Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.
Theme Switcher:

This blog is written in en-GB

· 75 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~24,703 times

Someone left a comment on my blog recently asking if I'd mind making my language more inclusive. They didn't get some of the cultural references I'd used and suggested it would be easier if I used tropes which were more globally known.

Here's the thing. No.

All my blog posts start with a simple declaration:

 HTML<!doctype html>
<html lang=en-GB>

There's a reason for that. It is more than the language I speak; it is the culture I live in, the way that I think, and the accent I use.

When your AI bot reads this text aloud, it should do so with a British accent0. That's how I speak. It is OK to hear a slightly unfamiliar accent. You'll be able to figure out what I'm saying. Your world won't collapse if I don't start each sentence with "Howdy, y'all!"

But what should you do if you come across a concept you don't understand?

When The Wicked Witch of the TERFs released the first Harry Potter book "Philosopher's Stone", it was published in the USA with a different title; "Sorcerer's Stone". There were also a dozen other language changes - which caused great consternation in the fandom.

What do you think happens if Skip or Madison come across a kid eating "a sherbet lemon" or a description of Hermione's "fringe" or discover Harry wearing a jumper? Will their little minds collapse under the knowledge that people far away use different words?

No. And neither will you.

It is OK if things are unfamiliar to you.

Up until my mid-twenties, I had never seen or eaten a Twinkie. They were a cultural lodestone in a hundred books and films, but not the sort of thing I could buy locally. So I used my context clues. They seemed like an unappealing foodstuff which, nevertheless, were inexplicably popular.

As a kid, I could recite all the lyrics to Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby without getting half the references. The brain is malleable and can fit in new concepts with relative ease.

So if you see a reference to Count Duckula, or hear me exclaim "Accrington Stanley!", or even blush as I describe an utter wanker - please take it as a sign that the hegemony is not universal and some people exist in a cultural milieu different to your own.

And breathe. It'll be OK.

  1. OK, accents are a whole can of worms. Regional English is varied. There are a variety of countries within the UK which each have their own forms of pronunciation. I'm not sure if there are any BCP-style tags for intra-country accents. ↩︎

Share this post on…

75 thoughts on “This blog is written in en-GB”

  7. @Edent I always enjoy reading/listening to non-US English speakers. Possibly a result of reading LotR too much as a kid (consistently have to remember to spell gray as an American not as a fan of Gandalf the Grey). Accents are fun, especially mixed. Favorite so far: Aussie-RP from a guy who taught ESL to aboriginals. I can pick him out in a crowded conference lobby every time.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on ruby.social

  9. What a very strange and self centred thing for someone to ask you to do with your personal blog. They should have their nipple nuts spun and be sent to Alaska for even suggesting such a thing.

    Reply

  11. @Edent Love this!

    I think we native English speakers (especially Americans like me) don't celebrate the variations of our language enough.

    In America alone, there's so many different kinds of English!

    And then beyond the Anglosphere, there's a whole constellation of different people and cultures that speak English that we don't recognize, but who have just as much claim to the language as we do.

    I wanna see blogs in en-BZ (Belize), en-GH (Ghana), and en-MY (Malaysia) too!

    Reply | Reply to original comment on jawns.club

    1. @saruwine @blog sure, one is puzzled. But if only used once (which means it's probably not essential in the wider context) I wouldn't look it up - that'd interrupt the flow of interpretation of the wider text.

      If an unknown word keeps popping up its context will provide some sort of working definition ("twinkie" in the blogpost, as an example). That's how all of us learn new words.

      Being aware of the country/cultural context of the author of a text may be helpful in some circumstances. As a non-native English speaker who reads texts in all sorts of englishes (probably not a dictionary word, but you still know what I mean) and other languages, encountering unfamiliar words, jargon, or cultural specific references is the name of the game. Vive la differance.

      Reply | Reply to original comment on c.im

  13. @Edent As a German living in France and writing (somehow en-GB) #English as a foreign language, I like your answer!

    In times of #LLMSlop, we need even more human #writing embedded in different cultures, experiences, and history. This is what I like: With all these different shades of "English-whatever" we can learn more about the fascinating #diversity of our world!

    #languages #languageLearning

    diversityenglishlanguagelearninglanguagesllmslopwriting

    Reply | Reply to original comment on mastodon.online

  21. One surprise I had when living in the US as an Englishman is discovering that in many cases in the US the responsibility of understanding in conversation is felt by the speaker rather than the listener.

    I would be (politely) blamed for not being understood, as if the plain US accent had some form of moral authority of correctness. Even from people who were seemingly well-intentioned.

