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This is a list of the main natively English-speaking countries/regions:

US (64.3%)
UK (16.7%)
Canada (5.3%)
Australia (4.7%)
South Africa (1.3%)
Ireland (1.1%)
New Zealand (1%)
Other (5.6%)

There are TeX hyphenation rule files for "en-us" (US) and "en-gb" (UK, but called GB here). There are none for the others.

Somebody told me that Canada uses the exact same hyphenation rules as US. Is this true? Somebody told me that Australia and Ireland use the exact same hyphenation rules as UK/GB. Is this true?

What about South Africa, New Zealand and "other"?

I've been trying to find an authoritative source for this, but of course I find nothing even remotely related when searching myself.

If they cannot be matched up to either the US or UK "locales", is the difference very minor, huge, or something in between?

  • I've never heard of US vs UK having different hyphenation rules. If anything, the rules would be specific to each style guide. – curiousdannii Jan 19 '20 at 10:15
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    If you are the same person that asked https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/524791/why-does-tex-latex-not-have-hyphenation-patterns-for-more-language-variants yesterday you could ask the stackexchange staff to merge your accounts – David Carlisle Jan 19 '20 at 18:32
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    There are no rules. Individual publishers may have (usually in private) internal hyphenation guidelines, but these are just guidelines and just publisher styles, of the same status as font and style guides. In tex the default hyphenation rules came from a dictionary provided by merriam-webster and the (rarely used) UK ones came from a dictionary provided by OUP but really these are dictionary-specific not locale specific. – David Carlisle Jan 19 '20 at 18:35
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    I think the migration here was wrong, you are asking if the general language locales have different hyphenation rules which is a reasonable question, even if it doesn't have a good answer, but it's not directly related to TeX – David Carlisle Jan 19 '20 at 18:41
  • I don't think that there are defined rules. Try googling for "hyphenation rules", it is often a matter of style. I have vague memories that some hyphenation rules are based on syllabification of the word while others are based on the (historic) derivation of the word. I think that there is probably a distinction about the use of hyphens on whether a word is being hyphenated in order to to make the line look better (as in TeX) or as a style to help improve the sense of the text. – Peter Wilson Jan 19 '20 at 18:45
  • @DavidCarlisle Hyphenation falls between the cracks in terms of sites, but I suspect we have more interest and knowledge of it than the linguistics site, although I agree the general question isn't about TeX for sure. Of course with some editing, the question could have easily become much more linguistic, by asking about the linguistic principles underlying the different hyphenation systems, which is most definitely a linguistics question. – Alan Munn Jan 19 '20 at 20:25
  • @PeterWilson Indeed, that's (roughly) the broad distinction between the British English conventions and the American English conventions. British English conventions tend to favour etymology over syllabification, and American English the opposite, but both systems have use both principles. – Alan Munn Jan 19 '20 at 20:27
  • @curiousdannii specify [british] to babel and you can try the UK hyphenation tables. – David Carlisle Jan 19 '20 at 20:28

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