I’m a bit lost here. Should I use british conventions? US conventions? Is there indian conventions? Or maybe cultural points I should be aware of?
Google is confusing me more than it is helping me?
Thanks.
Largely it’s going to depend on who your audience is. If you’re writing for an American audience, use American conventions. British audience, British conventions.
Things to be aware of:
Date formats:
US: 5/6/2024
British/India/Australia: 6/5/2024
Currency formats:
US: $1,234.56
Europe reverses that, so €1.234,56
https://www.ricksteves.com/travel-tips/trip-planning/european-numbers
India: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
That’s above and beyond things like Metric conversion which the US largely does not use except in soda bottles. 1, 2 and 3 liter bottles.
Spelling:
In the US, it’s “color”, in the UK it’s “colour”. There are LOTS of examples like this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences
As an American, I flip-flop (unintentionally) between British and American spellings on a number of words.
Unless OP is writing for a published doc, I don’t really think it matters all that much.
I’ve worked with Brits - English, Scot, Irish (and many Indians), and while they may write or pronounce things slightly differently than I’m used to, we understand each other just fine. I even appreciate hearing their construction and phrasing.
Avoid confusion in dates by saying May 6, 2024. This is the Canadian way because we had dd/mm/yy, but American influence of mm/dd/yy led to mass confusion. Everyone switched to May 6 to avoid it all.
There’s also ISO 8601, which does YYYY-MM-DD, though that doesn’t permit for writing out the date as a name or not specifying the year (the latter of which…might be a plus, I suppose). That’s internationally unambiguous. Anything of the format NNNN-NN-NN is YYYY-MM-DD everywhere.
I also like it because unlike either DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY, the numeric and lexicographic sort order is the same.
EDIT: Well, okay. I guess that that’s not true for years prior to “0001” or years after “9999”. In the former case, though, we rarely know precise dates enough to be using dates anyway, and in the latter case…well, eight millennia down the road, if we’re still around and using Arabic numerals and dating things off the approximate birth of Christ, I imagine that we’ll just upgrade to YYYYY-MM-DD.
Oh we’ve canadianized this too. We have yy-mm-dd. The two digit year makes it really fun. Pretty sure I’ve seen yy/mm/dd too. And we have yy-mm-dd where the mm is a two letter abbreviation with MA and I have to look it up each time if it’s March or May. We also have yy-mmm-dd with the more common letter abbreviations. Those are all government abominations of ISO.
But then there’s also the European standard of “6 May 2024”. ;)
Are you serious? It’s spelt out. The other one you can confuse day and month.
US: $1,234.56
Europe reverses that, so €1.234,56
Some of Europe does – but the UK doesn’t, and Ireland doesn’t.
Also, looks like India uses a period as the decimal separator, the way the US does.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DecimalSeparator.svg
On the same note, a number of countries put the currency symbol at the end of a currency amount (postfix) rather than the beginning (prefix).
It looks like all of the UK, India, and the US use a prefix currency symbol (e.g. $100, £100, ₹100).
India starts getting odd with large amounts though which is why I linked to the Wiki, I can’t wrap my brain around how it works.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
“The terms lakh or 1,00,000 (one hundred thousand, written as 100,000 outside the Indian subcontinent) and crore or 1,00,00,000[1] (ten million, written as 10,000,000 outside the subcontinent) are the most commonly used terms in Indian English to express large numbers in the system.”
Soo…
"lakh: 150,000 rupees in India is referred to as “1.5 lakh rupees”, which is written as 1,50,000 rupees;
crore: 30,000,000 (thirty million) rupees is referred to as “3 crore rupees”, which is written as 3,00,00,000 rupees with commas at the thousand, lakh, and crore places."
I guess if you grew up with it, it makes perfect sense.
