International English

by Karel Thönissen

It is a problem for all non-native speakers, and many of the native speakers too: how to spell words correctly without mixing up British English and American English? If you are either American or English this is less of a problem, because you probably have been submerged in a language with consistent spelling your entire life. However, for foreigners this is almost impossible without a dictionary, even when they speak English excellently. Still the question remains whether to use British or American English.

I have come up with a different solution that I call International English. The solution to this problem is simple and requires no dictionary at all. If there are several possible ways to spell a word, prefer the shorter word. If alternatives have the same length, use the one that comes alphabetically first. We use this in all cases when there are different alternatives, not just when Br.E. and Am.E. differ.

Sure, this approach blends Am.E. with Br.E., but is does so consistently and the approach is easily taught to and applied by a group of programmers. It virtually guarantees that everybody in a development team uses the same spelling for the identifiers and documentation, so that full text retrieval and programming is much simpler. Together with other intelligent style conventions, this approach makes it possible to guess correctly how services have been called in the software written by others in the team without the immediate need to inspect the interface for the code.

For the lovers of pure Br.E. or pure Am.E.: get used to the idea that most users of English are non-native speakers who will transform the language in ways much more radical than what we do here. I guess this is the price that English has to pay for becoming the standard in communication. Note, that I am not proposing words that are new to either language.

Not only do we use a different spelling, we also deviate from British and American practice in several other areas. Firstly, we always use the metric system. For everything. It is the simplest system and the most widely used system worldwide: there is only one country that still uses the avoirdupois system, i.e. the USA. Even the Brits have given up the imperial system.

Secondly, we always use the 24-hour clock. The 12-hour clock as used in the English-speaking world is so irregular that even a large minority of the native speakers cannot use it correctly. Is noon referred to as 12:00PM or 12:00AM? Better tutorials advise to do neither and advice to use 'noon' instead. The same thing goes for 'midnight'. So there goes your nicely laid-out computer output. Another problem are the periods between 12:00 and 1:00, whether these are am or pm. Ten minutes after midnight, is that 12:10pm or 12:10am? It is 12:10am, because it is in the first half of the day. However, it uses the hour designator from the second half of the previous day. Now explain that. A 24-hour clock that runs from 00:00 to 23:59 solves all these problems nicely.

Thirdly, we write dates using the yyyy-mm-dd format or something compatible. This is the only format that sorts correctly without special interventions. This is the ISO-standard. We always use an 8 digit notation, including leading zeroes for the month of the year and the day of the month. Particularly nasty is the American notation: not only it does not sort well, it is also highly ambiguous in the context of certain other languages. I always use the yyyy.mm.dd notation. It solves the sorting problem and it cannot be mistaken for two subtractions or divisions.

Finally, we use a decimal point. Half the world uses the decimal comma, but that stance can no longer be held in the context of programming. In almost all programming languages I know off, parameters are separated by commas. This is even natural to all the natural languages that use decimal commas. However, the use of the comma as a thousands separator as done in English is highly confusing for people used to decimal commas. An example will explain this:

1.5

• one and a half in English
• no interpretation in languages with a decimal comma

2,000

• two thousand in English
• two with four digits of precision in languages with a decimal commas

To avoid this ambiguity, I propose to use the decimal period and the underscore as thousands separator. This allows numbers such as:

• 1.5
• 2_000
• 1_000_000
• 1_234.56

Although the International English that I propose is native to no one, it is simpler and less confusing than normal British English or American English. Using International English helps to reduce the number of errors and the time needed to write something that is clear. It does not replace good writing skills or language proficiency, but our experience is that it helps.