Why are there so many Canadians in India? (opens in new tab)

French here who just defaults to American English on most devices: I never realized that you could have American English with sane unit and date defaults with EN-CA. Will probably use that from now on!

I ended with en-DE that for some reason exists. This way my phone has an English interface rather than poorly translated Polish (or worse, one app had English support but displayed Chinese with Polish as system language).

And sane units/date formatting etc.

I would mildly prefer en-PL, but it does not exist.

That's smart! I use en_IE for the same reason. I for some strange reason assumed that en_CA used non-metric measurements and crazy American dates. Thanks for enlightening me!

Those reasons don't make sense though. In Canada the official spellings are a weird mixture of British and US English, and mostly British spelling is used. Additionally, the US standard sizes of paper are used in Canada, so that wouldn't be correct either.

But Canada mainly uses letter instead of A4 IIRC (correct me if I'm wrong, not Canadian myself).

That is brilliant. I am switching to en-CA now.

Keep in mind that while some spelling in Canadian English matches the US (analyze in Canadian is spelled with the Z), other words match the British English (color is spelled with a U).

I really hope en-IN moves to American spellings and gets rid of the lakh/crore numbers and use million/billion instead (more scientific). Then it basically becomes en-CA with nice things like ₹.

en-CA has the best date format:

yyyy-MM-dd

I wish the language settings were more nuanced. I want sites that are primarily in my mother tongue use that, even if they have english version. I want foreign (often corporate) websites that also have a second-class translation to my native language, to stay in English.

en-CA uses US paper sizes AFAIK. Which is why I use it, as an American, for the same reasons you state — plus $ as the currency — and without changing paper sizes should I ever print something.

I do not know much about Canadian conventions to have made such an informed choice. I use en-US simply because I hate to see the red squiggly lines when I am fighting with someone on reddit

en-AU should be pretty same as well, coming from Australia :).

Hm, maybe I should start using en-CA as a Sweden then. I am currently using en-US. I have also considered en-DK.

Canada uses letter/legal paper sizes at least it did when I last lived there 10 years ago.

en_SE is a nice one if your system has it. Seems to be a sort of made-up locale. Things are in English, but use YYYY-MM-DD date format.

Kannadiga* here.

very interesting theory.

Although I haven't come across many Kannadigas who choose en_CA due to KA and CA sounding similar, this is an angle for sure.

But OP's guess (en_CA alphabetically above en_GB / en_US) is a more possible reality.

Another trivia: Kannada-English dialect is called "Kanglish" here. Ex: "ಲಾಕ್-ಡವ್ನ್ ! ಬಸ್ಸು ಕಾರು ಎಲ್ಲಾ ರೋಡಿಂದಾ ಬ್ಯಾನ್!" [phonetic: 'lockdown! baSSu, kaaru ellaa road-indaa byaan!'] Though the sentence is accepted to be Kannada, only true Kannada word there is "ellaa" (=> all)

Kanglish is the norm here, and textbook Kannada isn't getting good love from many. The onslaught of Sankrit on pure classical Kannada is a different topic altogether, for another day!

*people from Karnataka who speak Kannada.

This is unlikely IMO. There is no local Kannada-English dialect and even Kannada speakers with weak English would know how to spell it.

My guess is it’s because English (Canada) comes first, before English (United Kingdom) and English (United States), in the list and most people in India are just selecting the first one (en-ca) without preference to any locale.

In India when it comes to technology we(majority) use english almost everywhere, from TV menus to phone apps to the tiny cybercafes in a remote place, everywhere it is in english even with the option of choosing our own language. This is due to a couple of reasons: we have been accustomed to the use of English with any tech product you can think of since it was first launched in India, also no one wants to go through the settings and change the defaults. Also the english dialect here is English-India. Kannada is its own language. I also came to the same conclusion as the author here, EN-CA was the first on the list.

I’m from, and live in, Karnataka and have deliberately set my iPhone locale to Kannada.

That said, I’m almost certain it’s not because of people here mistakenly setting their locale to Canada. Because most of the consumers can understand English to an extent to use it on their phone. Secondly the Kannada translation is horribly bad to an extent of being useless. Most of the day to day phone use in Kannada is impossible because no one has bothered to translate the modern terms and phrases to Kannada.

