If you are from Europe, even if you're not living in the UK, the en-GB locale will feel a lot more familiar to you than the en-US one.
It uses the dd-mm-yyyy date format like the rest of Europe, the start of the week is on Monday (vs Sunday in the US), the default paper size is A4 (vs US letter), measurement defaults are metric (indeed UK roads use imperial, but the default is otherwise metric), the time format uses 24hrs (vs AM/PM in the US).
In a moment of whimsy I briefly considered a date format where digits were sorted alphabetically.
2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667
Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.
Well that's just totally ambiguous. What you should do instead is treat the date as one long number and present its factors, for instance 2⁴⋅11⋅7649⋅15050023, much more practical.
as an American this is my favorite format. Sortable, and the mm-dd order reflects the standard American way of writing month+day, and yyyy is unambiguously the year since it's 4 letters. Best of both worlds.
I believe it's the ISO standard because it is obviously distinguishable from both the MM-DD-YY (US) date order and the DD-MM-YY (UK/EU/Others) date order and so is unambiguous.
The European Commission published its own language guide. In terms of English it's only a small deviation from en-GB, but my first thought was indeed: when can I set en-EU?
Not to mention the fact that English basically everywhere else but the US is essentially en-GB with a few choice changes and anachronisms. Consider en-IN, en-IE, en-SG, en-MY, en-AU, en-NZ, etc.
I started writing something a while ago with preliminary title “Do en and en-US, not en and en-GB”.
If you cluster English dialects by various characteristics, you’ll end up with en-US as a clear outlier. I believe that, if you’re going to divide English into two camps, the best is “English (International)” and “English (US)”. Canadian English is the one that’s closest to US English, but even it works at least as well based on International English as regards spelling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s... is an interesting read).
But there’s a lot more to it than spelling, and here the distinction is even clearer: the US has its own length, area, volume, weight and temperature units that no one else uses; its own stupid date format that everyone else loathes; its own paper sizes that no one else knows what to do with.
Not everyone else agrees on which date format to use, but we do all agree that any of our formats (DD/MM/YY, DD-MM-YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD, &c.) are better than the US’s middle-endian monstrosity. Though if we see the likes of DD/MM/YYYY we may mistrust whether it’s actually MM/DD/YYYY.
I also believe that you should default to English (International) for all users geolocated outside the USA.
Once you’ve get this divide right, adding further dialects also probably becomes quite a bit easier. But I do wish for diamond inheritance of locales: so you can mix in -ise/-ize, -yse/-yze, -re/-er, -ence/-ense, program/programme, and thereby deduplicate a fair bit across locales.
(There are still plenty of differences: such as time formats; decimal/grouping separators though I believe all places where English is a main language use . for decimal and , for grouping; even number grouping varies: en-IN does 1,23,45,678 rather than 12,345,678; keyboard layout; word choices; and lots more.)
(One last point: the naming is a bit fiddly. “Spanish (International)” means Spanish as used outside Spain. “English (International)” means the broad international/non-US consensus of what English is, generally following what England does but probably with kilometres instead of miles for long distances.)
Unfortunately en-CA is not really supported as a locale and we have to choose between en-US and en-GB. I’ll usually choose the latter, because despite more differences in language, there is more alignment between Canada and British English in spelling, units, and style.
I really wish en-CA was as well supported as fr-CA honestly.
Except that if you were brought up in the 50s/60s/70s/80s in the Netherlands, you may have learned to speak English with what sounds to a Brit like an American accent, in part because so many of your EFL teachers were former US soldiers or their spouses who settled. (Exposure to US media is a secondary aspect)
This was a very noticeable phase in the UK; I knew several Dutch people who were fully unaware they had American accents and some American linguistic traits until they got here.
Whereas Dutch friends of my father who learned English before WWII had actually quite plummy English accents.
In earlier versions of OS X, setting your date format to have the day before the month was sufficient to also alter the default paper size to A4, which was really inconvenient for me since I prefer the day-month ordering (and as a consequence of buying a digital watch in the Netherlands which only had instructions in Dutch which I didn’t understand, I developed the habit of using 24 hour time), but I live in the US and only rarely encounter paper which isn’t 8.5x11.
The time format in the UK is mostly 12hr, although people are generally aware of 24hr time. In my experience, while there are usually more similarities between the UK and the rest of Europe, Europeans also have more exposure to American English than to British English, so it ends up being a bit of a wash, particularly when it comes to pronunciation, spelling, or idioms.
