Canadian Culture and Orthographic Word Forms: A Survey of Cultural Identity and Spelling Preferences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unlike most English speech communities with well-established spelling standards, historically English-speaking Canada has been split between British and American standards (Gregg, 1989), or has in some cases combined the British and American spelling structures (Pratt, 1993). As any native speaker of Canadian English could attest, some American standard forms, such as jewelry or story, seem ready to replace their British counterparts in the Canadian spelling lexicon, along with much older cases such as curb or tire. On the other hand, some researchers (Heffernan, Borden, Erath and Yang, 2010; Lipski, 1973) have pointed out the hostility toward American spelling forms since historically anti-Americanism is present in the Canadian linguistic landscape (see Pratt, 1993). This paper reviews the spelling choices of 26 Saskatchewan university students with respect to a group of 25 words known to be spelt differently in British and American English. The results are then correlated with those from a survey on attitudes toward Canadian culture (see section 3.1.3) and with the results from a brief "regional spelling test" (see Appendix B). Two questions are explored. First, to what degree can a correlation be found between the participants' preferences for the British spelling standard and positive attitudes toward Canadian culture? Second, what relationship can be discovered between the participants’ spelling preferences and their knowledge of British and American spellings?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".