Most of us up here in Canada call it ‘nine eleven’.
Well no, not exactly. That’s probably very true of many parts of the UK but nobody in London or most of the South-East would refer to it as the ‘London’ bombings. It would be a bit tautologous. The further you drill down in closeness to the event the less precise the description becomes. So locals often just call it ‘the Tube Bombings’ while staff call it ‘7-7’. The survivors and their families tend to just call it ‘the bombings’.
I suspect similar things happen with 9-11 and other major events. The more remote a person is both geographically and emotionally, the more description there must be. The closer one is to an event the less need for explanation exists.
Oddly enough no. It’s called ‘The Madrid Attack/Bombings’. I’ve never realised how strange that discrepancy is until you just pointed it out.
Coincidentally, I was in London on the tube about the time that the Madrid bombs went off.
In Swedish there’s no equivalent of “nine-eleven”, but a general reference would look like this:
Spoken: Terroristattackerna den elfte september tjugohundraett.
Written: Terroristattackerna den 11 september 2001.
…which literally is “The terrorist attacks the eleventh September twenty-hundred-one”. (isn’t Swedish easy sometimes?) Sometimes an “i USA” meaning “in the United States” is added infix or postfix.
Also common is:
Spoken: Terrordåden den elfte september tjugohundraett.
Written: Terrordåden den 11 september 2001.
…which literally is “The terror acts the eleventh September twenty-hundred-one”.
The shorter reference for the date might be used in the right context:
Spoken: elfte september.
Written: 11 september.
A friend to friend conversation “where were you on…” would use just the date without year, but a newspaper article beginning with “Ever since…” would use a longer description. There is no equivalent to “post-nine-eleven” in Swedish.
The date as written on a letterhead would be 2001-09-11, but this is never used to refer to the attacks.
The dates of the Madrid and London bombings are not universally known in Sweden IMHO, so a reference to them would be more of a description.
That is interested Bagistan. Do you know if the other Scandanavian countries do the same? I dread to think of what is used in Finland!
I’ll try, but I now speak with less authority:
Norwegiean long: Terrorangrepet 11. september 2001.
Danish long: Terrorangrebet (den) 11. september 2001.
Translation: Terror attack (the) 11th September 2001. Note that Danish and Norwegian unlike Swedish use a period to mark an ordinal number. Months aren’t capitalised. “Terrorangreppet” would be the etymological equivalent in Swedish, but has a slightly different nuance, more assault than attack. The finite article “den” seems to be optional as in Swedish, which make a single letter the only difference between Norwegian (Bokmål) and Danish. That’s how close we are.
Norwegian/Danish short: 11. september 2001.
My Finnish is even worse, but the events title in Wikipedia is:
Syyskuun 11. päivän iskut
Semi-literal: September 11th’s strike.
Hyper-literal: Autumn-month’s eleventh day’s stab.
The names of the months in Finnish are awesome as usual (December = Xmasmonth, btw., Annie). I don’t know if “isku” could be translated as attack, but it’s what you do with a knife and also what lightning do, so I think strike will do.
Finnish short:
Normally 11. syyskuuta would be used to describe the day, but it seems the more formal syyskuun 11. päivää is mostly used to reference the attack. Päivä means day. A possible translation of this expression would be “the day of september-eleventh” or “9/11-day”.
ELEVENINE
I as an Englander tend to refer to it as elevenine one word but am the only one as far as I know
The fact that London’s attacks happened on 7/7 and can be conveniently referred to as 7 7 by our US cousins suggest that it was deliberately chosen on that date so as not to confuse Americans as it would have if they had happened on any other day in july for example - an example of al quieda showing initiative
Thinking about London and ‘7/7’, I think this usage may have crept into media use as a way of distinguishing them from the failed attacks later that month.
We do use month/day (“September the Eleventh” or maybe “September Eleventh”), as often as we use day/month (“the eleventh of September”). We just don’t use the illogical month/day/year.
I’m a programmer by trade, anything except YYYY/MM/DD or YYYY-MM-DD is illogical too me.
Australia (a DD/MM/YY country):
September 11
This format is used here frequently if the month is spelled out - the only time we do the month before the day. We don’t baulk at American reports of “nine eleven” though. I remember immediately after the event, the media here was struggling with what to call it, but I think even the local grammar police finally realised this was a thing the Americans had earned the right to damn well call what they please, so we sort of fell into line with that to a degree.
The London bombings.
The Bali Bombing.
The Madrid Bombings.
China it is referred to as the numbers 9 1 1. They use the formal term for one so it’s jiu yao yao (at least here in Shanghai)
I don’t doubt the joke exists, but it’s a real concern when teaching kids emergency numbers, not the result of taking the joke seriously. Maybe more so in Norway where a kid would need to know that “hundred and thirtheen” equals 1-1-3.
Since the attackers lived in this country for a while, they had to have know about the 9-1-1 emergency telephone number. I wonder if that was a consideration in their choosing that date, or just a coincidence.
This is a fascinating discussion of how different countries name the dates. Keep it coming.
Even though it was on 11/9. 
I think maybe that was a bit of black humour on the part of Cantonastic. There’s no way that competent terrorists, which sadly they were, would allow such a minor point to affect their plans.
ETA: oh, you mean the 9/11 attackers. I stil don’t think that the phrase “nine eleven” is well enough known outside the USA, despite its familiarity from film and TV, for them to single out that date particularly.
Here it would be les attentats du 11 [pronounced onze] septembre, which means “the September 11 attacks”. We might also say l’attentat du World Trade Center, but that’s not quite accurate since the Pentagon was also attacked, and since there was a prior terror attack on the World Trade Center.
Almost certainly conincidence. One of the routine features of Al Qaeda attacks on western targets is that they can occur at any time, on mundane ordinary days. To do anything else would increase the possibility of plots being uncovered. Plus, the choice of 9/11 had more pressing concerns for the terrorists, such as weather conditions (clear skys), low numbers travelling midweek (easier to hijack a half-empty plane than a full one), etc.