The French speak French, the Spanish speak Spanish, The English speak?

[Pilkingtube]

Hey so i'm wondering after seeing a few comments from US citizens on this site about English grammar. When a person is Spanish and they speak Spanish, their language is called Spanish. When the Japanese speak Japanese, it is called Japanese. When the English speak English, it is called British English rather than English.

Does this also happen for French Canadians, who call the French version of French 'European French' and Brazilians who call the Portuguese version of Portuguese 'Iberian Portuguese' or is it just the US citizenship who modify the name of the original language If so, why?

I am curious because the majority of Australians, Indians and New Zealanders, who speak English too, don't seem to categorise English into 'British English' and 'Indian English' as much, despite the differences being clear and defined (Such as in India where English isn't really a well established language as most people speak primarily Hindi I believe).

Also, on a less serious/curious note.. what is the reasoning behind the unsual order of the American Date System? The progression is usually in ascending/descending order, such as seconds>minutes>hours>days>months>years or years>months>days>hours>minutes>seconds but whenever it is written on an American document it flows seconds>minutes>hours>months>days>years, why is it in such an unintuitive layout?

EDIT: I am genuinley surprised how many people I have offended by this post! Please note that i'm really just trying to sate my curiosity than slander the American use of English. I am using American English as an example of a wider subject. That being, at what point do countries begin to differentiate their dialect as a new language, like European countries differentiated their languages from eachother despite being identical originally. This question is relevant to former Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese colonies etc.

 

[masher]

The U.S. still hasn't changed over to the metric system.

I'll just leave that here.

We can be a stubborn people, unfortunately, and we appear to strongly value our, "Individuality," as a nation, which can be ironic in some cases.

 

[Crazy_Dude]

The U.S. still hasn't changed over to the metric system.

I'll just leave that here.

We can be a stubborn people, unfortunately, and we appear to strongly value our, "Individuality," as a nation, which can be ironic in some cases.

Probably since most "American" things are just rehashes of old European traditions.

American English or British English? Yes there are diffrences but I would go as far to call them seperate languages.

 

[yak_face]

To answer your first question, yes.

If, like me, you come from the American South West and have learned Spanish there you will have a very interesting time trying to communicate with someone speaking Spanish in the way it is spoken in Spain (typically called Castelian Spanish, by the way.)

I don't speak French, but I have a Haitian friend who does...unless you ask a French person, at which point he sure as hell isn't speaking "proper" French.

American English and British English are the same way. Which one is considered odd is a matter of cultural relativism.

 

[ZombieGenesis]

"British English"...? I've never even HEARD that before.
It's just English, that's all it's ever been. There's the 'Americanization' of English, which basically just means switching a few words and making all the 'U's sound like 'A's.

 

[SaberXIII]

English is English, and as far as I've been informed originated in English. Frankly, I'm not bothered about who speaks it, it's bloody English. I see what you mean about the different English dialects (I suppose you'd call it), but since a large portion of the American populus are descended from Britons and we shipped alot of people to Australia at one time or another then it makes sense that they use our language. Though, given that our language is a mixture of many others, and the many languages we mixed were made from several others, I think it no longer matters, just have a bonanza.

 

[Calcium]

Englsh is English surely. If you can speak "British English" it's not as if those who speak "American English" won't be able to understand you.

As someone living in the UK I can't complain about Imperial/Metric. We use both for some reason! Imperial for distance and metric for volume.

The date thing kindof makes sense... They say March 17th whilst we would say 17th of March.

 

[VaudevillianVeteran]

I always thought that "British English" was "The Queen's English" or "Standard English" or something to that effect. But I would've thought that it would just be English and those of the USA would call it "American English" or something.

 

[tigermilk]

"British English"...? I've never even HEARD that before.
It's just English, that's all it's ever been. There's the 'Americanization' of English, which basically just means switching a few words and making all the 'U's sound like 'A's.

And replacing "s" with "z" as in Americanization as opposed to Americanisation!

I too had never heard of "British English" I guess as I am English. Can't help but think there are a lot of Irish people who would be very pissed off at the phrase "British English".

 

[ZombieGenesis]

"British English"...? I've never even HEARD that before.
It's just English, that's all it's ever been. There's the 'Americanization' of English, which basically just means switching a few words and making all the 'U's sound like 'A's.

And replacing "s" with "z" as in Americanization as opposed to Americanisation!

I too had never heard of "British English" I guess as I am English. Can't help but think there are a lot of Irish people who would be very pissed off at the phrase "British English".

My terrible grammar habits are irrelevant, kind sir.

And you know...the Welsh? Since they don't speak English anyway.
They speak Welsh.

So yeah... 'British'.

