The InterDependent

Though the United Nations calls New York its home, the international body will not sound too American anytime soon.

The UN recently announced that all its written documents must follow the British rules of grammar and spelling, as opposed to those used in the United States.

Acting rather belatedly on a directive issued by the UN Secretariat in 2005, the memo outlined that all documents will use the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, favoring the more globally spoken British English as its default language.

The directive, first reported on Samir Sanbar’s UN Forum blog, urges British spellings over American; for instance, the word “programme” over “program.” Dates are also to be written by day-month-year sequence instead of the American version, placing the month first.

“Through this memo, we seek to organize our language more simply, to clarify things in our system,” Choi Soung-ah, an associate spokeswoman for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the UN, said. “Because of our diverse staff, this was necessary."

Chris Miles

The UN mandated the use of British English over American English.

Since the founding of the UN in 1945, British English has been standard, one of the two principal working languages along with French. (Additional official languages are Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish.) The UN and most of its member countries also use the metric system of measurement, unlike the US.

“For no other reason but historical reasons has British English been favored over American English,” Dr. Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville, said in an e-mail to UNA-USA. “British English is often regarded as the proper language.”

As the UN has evolved, American English spellings have intermingled in UN dispatches, creating grammatical irregularities. The editorial directive put out by the Secretariat upholds one standard over another to smooth these issues out, Choi said.

“It's not a new change at all -- a reinforcement maybe," said Ahmad Kamal, a former ambassador of Pakistan to the UN and a senior fellow at the UN Institute of Training and Research.

Promoting the international style of dates helps the UN’s multiethnic staff.

“All of us get so totally confused with American dates,” Kamal said. “That is not how the rest of the world does it.”

Apart from uniformity in writing and dates, the UN also seeks to make its grammar more easily understood by a wider international audience, one that has come in contact more with the British version than the American brand.

“These are the traditional forms of English most foreigners are used to," Kamal said.

“India, Pakistan, China and the Middle East all use British English,” Choi said. “Because of their colonial legacy, British English is very international, more accepted."

That does not mean that the UN’s push toward standardization suggests that it favors one nation over another but that streamlining spellings and grammar make it better understood, Choi added.

Nevertheless, Stephen Schlesinger, who documented the birth of the UN in his book “Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations,” said in an e-mail message that he believed the directive is meant to ensure that American culture does not infiltrate the UN anymore than it has.

“I am surmising that what prompted the UN's memo about ‘reinforcing’ the use of British English is that, as Americans tend to dominate the UN in all of its facets because of its outsized influence as the only superpower on the planet, the UN's largest donor, its most powerful military member, and one of the dominant media states in the organization, they affect the English used at the UN,” Schlesinger wrote.

Soldat-Jaffe of the University of Louisville said that from a cultural standpoint, promoting one standard over another can indeed be perceived as a slight.

“(It) is a form of language planning usually trying to increase the status of one language by decreasing the status of other language forms,” she said

Using both languages in tandem for specific issues may be a more innovative approach, Schlesinger said.

“Maybe on official titles, the UN should stick with British English -- but, given the dynamism of the language, I would recommend that the UN be more flexible in the regular texts of its documents as to which English it employs,” he wrote.

Kamal agreed with the practice of promoting British English as a more universally understood English, but said that he thought that US English may be better because of its flexibility in the long-term, especially when it comes to technical or specialty terms like “e-mail,” “upload,” “Tweet” or “pop star.”

“American English has grown because it is living – it incorporates more words and is malleable,” Kamal said. “British English, on the other hand, is static and doesn't change.”

Kamal said that the UN generally considers American English to be more attuned with technological jargon. But he stressed that the UN doesn’t consider one variation of English to be better.

"Nobody is trying to proceed against American English at the UN," Kamal said.