Why aren't British and American English considered separate languages?

Factual Questions
41

I have a number of personal anecdotes on the subject, which I will share FWIW.

Once I had dinner with two other people I know well. One was Serbian and the other Georgian, the American state. The latter had grown up partly in Atlanta, partly in Savannah. The G asked S (who had lived a couple decades in the US) what the difference was between Serbian and Croatian. S sighed and said, “I have been out of that milieu long enough to admit the truth. In fact the difference is less than the difference between your two accents.” I’m from Philadelphia, which is where S had been living for at least 20 years.

I have twice been in London and not able to understand a word of what someone was station. I was trying to ask a porter in Victoria (I think) station where the boat train to Paris was leaving from and I could not understand his answer. I asked him to repeat this and it remained incomprehensible. Although he seemed to understand me. The other was a gas (sorry petrol) station in London.

I once met a highland Scot whose English sounded perfectly normal Scottish accented English. But then he gave me a sample of the English (definitely not Gaelic) that he would speak to his family and it was incomprehensible.

I have been to Barbados every winter (with one exception) since 2001. They speak what they call English and their radio announcers are perfectly comprehensible. I suppose they are imitating BBC English. And they can almost all speak perfectly understandable English to me (I do recall one exception). But their native dialect is Greek to me.

My colleague who grew up in Germany until he escaped at age 16 in 1939 spent a year in Zurich in 1965-66. He said it took him till the end of that year before he really understood Schwyzerdeutsch. But the government insists that schools be taught in Hochdeutsch starting in 3rd grade. When my friend from Georgia spent a year in Zurich, his kids were speaking Swiss in a month or so, but said that German was “too hard”. Clearly they picked up the playground language not the classroom language.

I can understand, more or less, Parisian French when spoken slowly enough. Quebecois French defeats me, for the most part. Even though I have been living here for 46 years. Living in English, obviously.

Finally, this is crime fiction, but the authors were a pair of Swedes. The murder took place in Malmo, Sweden, but the perp escaped to Denmark. So the chiefs of police of Sweden and Denmark had to meet to discuss the case. According to the fiction, now that they had something substantive to discuss, they had to forgo the pretense that each understood the other’s language and speak English.

The conclusion I draw from all this is that language boundaries are confusing and ill-defined.

42

I didn’t mention the exception before, a Brit from Manchester who other Englishman have a hard time understanding. Once in the midst of the night he had to get a German to translate his marble-mouthed gobbledy-gook into the kind of English a Frenchman could understand. Despite no one being clear what he was saying, sometimes he will complain about the way the Scots speak, even though I can understand them quite clearly.

There’s another thread about distinquishing accents, and people not able to pick up on tiny differences in pronunciation. Much of it will be about what you are used to hearing, and the subjective interpretation of your own voice.

43

Seems based on what? If there were people writing and speaking Old English today, it would be considered a separate language, and no one expects someone to be able to understand Old English just because they understand English.

It’s considered the main ancestor of English because it is, but it’s only considered “English” by people who don’t know anything about language history and development and think it’s just old English, rather than Old English, or in the sense that back when it was a living language it was the English.

44

It’s just convention. We don’t call Latin “Old Italian”, for instance. But also, “Old English” is sometimes called “Anglo-Saxon”.

45

China seems to have a lot of Official Chinese Positions that cause the eyes to roll. They’re even able to get the rest of the world to play along.

46

Several people have alluded to the following point, but it’s worth emphasizing IMO.

There are two separate (but related) aspects of mutual intelligibility. 1) is based on how similar the languages are to each other, i.e. how much overlap there is in words, grammer, and pronunciation. 2) is how much exposure speakers of one language have to the other language.

In the case of Americans and Britons, there is a lot of exposure to the non-native dialect, and this makes it easier for mutual understanding than would otherwise be the case. If a Briton tells an American that he needs to fill his lorry with petrol, he will be understood, but not because enough of the words are the same that he can figure out the rest, but because the American is likely already familiar with these terms from literature and other media. And so on.

As a practical matter these are not unrelated, because the closer the dialects are to each other, the more likely there is to be sharing of literature and media and other exposure. But in theory they are separate, and could vary in a given instance. So that you could have Languages A & B which are less similar to each other but more mutually intelligible than Languages C & D, simply based on differences in exposure between speakers of the languages.

47

OK, I’m stealing this! :smiley:

Yeah, this sort of thing happens all the time. I ask a random Dane a question in my best (but still clearly Swedish-accented) Danish, he or she does a double take, blinks in stunned panic - and decides to answer in English.

48

There was an article (a book review, I think) in the Economist about the languages there. the author pointed out there were areas where the Chinese empire had effectively overrun and assimilated a myriad f ethnic groups. Occasional words and especially grammar were twisted - the groups had adopted Chinese words but still applied their original group’s grammar, or regional pronunciations. (I remember in Xian, the language sounded less like “wang hang ching chong” or whatever we imagine as an offensive imitation of Chinese speech, and more like “bur bur chur shur…”)

The Chinese government would like to promote the position that everyone is Chinese, that there are very few “separate” ethnic groups, and uses language and culture to assure this uniformity. The history of the Chinese empires over the centuries was that if the central government became weak, the peripheral areas would split off and become independent. As a result, admitting that any area might have a claim to separate autonomy of any sort is greeted with hostility, as it implied failed central government. Tibet, Taiwan, the far western ethnic states like the Uigurs, etc - may have at times been Chinese, other times independent, but to suggest the government should let them go their own way is to suggest the government is weak and failing. Just to reinforce the learning experience, they can look back at the USSR and its problems. Language uniformity is one way to help reduce the tendency to split off. Denying any differences is therefore promoting the central unitary state.