    Personally I strongly dislike when non-US Anglophones speak in a lowest common denominator way, as I find it constrains much of the fun of the English language.

    Reply

    1. I appreciate you explaining your point of view on this; it's illuminating. Given that you mention accent and listeners, I presume you're discussing oral conversation, rather than written (which is what our host's original post was about).

      In terms of relative status/power between/among people in an oral conversation, in the English-speaking cultures I've experienced, the person who makes more communications effort to be understood is lower-status. It is higher-status to be cryptic, to dismiss others' difficulties understanding, etc. This all goes along with the general observation that it is lower-status to be more considerate of the other person's needs than they reciprocate.

      If it's part of English culture to assume that it's more the listener's responsibility to make sense of a speaker's speech (compared to the balance of responsibility in US culture), that helps me make sense of some ways English people have acted in conversations that went awry, and ways that dynamic interplays with the status stuff.

      Reply

  23. Outstanding. I'm from the southern US, and I deal with the same thing. Your position is great: If you find yourself in unfamiliar territory, that doesn't automatically make it bad, it's just unfamiliar. The world does not have to adjust to you, you must adjust to the world, or don't - it doesn't matter, but don't expect others to change just because you feel uncomfortable.

    Reply

  24. Twinkie’s were such a disappointment when I eventually got to try one 😔

    Great post! I intend to sprinkle in some minimal Swedish with mine, a lil “Fika” here, a lil “Hej” there. I fully expect some references won’t make sense to all, but part of the joy of being online is learning new stuff IMO.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on bsky.app

  26. I LIKE when a blog uses cultural references that are new to me. I can either learn them from context or look them up. I LEARN and that's that's important to me.

    Reply

  27. As an American who immigrated to Canada, I am now totally adrift when it comes to spelling words like favo(u)rite, colo(u)r, etc. It's a coin-flip which one I actually use.

    But don't even get me started on maneuver... I don't think I'll ever switch for that one.

    Reply

  31. What you are doing is in fact more inclusive. It pushes people to adjust to the nuances of other cultures.

    Reply

  33. @Edent honestly, the world would be an incredibly boring place if we homogenized culture for the sake of "inclusiveness".

    Some things just aren't for me, some things just aren't for you.

    As a straight, white man should certain groups or cultures change just so I can be included more readily? Of course not, that would be insane.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on mastodon.social

  35. Having lived in four different countries with very different cultural references (Canada vs Australia or Quebec (family) vs France or England (more family) vs Canada, Quebec vs Switzerland) the whole collection of slang, accents, and TV / movie / cultural references, "frack" you'd think I was eating prawn pizza with maple syrup. Point being, my life experience is a huge mix of cultures and I would never trade that in for uniformity - especially for the tossers in Canada's southern provinces.

    I think your position is the correct and "write" one 😉 Just tell them to bugger off.

    Reply

  37. I think everyone worldwide should refer to their national government agencies and systems as the IRS, the DMV and Medicare for example, so it's clear what they are talking about.

    Greetings,

    A citizen of The Netherlands, part of the United States of Europe

    Reply

  41. @blog
    Re #BCP47 language tags for accents: the IANA language subtag registry https://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-registry defines only a very few variant subtags for such, look for "Prefix: en" entries, for example "Subtag: scouse" that is "English Liverpudlian dialect known as 'Scouse'", so that would be en-GB-scouse. One can however make up any private-use subtag like "x-yorkshir" to be used as in en-GB-x-yorkshir, but that is limited to a closed system, for data exchange/publishing only valid if all parties involved explicitly agree on it.

    More complicated, there may or may not be a valid Unicode BCP 47 U Extension https://unicode.org/reports/tr35/#unicode-bcp-47-u-extension like in "en-u-sd-gb..."

    Btw, I like the "English (Traditional)" and "English (Simplified)" pun 😉

    Reply | Reply to original comment on social.tchncs.de

  44. Almost totally agree with you. One of the (few) advantages of being an Australian is being able to understand both American and British references in almost all contexts. The only time and place where that failed me miserably was in trying (and I do mean trying) to understand and converse with a bloke from Yorkshire whilst in Canada. The accent was so unfamiliar and thick to me that I could understand maybe 10% of what he was saying.

    Reply

  47. Thank you for this article. I feel I've been noticing this, and that it has begun to hasten of late. I'm glad to see someone else talking about it. For example, as part of spell checking been getting markedly worse, it seems to be trying to almost "regress things to the mean" of en-US.

    The thing that recently had me (perhaps overly) incensed was YouTube. Videos that were clearly Brits talking to Brits getting labelled as follows.

