I'm guessing you're advocating for the short scale:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

It’s more scientific because science has standardized on SI [1] units with metric prefixes [2]. Above 10^9 and below 10^-9 you can see the exponents change by increments of 3.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

en-CA has the best date format:

yyyy-MM-dd

That's the official one from the all numeric date... but...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Cana...

All of the following dates are valid:

3 May 2021

May 3, 2021

3 mai 2021

2021-05-03

And from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

> ISO 8601 is the only format that the Government of Canada and Standards Council of Canada officially recommend for all-numeric dates.[28][29][30] But, their usage differs depending of many contexts.[31][32]

> All three formats are used in Canada for long format.

> For English speakers, MDY was preferred form (mmm-dd-yyyy) (Example: April 9, 2019) and used by nearly all English language publications and media companies as well as majority of English language government documents.[citation needed]

> For both French and sometimes English speakers, DMY are used (dd-mmm-yyyy) (Example: 9 April 2019/le 9 avril 2019) and also used in formal letters, academic papers, military, many media companies and even some governmental documents, particularly in French-language ones.

> Federal regulations for shelf life dates on perishable goods mandate a year/month/day format, but allow the month to be written in full, in both official languages, or with a set of standardized two-letter bilingual codes such as 2019 JA 07 or 19 JA 07.

Still, the one that contains only numbers (the most potentially ambiguous) is of the format yyyy-MM-dd

Apparently it's not obvious to all why this is the best, so let's be explicit:

Dates in this format can be sorted lexicographically

It's also unambiguous. Nobody uses yyyy-dd-mm, whereas xx/xx/yy can be misinterpreted.

I distinctly remember SQL Server 2000 pulling that one on me. I had switched a DB app over to using ISO dates exclusively in its queries to avoid the month-day-ordering confusion and then the bloody thing earnestly started to parse yyyy-mm-dd dates as yyyy-dd-mm at every chance it got. So much for unambiguous date formats!

Apparently, Kazakhstan uses yyyy-dd-mm, but only in Kazakh (not in Russian.)

I guess if we are only talking about English speakers, that’s not an issue, since if Kazakhs don’t write dates that way in Russian, I presume they wouldn’t do it that way in English either

My (and every other) Swedish social security number uses this format plus 4 more digits. It ends up being the format I usually default to when writing a date. I feel like it is the least likely to be misconstrued, when I start with the full year. Would many people ever mistake it for yyyy-dd-mm?

As an Indian who thinks of date as (in order) day → month → year for me dd-MM-yyyy is the standard.

But given a choice I'd prefer something like dd-MON-yyyy because there is such an incongruous mixture of dd-MM and MM-dd across Indian services that often you are not sure unless one of the numbers crosses 12.

A nice thing about yyyy-mm-dd, in addition to being the standard, is that since no one uses yyyy-dd-mm it's unambiguous

As a canadian, i'm pretty sure i've never seen anyone use that date format.

If you do your taxes on paper, you'll have entered your date of birth in that way (upper right corner): https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/cra-arc/formspubs/pbg/5015...

Fair. Also i just realized that cheques also use that format.

Colloquially though i dont see that format very much.

I wish the language settings were more nuanced. I want sites that are primarily in my mother tongue use that, even if they have english version. I want foreign (often corporate) websites that also have a second-class translation to my native language, to stay in English.

HTTP headers already let you assign weights and such to languages you understand, but I doubt many sites implement this properly.

If the site had its own set of weights corresponding to the quality of its translations, it can multiply those out and arrive at a "best" language to show you.

en-CA uses US paper sizes AFAIK. Which is why I use it, as an American, for the same reasons you state — plus $ as the currency — and without changing paper sizes should I ever print something.

I do not know much about Canadian conventions to have made such an informed choice. I use en-US simply because I hate to see the red squiggly lines when I am fighting with someone on reddit

en-AU should be pretty same as well, coming from Australia :).

As an Australian living in Canada for 15 years, I can assure you we barely speak the same language !

Speak != Write

I think Australia uses the British spelling for analyse.

Analyse is the "correct" spelling that we're taught in school, but there has been a gradual shift towards American English due to the dominance that Americans have over the media (e.g. "math" instead of "maths"). Analyse/analyze is one of those words that is in transition, and I suspect we'll be using the American spelling in 50 years' time.

In a professional context I've completely abandoned British English. Anything informal I still use it but for writing code and communications it seems more polite especially for people who speak English as a second language.

As much as would have liked it to be the reverse think it's fair to say that American English is now completely dominant worldwide and that will only continue.

Hm, maybe I should start using en-CA as a Sweden then. I am currently using en-US. I have also considered en-DK.

I live in Denmark, but with my browser set to English only. (The OS is set to en-IE.)

It's not unusual for a website to be presented to me in en-DK — probably due to the language setting and geolocation of my IP address — but it's also fairly common for numbers shown in that locale to be a mess.

en-DK specifies a comma decimal separator, which I find confusing when reading English. 1,234.00 being mis-formatted as 1,234,00 isn't ususual. Dates are formatted YYYY-MM-DD, when usage in Denmark is DD-MM-YYYY (as used for da-DK).

Supposedly, en-DK is considered "European English", but it fails at that (decimals, currency), and fails at being Danish too (decimals, dates).

We need an en-EU, which can easily implement the EU's official style for writing English. Meanwhile, I think en-IE is closest.

Canada uses letter/legal paper sizes at least it did when I last lived there 10 years ago.

en_SE is a nice one if your system has it. Seems to be a sort of made-up locale. Things are in English, but use YYYY-MM-DD date format.

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