In the UK anything "serious" like a train/plane ticket/timetable uses the 24 hour clock. That includes the default way to show a digital clock on a watch, phone or computer.
Timetables yes, but whenever I've bought a digital watch or set up a new device, the default has always been 12-hour. If you ask people the time in the afternoon, they will almost always give you the 12-hour format. People can understand both, but typically default to 12-hour times.
This is in stark constrast to Germany, say, where people colloquially use 24-hour times, with some exceptions for round times (e.g. 17:00 might be called "um fünf", but 17:05 would usually be described as "siebzehn uhr fünf", roughly translated as "seventeen oh five".
This might have changed in the last five years or so since I was living in the UK, but I've never noticed this be different when I was visiting, nor when speaking to British friends or colleagues.
"Beyond bizarre"? Why? "3:59pm" (and 7:30pm, regarding the post above) is exactly what's usually written in the UK. Technical use (24-hour) is different from the standard use used by the general population.
I read several blogs that use British English, including this OP's blog. Some of my favourite blogs in my RSS reader are British English blogs, or at least they use British English spellings and grammar. I find their use of the English language very charming and funny in a unique way.
It surprises me that anyone would feel entitled to ask a blogger to change the variety of English they use. American English is only one of many forms of English. The world is richer for its many varieties of English, and languages, and that diversity makes it more interesting, not less.
The way Americans speak and write, when compared to actual English, is terrible. No structure, wrong and misplaced punctuation, and lax grammar (if any). Speaking is even worse: a diarrhea of filler words, like 'like', 'I mean', and 'you know'. Practically no living American knows neither the word 'whom' nor when to use it. It's as if grammatical casing had been declared unconstitutional. If you ask me, it's more a speech impediment than any other classification.
But the thing is that every one (at least those below a certain age) speaks like this these days, thanks to the non-stop American content online. So it's basically normalized. This is why it's on my publish wish list that someone develops an AI that can filter out the American-ness, thereby Making English Great Again (MEGA).
Further, I think that institutions (those pertaining to education, at least) elsewhere in the world should issue PSA about too much exposure to American content--both written and spoken--and offer or mandate detox sessions.
Perhaps the only American to whom (there it is!) I can bear listening, is Steven Pinker.
Certain cultures teach that diversity is a bad thing to be feared and extinguished. Diversity is only a good thing when your mind has been poisoned by "education" and "experience".
It requires an open mind to see diverse experiences as a good thing, and certain cultures think having citizens with open minds is an unprofitable way to run a society.
Mainland Chinese gov't claims to have 56 official ethnicities in their country. They are certainly celebrated by official media. In particular, they seem to love the southwest portion of the country (Guangxi and Yunnan) with many mountaineous regions and various ethnic groups, mostly because they do not protest the central gov't. Also, look at the coins and bills of yuan -- many different ethnicities.
Is it bait? I'm pretty sure it's a reasonably factual, albeit general claim. Asking chatGPT for country-specific examples for instance gives this:
> Yes—some countries have (at various times, and in some cases still today) adopted policies aimed at making the population more “homogeneous,” through segregation, assimilation pressure, or exclusion/deportation. Concrete examples:
- South Africa (apartheid era, 1948–1990s): An official system of racial classification and enforced separation (“separate development”).
- Germany (Nazi period, 1933–1945): State ideology enforced a racial hierarchy and pursued forced removal and mass murder of those deemed “undesirable.”
- Israel (state policies affecting Palestinian citizens and occupied territory, especially since 1967): Includes laws and administrative practices that many observers describe as producing or enforcing unequal status by group; key issues include citizenship status differences and restrictions tied to national/ethnic identity.
- Myanmar (Rohingya): Policies and law enforcement that stripped/blocked citizenship for Rohingya and enabled persecution, culminating in mass violence and displacement.
- Canada (Indigenous assimilation policy, especially 19th–20th century into 1996): Forced assimilation via residential schools and bans on language/cultural practices; many have characterized this as cultural genocide.
- United States (Jim Crow + earlier immigration/citizenship rules; and internment): Historical legal regimes created segregation and restricted citizenship/naturalization based on race/national origin (e.g., earlier Asian-exclusion immigration restrictions).
You may disagree with some examples on this list, but I'm sure even you would consider that the first two are clear examples of diversity-fearing 'cultures' rather than 'bait'. And this is even before considering the wider definition of the word 'culture', which can be even more exclusionary.
