English in the Commonwealth of Nations

Current Commonwealth members (dark blue), former members (orange), and British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies (light blue)
English and Kinyarwanda text in Kigali, Rwanda. Rwanda, a Commonwealth country, was never associated with the British Empire.

The use of the English language in current and former Commonwealth countries was largely inherited from British colonisation, with some exceptions. English serves as the medium of inter-Commonwealth relations and the language forms part of the common culture of the Commonwealth.[1][2]

Commonwealth English refers to English as practised in the Commonwealth; the term is most often interchangeable with British English, but is also used to distinguish between British English and that in the rest of the Commonwealth.[3] English in the Commonwealth is diverse, and many regions have developed their own local varieties of the language. In Cyprus, it does not have official status but is widely used as a lingua franca.[4] English is spoken as a first or second language in most of the Commonwealth.

Written English in the current and former Commonwealth generally favours British English spelling as opposed to American English,[5] with some exceptions, particularly in Canada, where there are strong influences from neighbouring American English.[6] Few Commonwealth countries besides Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom have produced their own English dictionaries and style guides, and may rely on those produced in other countries.

  1. ^ "Joining the Commonwealth". Commonwealth. Archived from the original on 7 March 2022. Retrieved 27 March 2022.
  2. ^ "The Commonwealth". New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Retrieved 8 January 2024.
  3. ^ "Commonwealth English". Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 7 May 2024.
  4. ^ Ammon, Ulrich; Dittmar, Norbert; Mattheier, Klaus J.; Trudgill, Peter, eds. (2006). "Greece and Cyprus". Sociolinguistics: an international handbook of the science of language and society / Soziolinguistik: ein internationales Handbuch zur Wissenschaft von Sprache und Gesellschaft. Handbooks of linguistics and communication science / Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft. Vol. 3 (2nd ed.). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. p. 1888. ISBN 9783110184181.
  5. ^ New Oxford Style Manual. Oxford University Press. 2016.
  6. ^ Boberg, Charles (2004) Standard Canadian English Archived 11 April 2023 at the Wayback Machine." In Raymond Hickey. Standards of English: Codified Varieties Around the World. Cambridge University Press. p. 159.