Support

Hello Wesley,

If you ask me about my own personal spelling preference, I'd agree with you. My wife's American so that's the flavor of English we speak and write at home, and what I mostly use when replying to support tickets. Under American English spelling rules (and under Oxford British spelling spelling), yes, the correct suffix is -ize, not -ise.

However, Joomla's default locale is en-GB (British English), using the standard (non-Oxford) British spelling rules. We strive for consistency with Joomla itself, therefore the default language packs shipped with our software are using the en-GB locale used by Joomla itself. You can see that in the names of the language files, e.g. en-GB.com_akeebabackup.ini. Joomla has fairly recently published a linguistic style guide for this locale which explicitly states we must use the -ise suffix instead of -ize, hence "finalise/finalising" instead of "finalize/finalizing".

I believe you will find a lot more words using British spelling in our software. In fact, if we use the American English spelling it's a bug, since the language pack's locale is en-GB, not en-US.

As to why we don't ship two language packs, frankly, it's only because there's not enough time to do it. Maybe, maybe, I can get either an automatic spell-check or AI to do this for me – I'd still review everything, but at least I wouldn't have to do the edits one line at a time. I have some ideas, but they're still before the proof-of-concept stage.