Your spellchecker thinks your English is wrong. It isn’t.

Walk past enough shop fronts in any Indian city and a pattern emerges. “Fitness Center”. “Learning Center”. “Diagnostic Center”. The word appears everywhere, spelled the American way, on signs that in every other respect belong to a country with a long and unbroken tradition of British English. The spelling is not a stylistic choice. It is an error: one that was introduced not by any conscious decision, but by a default setting on a device.

The culprit is the locale. Specifically, “English (United States)”: the setting that governs spelling, date formats, paper sizes, currency symbols, and dozens of other conventions on virtually every device sold in India. It is a setting that most Indians have never changed, many have never heard of, and almost none chose deliberately. It was simply there when they turned their device on.

How “English (US)” became the world’s default

The dominance of American English as a software default is not accidental. It reflects the geography of the technology industry: the overwhelming majority of the world’s major operating systems, applications, and platforms were built in the United States, by American developers, for whom “English” means American English as a matter of course. The rest of the English-speaking world — which is to say, the vast majority of it — was treated as a set of edge cases to be accommodated later, if at all.

This framing inverts reality. The United States represents approximately 4% of the world’s population and roughly a quarter of its English speakers. Every other English-speaking country — the United Kingdom, India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and scores of others — uses some form of Commonwealth English as its standard. International standard bodies that govern scientific and technical language as well as other organizations, including the United Nations, the ISO, the BIPM, and even this website, use Oxford spelling as their norm. “English (US)” is, by any global measure, the minority variant.

The United States represents roughly a quarter of the world’s English speakers. Its spelling conventions are, by default, imposed on the remaining three-quarters.

Yet inertia is powerful. Because most software originates in the US, and because the infrastructure to localize that software for individual markets is expensive and often absent, “English (US)” ships as the default everywhere, including markets (like India) with no historical connection to American English whatsoever.

The Indian case

India’s relationship with English is distinctive. English arrived as a language of colonial administration, education, and law, and the English it brought was British. Generations of Indians learned to spell “colour”, “centre”, “organise” or “organize”, and “enrolment” as a matter of course. These spellings are not regional quirks; they are the standard, taught in every English-medium school in the country and reflected in every official Indian document.

The digitization of India accelerated dramatically from around 2009 onward, when affordable Android smartphones brought internet access to hundreds of millions of people for the first time. Android, built by an American company and defaulting to American English, became the primary computing device for most of India. With it came a spellchecker that had never heard of British English as a default, and which began, quietly and persistently, marking Indian spellings as errors.

The effect on real-world language has been measurable. Shop signs, business names, and increasingly even official documents now carry American spellings — not because anyone decided India should adopt American English, but because spellcheck said so and nobody pushed back. The Aadhaar programme, India’s national identity system, offers perhaps the most striking illustration: its enrolment centres are named “Aadhaar Enrolment Center” in many places around the country, a compound that manages to use British spelling for one word and American spelling for the next.

The dissonance is felt widely enough to have become comedic fodder. The popular comedian Kapil Sharma has observed in an episode of his show that he spent his school years learning to spell “colour”, only to emerge into a world where the word apparently no longer had a ‘u’ in it. The joke lands because the experience is universal. The spelling on the sign does not match the spelling in the textbook, and nobody has ever explained why.

A system designed to override your preferences

One might assume that changing a device’s language setting to “English (India)” or “English (United Kingdom)” would resolve the problem. In many cases, it does not. This is because several of the most widely used applications quietly ignore system locale settings and apply their own defaults.

Gboard, Google’s keyboard application and the default on the vast majority of Android devices worldwide, largely disregards the system locale when generating autocorrect suggestions. A phone set to “English (India)” or “English (UK)” will still be offered “center” and “color” as primary corrections because Gboard’s underlying suggestion engine defaults to American English regardless of what the system locale says.

Google Chrome, the world’s most widely used web browser, exhibits a similar pattern. Its “Enhanced spell check” feature — enabled by default — uses Google’s own spellcheck engine (the same one Google Search uses), which applies American English conventions irrespective of the browser’s configured locale. The “Basic spell check” option, which uses locale-appropriate dictionary files and behaves correctly, must be manually selected in settings. The option that respects the user’s language is buried; the option that overrides it is the default.

A note on labelling

Several major platforms (e.g., Twitter/X) label American English simply as “English” in their language settings, with other variants listed as “English (UK)”, “English (Australia)”, and so on. The implication — that American English is the unmarked, default form of the language — is without linguistic basis. It is a product decision, not a fact about the language.

The absent regulator

The appropriate response to this situation is not to expect individual users to navigate obscure settings menus; it is to require, at the point of sale, that devices and software sold in India default to conventions appropriate for India.

India has a standards body, the Bureau of Indian Standards, and multiple ministries with jurisdiction over technology and communications. Therefore, a straightforward mandate exists to be made: any device or software sold in India that offers a choice of English locale must default to “English (India)” where that locale exists, or to “English (UK)” where it does not. Crucially, that choice must function: not merely as a label applied over an American English engine, but as a genuine setting that governs spellcheck, autocorrect, and other language-sensitive features.

Such a mandate would not be unprecedented. It would be consistent with the approach taken by other large markets that have successfully resisted the wholesale adoption of American English conventions, such as the UK itself. It would also be consistent with what every Indian schoolchild is still taught: that “colour”, “centre”, and “enrolment” are the correct spellings, and that their devices should not be telling them otherwise. ∎

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