Hello.
Thank you very much for your software, it helps me a lot. I am not a native speaker and I haven’t had practice in English for two years, but now I’m trying to recover my English.
I write in several languages (in Ukrainian, Russian, Spanish, Esperanto and English), and I prefer to write in English with British spelling. But when I enable the option of language auto-detection I have a problem: LanguageTool is sure that I’m writing in English (US) and show that words like “colour” or “organisation” are mistakes.
I think, it would be perfect to have the language auto-detection, but I want to see in my computer British English as auto-detected. How can I configure the LanguageTool Firefox extension for this?
I think so, too; although I’m the creator of this topic.
One thing that could help is to find the information which variant of English is more used by bilingual people. One-lingual people can easily change settings one time, and bilingual or multilingual people need the autoselection. I think that the British English is more common among multilingual people: first, the British variant of spelling is the standard for studying in all the world; second, there are countries like Cameroon where the majority of people speak two languages, and one of them is British English (there are no territories with American English in the same situation, maybe except Puerto Rico).
So, I’d prefer to see the possibility to choose the variant of English manually staying with autoselection. I mean, the system can understand if you write in Spanish, French or English, but the variants of each language should be configurable. But if it is not possible to make it, I think the British variant is a little bit more preferable.
Well, I’ll tell a little bit in order to defend British English as the default choice.
First of all I need to mention that we should think about the people who use two and more languages in their day-to-day life; because one-language people can easily change the configuration, while bilingual and multilingual people need the auto-detection. So, there are my reasons:
British spelling is used by all the English-speaking countries except USA (or at least they used the spelling that is much closer to the British than to the American);
There are a lot of countries and territories where the majority of people use two languages, and one of them is British English (for example, Quebec, Cameroon, Singapore, and many others); we have only one territory with this situation where the American dialect is used (Puerto Rico);
It seems that much more British people learn and use other languages than in the USA, because they live very close to other European countries and really need it (maybe, I’m wrong; it’s just my experience of speaking with people from the US and GB);
In all the World people normally learn a British variant of English as the foreign language.
So, I think there are much more people who need auto-detection and British English than who need auto-detection and American one. So, the default variant should be British.