Fair point. I did not write my response from a historical viewpoint. I was writing from a current persepective. To give credit to their reply, many of their example are correct. With the exception of some very backwards dictatorships, at this point, pretty much most countries value some diversity. Plus, after 2010, all people under 30 have watched thousands of hours of YouTube, so they know the world is big, cool, and very diverse.
Right. As a Brit I am entitled to think we speak the best version (because we do; ISE is a close second) but I am not entitled to believe everyone else's is wrong, because that is ahistorical. They have diverged repeatedly and thus ours is one of the divergences.
Much of British English was standardised long after several waves of the US settlers left our shores, so US english has some traits of pre-standardised English dialects, and ours is different again.
It's equally silly when some Americans claim their English is closer to the "true" English as a result, because, again, there was really no standardised "true" English when they left.
Along with some simplifications and some things reintroduced from german settlers, it has some traits of older English that the British abandoned in our own simplification of the language.
Is ours the best? Of course it bloody is :-) But is it "true" English? No more than anyone else's. That is the enormous power of English.
I have never heard of a thing called “Indian Standard English”, nor (as an Australian who has moved to India) does it sound a very realistic concept. Can’t find any search results for it as a phrase, either.
I agree in general, but there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'. This means roughly the opposite in British and US English, and there's often insufficient surrounding context to alert the reader to their error.
(OTOH I don't think you should suppress 'false friends' like biscuits, pants etc.)
Another exception: "moot", as in "moot point". In the UK it means "subject to debate", while in the US it means "inconsequential and therefore not subject to debate".
I'm British but I always understood it as the second meaning. e.g. "We were going to consider XYZ but now it's a moot point because the project is cancelled."
There are a few others. “Quite” comes to mind — “I am quite hungry” or “that meal was quite good” can mean opposite things, depending on the speaker region and even voice inflexion if spoken.
Honestly it's not the first time I read such comments, and... they're not about the British as much as they are about the Americans, I'd say.
I think almost all of the expressions in the left-hand side have direct, almost literal equivalents in French for example, with the same meaning as they have for the British, including being very context-dependent.
Also works for Flemish by the way, although the Dutch are supposed to be more literal so maybe Flemish/Dutch is to be seen the same way as British/American.
Quite, indeed, has no simple meaning in British English. Any non-British attempt to assign one meaning that is different to their regional meaning is doomed to failure :-)
Imagine someone wrote a blog in some obscure language that few people speak. If you happen to know that language, you'd think wow this is great. If you don't happen to know that language, you'd just think it's a shame. This is the same thing, just to a lesser degree. Some people might be interested in putting in the effort to learn a bunch of foreign cultural references, but not everyone.
I am the only Brit in the department I work in. No one gets the cultural references or British idioms I use, and I've found myself significantly changing the language I use to a very utilitarian and direct style to prevent the endless blank stares... reading this blog post just made me realise that this self-editing has made my interactions rather more 'flat' and unnatural, as they now lack spontaneity, with everything passing through a secondary filter before leaving my brain.
I have a cunning plan: Sneak as many Brits into Hollywood as possible, and have them slip in as many British references into American films as they can. Over time, they'll effectively BECOME British, and Robert's your father's brother!
Just whatever you do, don't mention the taxes! I did once, but I think I got away with it...
I experienced this. I only lived in the U.K. for 6 months, but the number of chiefly British phrases/words/idioms that nestled their way into my way of speaking and stayed (20+ years on) was interesting and somewhat surprising.
For example, I never said "supposed to" again — "meant to" has always sounded and felt so much better. Similarly, "can't be bothered/asked" often exactly describes the situation in a way that "I don't want to" seemingly can't.
I'd also like to add "bum bag" v. "fanny pack" was a valuable lesson and a memorable laugh.
I live in Sweden (and have for 11 years), a lot of the "charm" in my speech has been filed away, I speak in a very neutral accent (which barely registers as british anymore) and I use americanisms a lot, avoiding "false friends".
(IE; I never use the word "chip" to mean crisps or fries - I will instead use "Crisps", despite it being british, and fries, despite it being American; in order to avoid ambiguity.)
The more difficult one is "pants", I would say underwear or trousers.
It's interesting how I only notice how much it's contrasted when I go back to the UK and hear others, I notice people using words that I've put a mental "X" on, and its only then that I realise that I've put the mental "X" on the word... because it no longer feels natural to hear it.
