“Language technology, eh? Are you going to fix Word’s grammar checker?” asked the technical writer.

No; I hate grammar checkers.

“Me, too. This one’s stupid. It flags good sentences, like ‘the staff’.”

The staff?

“You know, like I write ‘The staff think we should…’ and Word says it should be ‘thinks‘…”

Well, Australian English and American English have different ways of handling collective nouns, like company and family. They’re grammatically singular, but speakers of Australian English (and, it seems, British English) prefer to see the plurality of it. So in Australia you’re far more likely to see “The Motleyup Town Council welcome you” whereas American English would have it “welcomes“.

My sense is that this is changing in Australia. A dodgy Google search turns up more hits for “Australia welcomes you” than for “Australia welcome you“, without weeding out bogus examples. Which, but for work demands and laziness, I would do.

Usage guides are full of advice that no one cares about or ever uses. Ignore them and say what the population around you says. Or say.

Update: That wasn’t the best example. So I did a slightly more thorough, yet equally dodgy, search. I say ‘dodgy’ because Google fiddles with its page counts. I haven’t controlled for bogus hits.

Australia, “The family is“: about 121,000 pages
Australia, “The family are“: about 32,800 pages.
Australia, “The company is“: about about 850,000 pages
Australia, “The company are“: about about 121,000 pages.

Don’t do anything serious with these numbers. Still, this is a starting point for confirming how the singularisation of collective nouns seems to be creeping in.