Isn't Canada just America North? I don't think there are different versions for Canada -- I always assumed they got the US version. I don't think they have different spellings (or do they?) Most US versions of books have the prices in both US and Canadian dollars, so that's why I assume US and Canada are one market. (Although I know amazon has a Canadian site, I assume for currency and probably tax/business entity reasons.)
@chicagoliz That makes sense. I'm kind of looking forward to the day when we'll have Amazon in Sweden. That would be exciting.
No. Canadian English tends to follow UK spelling for the most part, but it also follows US English for some words. There are also some French influences, but those are pretty isolated, and are generally words not found in US or UK English.
I'd write the body in British and the dialogue in American. In the same way y'all'd use increct spellin' tuh indercate uh accent. God but that was difficult to write. :-(
I'd pick one and stick with it. Readers will get used to one or the other, but to use both will constantly distract them. (I also hate the use of phonetic spelling to indicate accents. I get used to it, and it is an acceptable convention, though. But I've never seen homophonic spelling used to differentiate nationalities of characters.)
I enjoy how well it worked in the Harry Potter novels. The sound of Ron talking with food in his mouth. The piker sort of accent of the lower class Death Eaters. ...Hagrid. And if you watch Discovery Channel, you can see how often they need to use subtitles for the Americans that are on the show. Half of the characters on the Alligator/Swamp/Gold [anything] shows get subtitles and I think they would come across well, in a book, being written as they sound, in the style of Huck Finn or E.A. Poe's "The Gold Bug".
If I were you and used to writing in BrE, I think I'd stick to BrE. If you feel comfortable with both, I'd use AmE... I guess it'd just look more fitting if the setting is in America, the characters are American etc.
As many people have said - write for your audience, write for authenticity and, in a perfect world, do both.
Another necro-thread! In case anyone is still wondering about all this, my experience supports the "write for the market" approach: I'm Canadian but sell to the US market. I us US spellings, even in books set in Canada, because that's what my publishers expect and I don't want to go back and change it all during edits. The British publishing world is bigger than the Canadian one, so possibly you're planning to publish through it, in which case you should use British spellings.
This is the problem I have when reading British English. The spelling differences are so insignificant for the most part that it doesn't even slow me down when reading. However, when I run into a "British" word sometimes I have to re-read the sentence(s) several times to decipher the meaning or do a quick google search.
That's a very sensible solution. I've had a couple of betas catch similar mistakes in mine. I'm a born American, who lived her first 37 years of life in the USA, and the last 28 in Scotland. Although my story is set in the USA, I've discovered a few Scottishisms have sneaked in over the years. I'm always grateful when somebody points them out. As to the spelling issue ...aargh. I'm now so betwixt and between, I often have to check my spelling to make sure it's consistent with whichever side of the Pond I'm writing in. It is tricky, though. I know I would never write a book from the POV of a Scottish person, even though I've lived here a long time. It just feels wrong, and feels as if I'd need to know more than I do. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, only that I just wouldn't do it. As for the James Kelman example - what would James Kelman do if he decided to write a book about the experiences of a young person going to high school in the USA, or an older person living on the streets in the USA? It would be easy if this POV character came from Glasgow ...but if the POV character had never been to Glasgow and was actually American? Surely Kelman wouldn't use a Glasgow vernacular to write the story then, would he? I don't think the issue the OP presented has anything to do with learning other dialects and words. The OP was concerned about how to portray another country or culture accurately enough—accurately enough to create a POV character from that place. I don't think that's very easy, actually.