I don't do the "chips" one, because it's usually clear enough from context, and the people I speak English to generally know me and my foibles. But I do religiously say "half past 6" now, instead of shortening it to "half six". In Germany, you count towards the next hour, so our "half past six" is their "half to seven".
To avoid ambiguity, I always say "half past" in English so that Germans (and I!) remember to compensate for the language barrier. Unfortunately "half to" isn't really a thing in German, so I can't do the opposite when I'm speaking German.
It's more complicated than this and how you say "quarter to eleven" is A Whole Thing in Germany, but everyone agrees on the half hour at least
> (IE; I never use the word "chip" to mean crisps or fries - I will instead use "Crisps", despite it being british, and fries, despite it being American; in order to avoid ambiguity.)
In Australia we don't care about ambiguity or clarity and refer to both the thin sliced cold things and freshly fried rectangular ones as "chips"
I live in Denmark, and for such basic words (crisps, trousers, maths, aluminium, football, quid, couldn't care less, fire engine, motorway, petrol, public transport, railway, tram) I use my native British words.
People occasionally comment that it's a British word, but being misunderstood is so unusual I can't remember a recent example. Essentially everyone has read/watched Harry Potter, Dr Who or Midsomer Murders, and Europeans are probably ten times more likely to have visited the UK as the USA.
I think everyone says “couldn’t care less”. But Wiktionary does say “could care less” is “American, nonstandard, proscribed”, so I guess only Americans have that (defective) alternative phrase.
I have a similar experience, for the last 5+ years I've worked in companies where very few of the people I work with are British which does require care on both language and idiom. Combined with being older than a lot of colleagues, cultural references need to be picked with care :D
I had that when workign with a lot of other Europeans. When I moved to a company where everyone was British I had to re-adapt, particularly because I'd become more direct after working with a lot of Germans.
I am the only Brit in the department I work in. No one gets the cultural references or British idioms I use…
Oh, fer feck’s s sake, it’s not like the U.S. hasn’t had Monty Python for fifty years. Me, after a steady diet of British motorcycle magazine’s for the last 40 years, I speak Brit just fine. But I would think the diversity and prevalence of online forums would get folks up to speed. I dunno, maybe people just don’t pay that much attention.
OTOH, I do recall an Australia coworker who expressed appreciation that he didn’t have to explain idioms to me (Oz has moto mags, too). Obviously it’s a real problem even in this age of connections.
I've had the pleasure of working with many different people from different backgrounds, including many Brits. I've always found the dry, understated humor from them to be endearing, making casual conversation more interesting. My parents are both from the Middle East, my wife is from Southeast Asia, and I have many Middle Eastern, Desi, African American as well as African (as in continental) friends, so I may not be a "typical" American in that regard.
That being said, don't underestimate the value you bring by sharing your cultural insights. I don't think I told anyone to their face that appreciated their cultural value, but I hoped that my engagement and cheerfulness in dealing with them at least communicated that I was happy with their presence.
It might be that your engagement with someone opens them up to a part of the world they've yet to experience or know much about. Granted, there are lots of places with more gaps than the US and the UK, but there's still value in that and I started with those examples but mentioned it comes from all sides.
Cultural insights are one thing but the issue is if you slip into full flow of Britishisms and let your accent loose people who only speak English as a second language can't understand what you're saying.
There's nothing unique about this though, it's the same for every language - it's one thing knowing Spanish well enough to hold a conversation where the other person is speaking slowly and making it easy for you, it's quite another to be able to slot into a group of native Chilean Spanish speakers in full flow.
I travel a lot so I'm used to adapting my use of English depending on who I'm talking to. I find there's a way to express things and still enjoy using the language without making it hard for non-native speakers to understand. But also, when you do end up in a group of entirely Brits it is fun to be able to just let loose
> My parents are both from the Middle East, ... so I may not be a "typical" American in that regard.
If you are from Detroit or Houston, then that would sound typically American to me. I say this over and over again on HN: The US is simply too big and too diverse to generalise about. It's better to pick a region, then generalise. The US has roughly 6-8 big cultural zones. In comparison, Europe, which has fifty countries is infinitely more diverse than the US, even if we only look at native Europeans that live there. Think about it: Germany shares a border with France. Literally, it is like Mars vs Venus in terms of their culture and language. And there are many more examples. There is nothing like it in the US.
