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Comment by dkga | Hacker News Reader

I work at an international organisation, and can confirm. My understanding is that is that at the international level, only the US-based international organisations use US English.

To be sure, I don‘t have any dog in this fight, just highlighting a fact from my experience that many here might not know.

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That sounds surprising. As an European, I thought that UK only thinks their English is the dominant one, because it's the one officially taught everywhere. Meanwhile, the reality is, people learn English primarily from Hollywood and MTV; music, video, television and computer games are both the primary exposure and the main reason for people to pick English up, and they're almost all in US English. Secondarily, computers - the OS, software, SaaS - all of that is either in US English or localized to wherever the users live, and even then the US English version is usually better.

Nobody actually uses UK English here, except for English teachers. Computers don't. TV doesn't. Corporate jobs don't. And so regular people don't either.

Where is "here"?

I believe at least in all of Eastern Europe (including those guys who call themselves Central :wink:) US English dominates in pop culture, and business. I also used to work with a few Italians, and Portuguese and they all wrote US En too, so I suspect it's the same for them too.

Those who call themselves Central Europe are a part of the European Union, and so lean towards the UK English since school education and relevant English certifications are geared towards it. Perhaps those who would like to ignore the fact that Central Europe is a region distinct geographically and culturally from the Eastern Europe, nowadays more than ever, should not project their views unto others and speak for them?

"Here" is Poland, but in my trips to other places in Europe (and around the world), I never saw anything that would suggest this is an unique experience. On the contrary, it's pretty much self-evident, and having it be otherwise would require the last 200 years of world history to be dramatically different from what they were.

The kind of organization that identifies as an "international organization" is disproportionately likely to be hyperaware of its working language choice and standardize on a particular English dialect by policy and pick en-gb.

Without such a conscious choice, yes, Americanisms do seem a fair bit more globally pervasive and easy to fall into "by accident".

I'm assuming we're talking NGOs here, because if we expand "organization" to include for-profit entities, then I'd argue vast majority of them will not just be US-English speaking, but US-originating and US-headquatered.

> Without such a conscious choice, yes, Americanisms do seem a fair bit more globally pervasive and easy to fall into "by accident".

You'd need choice and enforcement - unless such organization is testing for Received Pronunciation during interviews and filtering out people who cannot into Queen's English[0], I'd wager most of the members in such org, who don't come from UK (or a few related countries), will be speaking "British English" with distinctly US pronunciation. Because while an organization can make a conscious choice here, for most people, learning a second language is a long-term endeavor that largely happens "in the background", and it's very easy to learn a blend, with UK English being present in schools, and US English everywhere else.

[0] - Or is it King's English now?

Coming from the horse's mouth, my expectation is that GP works at some kind of (non-military?) treaty organization? ime while outsiders might include NGOs under the umbrella, the kind of people who work at the "international level" tend to uhhh, care about their taxonomy. Multinational corporations are almost never lumped together with these (and generally don't really care about international cooperation as a goal, except instrumentally), outside the barest sense of "yeah, I guess they're organizations and they work internationally".

Majority counting by combined headcount of the organisation type maybe, but almost all multinationals are very big companies so by the law of "you get fewer number of pieces if each piece is large" there just aren't very many of them.

My experience with a large multi-thousand Eng department where the majority are in the US or UK: US-based or influenced employees will write usually with American English spellings and continue to do so even if based in the UK. UK-based or influenced employees will write with British English spellings and continue to do so if based in the US. No one conforms to the other and everyone can understand each other perfectly fine because the spelling of these words does not matter for comprehension. This applies to writing as well as words in code or API names.

This feels wrong, I work in China in a European multinational with low number of Americans, yet we all spell in a mixture with no expectation of consistency: half the sentence can be in British, the rest in American and it will be an Australian reading the email and they will feel absolutely nothing: multi national corporations full of non-native speakers are completely used to the confusion. I'm French myself, I write color as often as I write colour, and practice and practise are completely identical to me.

Not sure what is international level? If it's a kind of supranational organizations which mandate a particular version of English, I'm ready to believe that in EU it's UK En. But for commercial companies my experience is exactly opposite: it's mostly US En unless you're communicating with Brits, or someone from a country which inherited British education.

This is my approach/experience as well, hence my comment and question to the previous poster.

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