    An image of youtube's audio track settings. The language is marked as follows: English (US) original

    I'm not sure if there is a correct term for this phenomenon, but it is at the very least overlooking non-American English(es)

    Reply

  51. Yeah, the general BCP language tags are generally "[language] as used in [region]", where region is only specified to the national level or un statistical supranational level (i.e. "south america"). It also doesn't encode accents, where the written forms are identical.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on bsky.app

  53. Extension U allows you to specify attributes from Unicode Locale (CLDR), including subnational regions, e.g. gsw-u-sd-chzh represents Swiss German as used in the Canton of Zurich. I probably wouldn't use in production as I don't know what kind of support it has and I wouldn't want to break things.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on bsky.app

  54. I get the "Count Duckula" reference cos that cartoon was shown here (🇵🇰 Pakistan) in the 90s as well as Rainbow, Rent-a-Ghost and Mind your Langauge, Bananman and Danger Mouse, Fantom Cat and when it comes to spellings we still use all the British spellings even though it is causing quite a number of issues with the younger lot as most of the internet is filled with American English !

    Reply

  56. [ja_DE] 問題は、あなたが誰に向けて書いているのか、ということです。自分自身のためなのか、それとも読者のためなのか。前者なら、もちろん好きなだけフィードバックを無視すればいいでしょう。でも後者なら、ところどころ説明を加えたところで、あなたの精神が崩壊するわけではありません。ましてや、あなたが伝えようとしている相手がそれを求めているのならなおさらです。

    Reply

  57. @blog localizing is perfectly valid. I live in a much larger (and mostly #English speaking) country 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦 and there are terms used in every part of it that are complete mysteries to English speakers in other parts thereof.

    You can decide to make your #language more inclusive or not and simply leave it at that. But your argument for not doing so is pretty sad. Just say no and don't do it. That would be fine.

    See also https://youtu.be/jI2GVcjXXI8 which is about where I'm from.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on floss.social

  62. This post reminds me that I was once asked to speak more inclusively; apparently my speech was sufficiently far from "international English" that I must surely have been choosing obscure words and figures of speech on purpose, to sound clever or confuse others. I was merely speaking British English with my native accent, which I thought appropriate given that both I and the foreign colleague who disapproved of my manner of speech were working in England for an English institution at the time.

    Reply

  64. Terence Eden’s blog is (like mine!) unapologetically in en-GB. But maybe his particular cultural references need to be slightly more-specific still?

    Reply

Trackbacks, Pingbacks, and Boosts

  2. Nice post by Terence Eden about being asked to tone down his cultural references.

    When I write for @lwn I try to use language (or am asked to by the other editors...) that's more universal, and that's fair -- we have subscribers from around the world, and they're there primarily for the information we convey. Using obscure cultural references can get in the way of doing our primary function, so sometimes a turn of phrase I like goes in the bin anyway.

    I've heard that some folks complain about The Register's extensive use of Britishisms -- to me, that's part of the publication's charms, such as they are.

    But personal blogs are not obligated to cater to anybody but the blogger. It'd be one thing for a reader to say, "Hey, uh, your blog totally breaks my screen reader; could you fix that?" That's fair. I wouldn't want my blog to be non-accessible. But, "please erase your voice from this writing"? What a terrible request to make, to ask someone to write in a way that doesn't let them express themselves fully.

    There was a blog posted to Lobste.rs recently that the readers were complaining that the blogger criticized a project too much, and too harshly. Not wrongly, just too harshly--and the complainer said the blogger didn't have *the right* to do so. That's bogus.

    FWIW I'm glad I was exposed to a lot of British television, older TV shows, cartoons, and books as a kid that were laden with cultural references I didn't (at the time) get. Because if it piqued my interest enough, I went out of my way to learn about those things. Obscure cultural references are a potential doorway into understanding other people a bit better.

    And finding out when those references don't land is also a good learning opportunity, and when it's appropriate to dial them back. In a video call with some European colleagues, I responded to a question about our next meeting with "Same Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel!" That... did not make any sense at all to them. Broke the ice a bit, though.

    https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/this-blog-is-written-in-en-gb/

What are your reckons?

All comments are moderated and may not be published immediately. Your email address will not be published.

See allowed HTML elements: <a href="" title="">
<abbr title="">
<acronym title="">
<b>
<blockquote cite="">
<br>
<cite>
<code>
<del datetime="">
<em>
<i>
<img src="" alt="" title="" srcset="">
<p>
<pre>
<q cite="">
<s>
<strike>
<strong>

To respond on your own website, write a post which contains a link to this post - then enter the URl of your page here. Learn more about WebMentions.