Although escapism feels like the priority for lockdown reading, I recommend making an exception for Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch. Anyone with a passing interest in language will find all kinds of fascinating nuggets, and it’s a good reminder that we need to keep an eye on how English is actually used if we want our writing to sound normal.
English is changing faster than ever, ‘because internet’, and even the title made me examine my preferences and prejudices about it. I’m all for ignoring outdated grammar rules (yay to starting sentences with ‘And’ or ‘But’) but unnecessary Americanisms in British English get a big thumbs down – the UK government telling us to “Stay Home” was particularly upsetting.
I really should get over it, mainly because I have no way of knowing whether these phrases sound as unnatural to the rest of the intended audience as they do to me. With little else to distract me at the moment, I decided to carry out my own very basic and unscientific linguistics project to address a dilemma that frequently comes up in my work – the spelling of Majorca vs. Mallorca.
When writing in English, I’ve always found it more natural to use the Spanish and Catalan spelling (Mallorca) than the official English name of Majorca. The BBC news style guide still insists on the latter, as does the island’s English-language paper, the Majorca Daily Bulletin, but this spelling seems to be on shaky ground. BBC1’s new detective show is called the Mallorca Files, Google Maps shows “Mallorca” (but also “Seville”), and Rough Guides, Conde Nast Traveller and the Guardian are all on Team Mallorca.
As this 11-year-old article in the Times explains, it has a lot to do with snobbery. No wonder media and marketing people opt for the Mallorca spelling – we’re the type to bother our Instagram followers with authentic local scenes rather than piss-ups in Magaluf. As I often found when I worked in marketing agencies, a tiny bit of data quickly proves our hunches about what ‘people’ say and do to be completely wrong. Mallorca may be everywhere in the media, but a quick check on Keyword.io shows 2,900 searches for “Majorca villas” in the UK in an average month, three times more than “Mallorca villas” (880), and that the gap has only slightly narrowed since 2004, according to Google Trends.
However, Google also tells us that it recognises the two spellings as variants of the same word, so choosing Mallorca over Majorca won’t affect search results. There’s nothing to lose from a brand point of view either – it makes sense for a Spanish or Catalan company to use the spelling from its native language when so many English-language media and brands have already set the precedent. So, my recommendation to clients remains the same, but I now have better reasons for making it than my own, biased preference.
Share