If American English is the language/dialect spoken in the Unted States, what do you call the language/dialect specifically spoken in England? English English?
You know something Matt? Until right this minute I always automatically thought of French as a foreign language. I KNOW better, of course. It’s just that, as a lifetime BC’er, I never really got exposed to spoken French on a regular basis.
I’ve been writing quite a bit lately, a novel and a half. They’re set locally and I’ve been making it a point to use Canadian/British spelling. I figure if I’m going to write an unashamedly Canadian story I might as well make it look Canadian too!
Well we just call it English, but in places where it’s distingushied from American English (such as spell checkers) its usually called British English. MS Word calls it “English (U.K.)” and calls American English “English (U.S.)”.
And why should we be forced to exercise this redundancy…?
On a trip to Vienna I unthinkingly referred to the language as “German” - didn’t seem to go down well with the guy I said it to!
I reminded him about Americans speaking “English” and he thought I’d made an honest mistake (in fact I’d forgotten I wasn’t in Germany! - I’d been doing jobs in various countries including Germany and the Hefe-Weise was kicking in)
So tschild, or someone, do Austrans speak Austrian?
Or was I the victim of some Viennese wind-up?
OK. You’ve just proded a pet peeve of mine.
English the language did not come from England the country. They share the same root, but the language did not follow on from the country. If anything it is the reverse.
This means that early English (the language) was spoken in geographical areas outwith the boundaries of what later became England. The majority of the speakers lived within what became England, but not exclusively.
So the English language is not from England and the current situation where native speakers of it live outside England has always been the case for the entire history of the language.
Surely this is the point…?
Well the point is I don’t speak a language that came from England and nor do Americans.
Or Ozzies. Or Kiwis. Or anyone else.
I’m not being facetious here - I really don’t get what you’re saying. When did English become English? Surely, from everything I’ve read, at the time of Beowulf, the Venerable Bede, or later Chaucer? But England didn’t begin its empire until around the time of Shakespeare. So in the general region of England, there was a large population of people speaking what was known as “English”, for centuries. The export of the language, and the subsequent independent evolutions of each regional variant, has only been happening for about 5 to 600 years (maybe longer, if you count Ireland, but they didn’t speak English for a very long time after invasion).
When ‘English’ became ‘English’ is obviously a debatable point.
But if Scots dialect is the same language as Cockney (for example) dialect and English was been spoken in both areas prior to the formation of England, you can’t then argue that England is the origin of English. You’d as well argue that the Alps originated in Italy.
Any spread from then on, whether it be by Empire or otherwise, was from a base that already extended beyond England’s boundaries. English was never England’s alone, it first belonged to Britain.