But “zed” has been acting really weird. The linguist J. K. Chambers did a survey of Canadian twelve-year-olds in the 1970s, and found that two-thirds of them said “zee”—but when he went back and surveyed the same population in the 1990s, he found that the vast majority were now using “zed” as adults. The same shift happened with successive generations. Chambers figured that children learn “zee” from the alphabet song and American children’s television programs like Sesame Street, but when they get older, they learn that “zed” is associated with Canadian identity and switch. Indeed, noted
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