 

[Therumancer]

Hey so i'm wondering after seeing a few comments from US citizens on this site about English grammar. When a person is Spanish and they speak Spanish, their language is called Spanish. When the Japanese speak Japanese, it is called Japanese. When the English speak English, it is called British English rather than English.

Does this also happen for French Canadians, who call the French version of French 'European French' and Brazilians who call the Portuguese version of Portuguese 'Iberian Portuguese' or is it just the US citizenship who modify the name of the original language If so, why?

I am curious because the majority of Australians, Indians and New Zealanders, who speak English too, don't seem to categorise English into 'British English' and 'Indian English' as much, despite the differences being clear and defined (Such as in India where English isn't really a well established language as most people speak primarily Hindi I believe).

Also, on a less serious/curious note.. what is the reasoning behind the unsual order of the American Date System? The progression is usually in ascending/descending order, such as seconds>minutes>hours>days>months>years or years>months>days>hours>minutes>seconds but whenever it is written on an American document it flows seconds>minutes>hours>months>days>years, why is it in such an unintuitive layout?

When it comes to the date system it has to do with efficiency compared to nations that are more mired in tradition.

The bottom line is that when your filing things the older files are usually moved out and archived. Typically you have the year on the drawer or box, and then when you flip through them the first thing you see is the month, once you have the month you can narrow it down to the day, the year is the furthest over since it's the least relevent and only really useful for determining what box/drawer it goes in if it gets misplaced or misfiled.

Putting the year first would be counter productive since by looking at the files to begin with you already know that. The day is pointless before you know what month it is.

Especially when dealing with the "Old World" (Europe) it's kind of funny how the rivalry works. The bottom line is that while similar, things in Europe work they way they do mostly because of tradition. It worked then, it will work now, and it's a pain to teach someone a new system for an efficiency increase when the old one has worked just as well. The US on the other hand broke free of a lot of the trappings of European bureaucracy and defined things on it's own depending on what worked the best. Being only 200 years old we haven't yet run into a group of "young turks" with better ways than us, so we can be the stodgy old codgers.

Of course a lot of things like the order of dates becomes semantics with electronic filing systems. When your not thinking in terms of physical record keeping and archives it's easy to go "WTF" when you just see the date organized on a computer screen.

I incidently know the specifics of WHY things work like this because I've spent a lot of time writing and filing reports, and digging around to find paperwork. Honestly, it doesn't surprise me there are so many jokes about the speed and efficiency of european bureaucracy because it would probably take me twice as long under that system.

-

When it comes to language, it largely comes down to the US being a melting pot nation with a somewhat unique style of cultural identity. We don't feel the name to differntiate ourselves to quite that degree, where language is a matter of cultural pride for a lot of other nations. Our complaint about immigrants not learning the language has more to do with efficiency and adaption than any paticular connect between language and culture, and of course that's one of the problems with getting people to adapt in many cases, since a lot of them don't really want to become Americans so much as maintain their own culture, live seperatly from our society for all intents and purposes, and draw the benefits of being US citizens. That however gets into another entire disucission

The British will specify "British English" largely as a method of diffentiating themselves from the US and asserting a cultural identity, where Americans will rarely say "American English" since we really don't care, and are using the name of England (which we broke away from) to begin with).


As far as the international usage of English, that comes from the US being the dominant world power and also the biggest positive cultural force the planet has ever seen, like it or not. As many people will point out the US might not be a conquering empire in a traditional sense, but we have none the less conquered the world with things like "Starbucks", "The Big Mac", and "Melrose Place" like noone before us. Thus we and our basic usage of the language's name have defined what people call it. On top of this our style of superpowerdom has made English the default language of business, and catapulted it into a league of it's own internationally. Even when no Americans or members of the UK are involved during business meetings it's not uncommon for everyone to switch to english as the default language that will be used by everyone, and also the language the contract will be written in even if
none of the people involved are native english speakers. It's funny that this is mentioned right alongside the bit about dates, which lead to discussions of paperwork, because one complaint I've run into is how English is almost like what Latin used to be in some countries where they vehemently hold onto their language for cultural reasons, but at the same time require all their official documents and business records to be in english. Thus like scholors or the religious had to learn latin (to read the bible and recite prayers, and read documents and books in universities), a clerk frequently has to know english fairly well even if they don't use it for anything other than the paperwork, especially if the business is operating internationally. It's the "middle ground" language.

Interestingly, I think one thing that we're eventually going to see happen despite great opposition is English becoming a mandatory language for the planet. People will still have cultural tongues, but as a secondary thing. Simply because it will help efficiency in communications and the spread of ideas, and also because so much of the world is already using if only for administrative purposes.