49

Based on the excerpt that Colibri quoted (which certainly seems to me to reproduce the sounds of, e.g. Jamaican colloquial speech somewhat accurately) I have to doubt that. The excerpt ‘looks’ more foreign because it’s spelled phonetically, but if you sound it out it’s clearly recognizable as English, if a rather idiomatic variety.

50

This question needs to define whether language disparity involves phonetic or written usage. The Indian that answers my 1-800 call is speaking immaculately perfect English, vocabulary and grammar and syntax, and when he writes, he spells every word exactly the same way I do, but I cannot understand him because of his pronunciation accent. So is he speaking a “different” language, or not?

Meanwhile, if he goes to Pakistan and picks up a newspaper in Urdi, it is meaningless marki, but he would understand a Pakistani reading it to him, because spoken Urtu and Hindi are mutually intelligible.

So, my Indian CSR speaks to me in perfect English, and I do not understand, but he can read my instruction manual which I am asking about… And the Pakistani in the next cubicle understands both the English and the Hindi that my man speaks, but cannot read the manual if it is in Hindi.

Now, how do you resolve the question of whether these communications are taking place in different languages or not. Is my man in Bangalore speaking English to me, who does not understand him, although we read the same manual? Is he speaking Urdu to his colleague from Karachi, who does understand him, but can’t read what he writes?

51

And it’s way way exaggerating the difference from America/British English because it’s rephrased everything using completely different words. If you did that just using modern American English, your second line wouldn’t look anything like “Hallowed be thy name”, either.

52

And I believe Scots and English also exist in a language continuum. J. Random American speaks a language that is quite different from Scots and not very mutually intelligible. A Glaswegian speaking English probably speaks a dialect that is quite similar to Scots in many ways, including grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Of people who speak honest-to-goodness Scots as their primary language, there’s also going to be a continuum where the more educated Scots speakers probably speak with more of an English influence that would render them quite capable of speaking with Scots-influenced English speakers of Glasgow and a fair amount of capability in speaking with Americans and Aussies. Ye ken nu, laddie?

53

Norwegian is basically very similar to Danish when written, and very similar to Swedish when spoken. Geographically, Norway sits right in the middle. In all cases, I am referring to the dominant Bokmal. Nynorsk is the most similar to Icelandic among the three, and by that I mean that it is still very different. Bokmal is directly based off Danish. None of this is an accident; Norway [del]suffered under the cruel yoke[/del] was the secondary part to the Kingdom of Sweden and even more so under Denmark. The current Norwegian royal family descends from Denmark since it was founded in 1905 (interestingly enough, the Swedish royal family is of Napoleonic French origin).

I am having trouble digging up the original cite, but according to the internet Swedes and Danes can about equally understand each others’ writing, but Danes understand spoken Swedish better than vice versa.

Hark! To ye uneducated, Old English lookes like this. But ye language is nawt Old English but a falsetongue.
Modern English rests on the skeleton of Old English, even if the influence from Norman French is large.

Latin became many languages, not just Italian, so it’s not the old version of anything specific. Italian isn’t even the closest to Latin (to hear it told, that’s Romansh).

54

What arguments? Anyone who cares already understands and accepts that they are different variants of English. Anyone else would not care if you defined them differently.

55

I’m not entirely sure what you intended to convey here, but Old English to anyone looks like this:

http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/hel/orosius.html

56

Well, I typoed and meant to put Olde (sic) English, which is what “everybody” believes is meant by Old English. Where “ye” is pronounced “yee” and we have shoppes, not shops. Or,

Olde English:Old English::Shakespeare:Beowulf.

57

That would have made it clearer that you were completely tangential to a thread that started with “I am a native speaker of both English and Spanish, and I am able to make more sense of written Portugese or Italian than Old English”.

58

What about cultural concepts that are hard to wrap your head around no matter if you understand the words or not?

Like maljoe, or evil eye. http://www.newsday.co.tt/commentary/0,139489.html

The concept that people’s thoughts or feelings can create or change reality and cause physical effects is something that takes a bit of time to wrap your head around.

59

Quite right.

I wouldn’t say that. Sweden and Norway share a very long border - they’re right next to each other. Denmark, however, is all the way down there, across the water.

If you can find the cite, lemme know. 'Til then, I’ll go with my gut and assume - based on personal experience - that it’s a myth.

60

There’s only one cite one currently needs on inter-Scandinavian language comprehension. Nothing I know of comes close to the scope of Holder spåket ihop Norden (Does language preserve Nordic togetherness).

Their main conclusions were:

Looking back in the report for specifics their comparison between Swedes/Danes understanding each other’s language spoken or written both give the edge to the Danes, unlike your recollection.