My money was on all the Punjabis going back and forth to BC

I have a friend who used to travel to a remote region of Ghana pretty regularly. After the first couple of trips she concluded that it was better to just risk/get malaria, and treat it afterwards, than to take the prophylaxis drugs. At least for her, the side effects of the drugs were worse than those of actually getting the disease!

A few years ago, I was in Liberia working on a contract, and was prescribed Lariam as a prophylactic. I'd traveled in West Africa before, but when taking a prophylactic, which wasn't always, I had only had Malarone, which gave me weird dreams and nightmares, but wasn't too bad.

Not so with Lariam. Working in a different culture, and coming to Liberia for the first time, can be stressful in itself, but I honestly don't think I would have made it without ditching Lariam after a few weeks.

I was there for three months initially, extended to six, and was prescribed this crazy drug for the extent of it.

Use another prophylactic. Not everybody are affected like this, but it's not worth it finding out, IME.

I did extensive research before I spent 8 months traveling around South America in the midst of the Zika outbreak and of course also concerned with Malaria. My conclusion after all my research was that anti-malarial drugs were less effective per dollar/effort cost than insect bite prevention. I ended up writing an article on the topic on my blog at the time: https://tristor.ro/blog/2016/05/01/trip-preparation-update-i...

I ended up treating most of my clothing and equipment with permethrin, using Picardin spray on my skin, hanging permethrin treated mosquito nets over windows and doorways, and as a final line of defense and for comfort I bought a cheap fan in each country I visited and left it behind in the apartment for the next occupant when I left, having it blowing on me directly at night.

Anti-malarial drugs all seem to have severe neurological or psychological side effects, and some can cause permanent damage, so just on the off-chance that anyone sees this that's considering traveling to a malaria-risk region, be aware there are other options.

I had to cancel a planned trip to the Amazon rain forest in 1998 because of lariam. I was on day 3 of the week long regimen in preparation, but by then the unwanted, horrifying thoughts and images invading my head were terrifying. No experience like that before or since. I learned then that one of the side effects is potential suicide.

I opted to prolong my visits to other destinations with lower malaria risk. Glad to know it has since been banned.

> Despite being a country of European heritage

There were plenty other humans in Canada before Europeans arrived...

Western nations have depressed labour conditions around the world for centuries and they are still ensuring that any immigration is going to be to their advantage. (Or at least, the advantage of their corporate and political elites.) The increased precarity and anxiety experienced by working and middle class people in the West is not due to some labour-robbery by people from developing nations. It's a whittling away of social welfare and economic opportunity and a concentration of wealth greater than that of any pre-war time.

The diminishing status of middle class westerners still looks better than the chances you get in India though, so of course foreign workers will probably compete at levels you weren't prepared to, for rewards you deem insufficient. But in both cases, you are fighting for a small piece of the pie, the vast majority of which is taken by the most rich and powerful. So why not point the finger at them? Canada is rich enough for all its citizens and migrants to get N-fold richer at the expense of a very wealthy few. Rather than making some migrants slightly better off at the expense of the working and middle classes. You're falling for the con if you think migration is the problem and not the mass exploitation of all workers.

We’re talking about Firefox language settings. Politely fuck off and advocate for a racially pure ethnostate somewhere else.

Yes, the Canadians of Convenience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadians_of_convenience was my first thought. That can't be the only reason as the blog post explains—I agree that en-CA coming before en-GB is likely the most important factor—but I'd be surprised if CoCs don't make up a meaningful share of "Canadians" in India. I wonder if there has been a noticeable rush of CoCs out of India during the current COVID19 flareup?

I think if someone downstairs asked me how far away the airport was and I answered in Kilometers or Vests they would be a bit annoyed.

It would be cool if everyone used SI units but they grow up with local tradition.

Even if you could convince everyone to move there are lots of locale features that don't really have an international standard most people know about. ISO doesn't even have a suggestion for which radix you should use and says both the American and British radix is fine (which is bad since they're mutually incompatible the way they're commonly used.)