I am a monolingual English speaker.
Does anyone else involuntary see the word ‘English’ as an American term even though it is obviously of England?
I assume it was because when I was very young and I first learnt of the language we speak, that it was called ‘English’, I invariably it associated with all the other things I would later be taught were American.
Why do we still call our language English? It is often quite different from any language spoken across the pond.
eht dne!
Whatever admissions people are going to make in this thread you can rest assured that you are certainly not alone in your mistake. There are those of us from this side of the Atlantic who, when visiting the USA, have been asked in all seriousness what language we speak in our home country.
It often ‘jumps out’ at me (an Englishman) when I hear an American on an American TV show or film refer to the language as ‘English’.
What do you Brits call our American language if not English? American? Don’t Australia and New Zealand also speak “English” and it’s clearly different that the American or British versions?
If you renamed it to American you’d have one language with two names. And that’s just silly.
In my opinion it should be called English forever. It is something we have in common, it bridges the gap, common language etc blah blah.
Depends whether people are trying to be smart alecs or who’s within hearing range. I suppose “American English” is a pretty widespread term. The Australian and New Zealand versions are closer to ours than they are to yours, and most of the differences we would notice are colloquialisms or slang terms.
I don’t think any of the versions of English spoken around the world are incompatable with one another, so it hardly seems worth the trouble to rename one of them. Personally I’d rather see more effort go into teaching/learning the language we already have.
I thought this would be about the way a lot of people - and that includes a lot of English people - have trouble understanding the difference between “English” and “British”.
The differences between different kinds of English are quite small, when compared to differences between different brands of Italian, German, or some other languages English is largely cohesive.
The ‘English’ I really struggle with includes:
Traditional “Lallans” Scots (Rober Burns type speech)
Newcaste Upon Tyne “Geordie”
West Indian Patois or Sea Island “Gullah”
Lousiana Cajun (which might really be French sometimes, I can’t always tell).
Also, I remember seeing a documentary on an island off the coast of the state of Virginia where people spoke very differently from most “Americans”. It was funny that the people (who had to be subtitled) insisted that they spoke regular English, and it was the mainlanders who couldn’t “talk plainly”.
But really, are there any ordinary American speakers that are incomprehensible outside of North America? Do Harrison Ford movies get subtitled in Glasgow? ‘Sounding funny’ is not enough basis to split up a language. It would be quite remarkable if everybody spoke English alike.
Interesting detail: I have often seen French-language translations of American books that say “traduit de l’américain.”
Some people seem to regard American as a language - at least I have seen Übersetzt aus dem Amerikanischen von … (Translated from the American by …) on the inner title page of some translations published in Germany.
I have on a few occasions encountered English speakers who could not understand my accent. Always either in Scotland or Ireland, and generally they have been older people.
Please, no, keep it “American English” if you feel the need to make the distinction.
See, we speak American English at home. Now, Norwegian schools start teaching English (as a foreign language obviously) in second grade. This means that flodjunior, who’s going into fourth grade, needs activities to keep him busy while the rest of his class has English lessons. I mentioned this in passing to a Norskie acquaintance who said: “But you speak American! Don’t you want him to learn English?”
Uh, brilliant. Let’s have him sit in the class and be utterly bored most of the time just to make sure he learns to spell “neighbour” and “colour” and to say “lorry” instead of truck :rolleyes:
(Is it worth mentioning that his school’s English teacher is American, too?)
Some localization companies treat American English as a separate language for translation purposes.
When I was in the States, I was surprised to find that several people I met there there did not associate the language “english” with the country England. I guess if you’re not really interested in etymology, this might be feasible.
For some reason it really annoys me when the signifier for the English version of something (be it a pamphlet or maybe a section of a website) is an American flag.
I thought the standard term was “US English” or have software installation programs been lying to me?
Not as much as it annoys the Irish when the signifier is a Union Jack!
It doesn’t bother me when the signifier for the English version of something is a Union Jack. It does bother me when the signifier for the UK-and-Ireland section of a multinational’s website is a Union Jack.
What bothers me is when a Maple Leaf Flag is used on a Canadian website to mean English. What part of “two official languages” didn’t you understand?!
(I use it on mine, with various other flags, to mean both English and French.)
The only thing in this regard that bothers me more is calling French a foreign language.
I assume you speak of Tangier Island. As the linked (non-SDMB) thread makes clear, however, the form of English spoken on the island is, contrary to fairly widespread belief, not truly Elizabethan. The dialect does, however, draw heavily upon the 16th- and 17th-century speech of England’s West Country.
It bothered me when l lived in California to hear Spanish referred to as a foreign language, as well.