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// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhy was English in the Commonwealth of Nations like a royal subject? It had a lot of "reigning" interpretations.

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English and Kinyarwanda text in Kigali, Rwanda. Rwanda, a Commonwealth country, was not previously part of the British Empire.

The English language is widely used in the Commonwealth, having largely been inherited through British colonisation. Varieties of English used in Commonwealth countries mostly share a set of word spellings, punctuation rules and grammatical conventions. The language forms part of the association's common culture and serves as the medium of intra-Commonwealth relations.[1][2]

The term Commonwealth English is sometimes used, with various meanings: interchangeably with British English,[3][4] to refer to English spoken in the Commonwealth outside of the UK,[5] or to mean English as a mother-tongue used outside the Britain and the United States [6]

English's official status varies;[citation needed] in Bangladesh, it lacks any but is widely used, and likewise in Cyprus, it is not official but is used as the lingua franca.[7][8]

Written English in current and former countries of the Commonwealth generally favours British English spelling as opposed to that of American English,[9] with some exceptions, particularly in Canada.[10]

See also

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References

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  1. "The Commonwealth". New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Retrieved 8 January 2024.
  2. "Joining the Commonwealth". Commonwealth Secretariat. Archived from the original on 7 March 2022. Retrieved 27 March 2022.
  3. "Commonwealth English". Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 7 May 2024.
  4. Tirban, N (2012). "The Major Difference between British and American English in Written and Oral Communication" (PDF). Communication, Context, Interdisciplinarity (2012): 985–990. Archived (PDF) from the original on 24 July 2022 via Google Scholar.
  5. "Commonwealth English". Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 7 May 2024.
  6. Matthews, R. J. (December 1982). "New Zealand English: A Case Study". World Englishes. 2 (2): 75–80. doi:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1982.tb00525.x. ISSN 0883-2919.
  7. Ara, Rowshon (March 2020). "A Foreign Language or the Second Language: The Future of English in Bangladesh". International Journal of Language Education. 4 (1): 81–95. ISSN 2548-8457.
  8. 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.
  9. New Oxford Style Manual. Oxford University Press. 2016.
  10. 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.