 

[YesIPlayTheBagpipes]

it's just that they've slightly diverged over time. same thing's happend to Spanish and Mexican, words mean different things and in Mexican they forget about the "vosotros" tense compleatly.

 

[ten.to.ten]

Any language is going to have differences when spoken in locations so far apart. If you think Commonwealth English vs. American English is bad, you should check out European Portuguese vs. Brazilian Portuguese, they're almost like two different languages compared to English.

 

[2xDouble]

English speak English, Americans speak American, Australians speak Australian. Our languages are similar (enough such that none of us bothered to rename it) and have similar roots. But, as the English are very keen to point out to us, Americans use language "differently". Among ourselves (as I'm sure you do), every dialect is simply "English". It's only when people start getting pretentious that the distinctions need to be added.

Yes, there are differences between French and French Canadian. Then again, there are differences between Spanish and Madrid Spanish, various dialects of French, English and whatever the heck the Welsh speak (heh, just kidding, Welsh-speakers), the Chinese languages... etc.

As far as the time thing, on most American documents its Month, Day, Year; Hour, Minute, Second. The times are presented in descending order of importance, with Month and Day being the most critical pieces of information in most situations (as documents frequently occur within the same year). It may seem unintuitive, but it really does make sense. At least, that's how I understand it. I never took Advanced Timekeeping in college. heh.

 

[Pilkingtube]

The U.S. still hasn't changed over to the metric system.

I'll just leave that here.

We can be a stubborn people, unfortunately, and we appear to strongly value our, "Individuality," as a nation, which can be ironic in some cases.

Probably since most "American" things are just rehashes of old European traditions.

American English or British English? Yes there are diffrences but I would go as far to call them seperate languages.

Exactly my point, they're not different languages, simply minor changes to Dialect. No other former British Colony refers to the original English as 'British English', yet American users seem to, it is just something that i'm curious about, it may simply be an American tradition to name any language used in America 'American French' 'American Spanish' and 'American German' too, but i'm no real expert on American culture.

 

[Rhaff]

The U.S. still hasn't changed over to the metric system.

I'll just leave that here.

We can be a stubborn people, unfortunately, and we appear to strongly value our, "Individuality," as a nation, which can be ironic in some cases.

Actually the U.S. have officially switched to metric long ago, people just kinda ignored it and kept using imperial, so the elected officials at the time just gave up and forgot about it.

OT: Its all about regional dialects. No matter what language it is, if it's spoken in several countries, there will always an addjective? to describe which region/country it is from.

 

[Jacinto]

As a western Canadian, I call what the French in Europe speak "French" and what Quebec speaks as Quebecois. Also, being or Portuguese blood, Portugal has the language Portuguese and Brazil, as I call it, is Brazilian. I use the same for Spanish people speak Spanish and Mexicans speak Mexican. it is your country's dialect so why not name it after your country? It isn't just slang and accents when it is whole parts of the language that are different. It is a different language like the two kinds of Chinese, being Cantonese and Mandarin. Why should the origin of the language have to specify it is their version? Should the modified ones in other countries just come up with their own names for what they speak so it is more understandable. Like, "Hey, do you speak Spanish?" "What, Mexican or Spain?" It would be easier to just ask if they speak Mexican or Spanish. I mean, the name of the country is in the language.

 

[Chemical Alia]

I'm not sure why the backwards date system is used, but the military uses DDMMMYY and 24 hour format for all of its documents. Just for the record.

I've seen people make similar distinctions between German dialects, like paelzisch, schweizerdeutsch, or even pennsilfaanisch-deitsch. Same thing with regional Chinese dialects or comparing mainland Mandarin to Taiwanese Mandarin or Singaporean Mandarin.

 

[Ailia]

In Québec we do tend to call it "le français d'France", as it does differ quite a bit from what we speak. Not just in terms of accent, but in terms of the words and expressions we use.

 

[zHellas]

Also, on a less serious/curious note.. what is the reasoning behind the unsual order of the American Date System?

Goddammit, you had to bring up that flame bait question...

Spoiler: My Rant About That Topic

Really, for some odd reason lots of people here get into a pretentious fucking idiotic rage over this topic.

I get into a rage at how people keep spouting "Day-Month-Year is so logical and the totally right way to do things! No explaination needed!", while what I've come up with (and granted, since I suggested the idea I prefer my thought over others) is that: In most of the world, you say, "The third of January." or "The ninth of March.", so it'd make sense for you to write it out that way.

For us in the U.S., we've grown to say "January third." or "March ninth." so, obviously we'd write it like that.

That's why.

OT:

Living a continent away from the beginnings of our country for about 250 years, obviously the way we speak English, or whatever native language it might be for any country in the same situation, would be different in some way.