babelhyphenation
When writing in English what is the benefit of loading babel, by \usepackage[english]{babel}, except for the possibility of setting it to use specific English dialects as described in babel: english, american, USenglish?
For example I know that biblatex, csquotes and microtype can work together with babel but their features seems to only make sense when writing in other languages than in English.
No, all three are synonyms for each other as far as Babel is concerned.
From the babel documentation p. 78:
‘American’ is a version of ‘English’ which can have its own hyphenation patterns. The default english patterns are in fact for american english. We allow for the patterns to be loaded as ‘english’ ‘american’ or ‘USenglish’.
There are no differences between these three language names; there are, however, differences in both hyphenation and date formats between these and UKenglish,british (which themselves are synonyms.)
The following document (must be compiled with lualatex) shows both example hypehnation point differences and date format differences for 5 types of specifications: (Australian is excluded here only because there is no lualatex language definition file for it defined.)
% !TEX TS-program = LuaLaTeX
% show hyphenation points code by Patrick Gundlach
% from http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/Show_the_hyphenation_points
\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage[margin=.75in]{geometry}
\usepackage[british,UKenglish,USenglish,english,american]{babel}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{array}
\newcolumntype{S}{p{.3\textwidth}}
\directlua{
show_hyph = function(head)
while head do
if head.id == 0 or head.id == 1 then % hlist, vlist
show_hyph(head.list) % should be head.head in a newer luatex than 0.64
elseif head.id == 7 then % disc
local n = node.new("whatsit","pdf_literal")
n.mode = 0
n.data = "q 0.3 w 0 2 m 0 7 l S Q"
n.next = head.next
n.prev = head
head.next = n
head = n
end
head = head.next
end
return true
end
luatexbase.add_to_callback("post_linebreak_filter",show_hyph,"show_hyph")
}
\newcommand{\displayinfo}{\languagename\par\today\par Hyphenation of analysis}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{SSS}
\selectlanguage{american}
\displayinfo
&
\selectlanguage{USenglish}
\displayinfo
&
\selectlanguage{english}
\displayinfo
\end{tabular}
\begin{tabular}{SS}
\selectlanguage{british}
\displayinfo
&
\selectlanguage{UKenglish}
\displayinfo
\end{tabular}
\end{document}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[ngerman,english]{babel}
\useshorthands{"}
\addto\extrasenglish{\languageshorthands{ngerman}}
\begin{document}
\minipage{1cm}\hrulefill
\hspace{0pt}zoning-facilitated
\hspace{0pt}zoning"=facil"-itated
\endminipage
\end{document}
With lualatex you do not need the \hspace{0pt} (LuaTeX hyphenates the first word of a paragraph, which TeX doesn't)
Best Answer
You should load babel if you're unsure about the default language. A system administrator in the UK may well have changed it to British English instead of US English (they have different hyphenation rules).
Assuming TeX Live is used (but also MiKTeX, I believe), lines such as
will guarantee that the requested hyphenation rules are used during typesetting. Another use for babel is for choosing a not directly supported set of hyphenation patterns; for example,
will use the "maximal set" of US English hyphenation patterns (check your
language.datfile for the exact string to use,usenglishmaxis surely correct for TeX Live).