The world is made up of a large number of nations. Each has its own history, language, and culture. From the form of government right down to food and fashion, each country is unique. Even systems of measurement vary with most of the world using the metric system. The United States is one of the few nations hanging in there with the English system. One of the oddest variations is the date format. The standard calendar is universal and contains the same dates but the order of month, day, and year vary from nation to nation. Why is this the case?
The Different Formats
The use of different formats can be confusing especially when expressing months as numbers. This is why the business software used by international corporations allows users to change it such as the excel date format. This comes in handy because there are three different formats that can be used.
The first of these is the mm-dd-yyyy format. Much like the English system of measurement, the U.S. is the only country in the world to use this system. American companies that do business with foreign entities can be assured of having to recognize a different format no matter what nations they work with.
The most commonly used format is dd-mm-yyyy. This is the one used throughout Europe and South America, as well as in Mexico, Australia, and North Africa. The third format is yyyy-mm-dd and is used exclusively by China, Japan, and both Koreas. There are several nations that use two of the latter formats. Canada is the most flexible when it comes to date formats and regularly uses all three. This must be helpful in dealing with all other nations.
The Condition of Middle-Endianness
The U.S. date format has an uncommon name to the layperson. It is called middle-endianness and comes from computer science. It has to do with the way bytes are arranged. If the largest bytes are first it’s called big-endianness, as in yyyy-mm-dd and dd-mm-yyyy has the small bytes first and thus is called small-endianness. The American date format has the largest bytes in the middle.
The origin of these terms is strange and fascinating. Computer scientists lifted them from Johnathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”. The terms were used to describe how the people of Lilliput and the citizens of Blefuscu cracked their eggs. Swift used this to make the point that even in trivial things, people tend to expect everyone to do things the way they do. This was a brilliant observation on his part and it’s as true today as it was in the 18th Century when he wrote his classic novel.
The Reason the U.S. Uses MM-DD-YYYY
The reason the United uses the format it does is actually debated frequently on online forums such as Quora and Reddit. Some of these discussions become nearly as heated as political discourse.
One simple theory has to do with language. In the U.S, if one person asks another what the date of something is, the response is something like, “July, 7”. Month first, then day, then year. In the UK, it’s common to say “the seventh of July”. Day before month. Verbal language influences written language. In nations that speak languages other than English, the verbal expression of the date is different and so it is written in that manner.
Another theory that is very popular is that before the 20th Century, the UK used the mm-dd-yyyy format. This was the case when the U.S. was a British colony. Americans got used to writing the date in the format and after gaining independence have stubbornly stuck to it. Americans seem to enjoy being unique and going their own way.
The differences between nations are fascinating and all contribute to the world. Date formats may seem trivial but they do vary. The U.S, as with the English system is happy to go on being the only country to exclusively use mm-dd-yyyy.
