[Laura Knotek]

I was just looking up some of my settings in Options. I went to Language and saw that I could have a choice of English (United States) or English. What is the difference? If I changed my setting to English, would it be UK English?

[Reed McLay]

That is a good question. I am Canadian, we are taught the UK version of English.

The most obvious difference is the way UK and USA English handle the soft vowel U.

Colour/Color, Labour/Labor, Valour/Valor are a couple examples.

When I have UK English selected as my input language, the USA spelling is caught. When I have USA English selected, the UK spelling is flagged.

[Laura Knotek]

That is a good question. I am Canadian, we are taught the UK version of English.

The most obvious difference is the way UK and USA English handle the soft vowel U.

Colour/Color, Labour/Labor, Valour/Valor are a couple examples.

When I have UK English selected as my input language, the USA spelling is caught. When I have USA English selected, the UK spelling is flagged.

I am aware of the differences. I have actually changed my language on Word to English UK and typed letters just to mess with people, so they thought I was British.

Under language on my Blackberry, I see 2 choices "English (United States)" and "English." The one just says "English," but does not specify a country. Would it be UK English?

Here is a screenshot of what I have.

[Reed McLay]

I am aware of the differences. I have actually changed my language on Word to English UK and typed letters just to mess with people, so they thought I was British.

Under language on my Blackberry, I see 2 choices "English (United States)" and "English." The one just says "English," but does not specify a country. Would it be UK English?

Research in Motion is a Canadian company with mostly Canadian educated employees doing the software development.

To us, it is English.

[jeffh]

It doesn't appear to be UK English. I changed English (United States) to English and tried Reed's test with "behaviour" and "memoury" and both were changed to the US spelling when I ran the spell checker. I also tried "colour" and "valour" and they were changed to the US spellings as well.

[Laura Knotek]

Interesting. I wonder what dialect "English" is.

[Reed McLay]

Over the past 400 years, the form of the language used in the Americas—especially in the United States—and that used in the United Kingdom and the British Islands have diverged in many ways, leading to the dialects now commonly referred to as American English and British English. Differences between the two include pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary (lexis), spelling, punctuation, idioms, formatting of dates and numbers, and so on, although the differences in written and most spoken grammar structure tend to be much more minor than those of other aspects of the language in terms of mutual intelligibility. A small number of words have completely different meanings between the two dialects or are even unknown or not used in one of the dialects. One particular contribution towards formalizing these differences came from Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary (published 1828) with the intention of showing that people in the United States spoke a different dialect from Britain.

This divergence between American English and British English once caused George Bernard Shaw to say that the United States and United Kingdom are "two countries divided by a common language";
...

We can thank Noah Webster and his 1828 dictionary for the confusion.

[Laura Knotek]

I just plugged my Blackberry in and opened Desktop Manager. I then opened Application Loader. I have English UK checked as being installed under Language and Input Support.

I also noticed on my Blackberry Options that I could change my input language from English (United States) to English (UK). So it looks like I would have to change the input language on the Blackberry to get the spell checker to recognize UK spellings.