When I moved to the states nearly 20 years ago, my pronunciation sharpened up (stopped dropping consonants) very quickly. Over time I stopped using idioms, and the few bits of Cockney Rhyming slang I used (Butchers, Scooby; which are look, and clue, respectively).
I think it was less as a conscious act and more as a result of just not being around people that use them. There's a sizeable element of cultural reinforcement involved.
That said, they'll pry my British spelling out of my cold, dead, hands.
I worked in a US office for a while (but with a few other British people as well). I didn't feel the need to edit my sense of humour luckily, but I purposefully switched to saying things like "sidewalk", "elevator" and "bathroom" because it made interactions a lot easier.
I'm American, but I've said "washroom" for a long time because I'm not asking to take a bash, but at least I wash at some point afterwards. Most people seem to understand fine, but I do get a few now and then.
Funny story, I was visiting Hong Kong one time, and asked the young waiter, who seemed to speak English just fine, where the washroom was. Blank stare. Bathroom? Cesuo (Mandarin)? All blank stares. I was a little out of options at that point... Turned out the word I was looking for was "toilet", which is a word I never use.
Are your other department members (a) native English speakers, but not British, or (b) non-native English speakers? In my experience, there is a huge difference. I am a native English speaker. When speaking with (a) but from a different region, you can usually speak in your normal style, but don't use too much slang. With (b), I remove any slang and choose my words much more carefully. My goal is to communicate well, even if I need to adapt my style.
I'm often shuffled into teams where I am the only American and everyone else is Indian, working in India, and I take a small measure of pride in switching to the formal register that Indians like to use in workplace English, and using the idioms they have.
The ultimate irony is that many folks asking for things to be “more inclusive” are asking for someone else to modify their behavior to fit the requester’s preference and definition of the “right” way, which is the literal opposite of being inclusive.
This French person has taken to writing in en-GB, as a token of protest against current USAian politics. I thank the USA for this step in French-British rapprochement !
Also, in the late 90's, The Register made me love British English... Local accents are great branding.
I really want to see a local Euro English[0] develop as an actual, recognized variant of English. Both because it would be really funny, but also as a way for Continental Europe to develop a common language we can shape our own way
I call it Eurospeak, for extra outrage - though that word currently has European Union civil service connotations (cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eurospeak)
Eurospeak is definitely the language of international corporate meetings !
It's a weird broken import of French (could be because the EU Parliament) is in Brussels so highly French-speaking. It's also still very incoherent, it mixes up billion and trillion, and it mixes up milliard (the French equivalent) with billion. You absolutely do not want ambiguity there when you work professionally as a politician.
deadline supposed to come from delay but it is incorrect use in French.
cabinet is toilet. etc
It's an artificial invented variant, like a kid would invent its own language to speak to other kids, not something that was born out of habit and unified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto shares a similar issue but at least it's cute and more logical though.
AI would be good at creating an international language
I did not know "Euro English" was a thing. By the look of it, it isn't a language, it's just a euphemism for incorrect English as spoken by non-native speakers in Europe.
I can’t say I understand this new current of culture/writing. It’s something like: get angry, turn small acts into grand acts of social defiance, and signal your social ingroup by referencing other things we are angry about.
“Do you remember that JK Rowling lady we all hate because she’s an evil witch? Haha, yeah. Anyways, I’m British and I’m going to keep writing like I’m British.”
Edit: I agree with the thesis. You have a culture; don’t filter it. Differences are beautiful. I’d rather live in a melting pot. Etc. Separately this new communication style is hard to stomach. Ive seen it growing in popularity in the U.S. - seems like there too?
You seem to be unaware of one of the British idioms used in language, it's called "A joke".
Calling her 'the wicked with of the terfs' was one of those. I found it quite funny personally. I can find the joke funny despite my opinion of Rowling as a person or her statements on particular topics. Sometimes, here in the UK, we make jokes featuring people because the joke is funny, not just to virtue signal.
Here in the UK, there is a significant section of the population whose base state is mildly dissatisfied and the external manifestation of that is low level grumbling about minor things. It's not a virtue signal, it's not a statement, it is just how they are. You may do better understanding if you take off your glasses of American Exceptionalism and view things more objectively.
Ironically, your post could very easily be read that you were upset by the article, wanted to express that to strangers, and signalled your social ingroup by referencing other things you were upset about, like the joke.
This post contains more than one joke also. Some people will get them, some will not. And that's OK.
I feel this post is also an example of the the British past time of having a moan.
It's a stereotype that Brits can be miserable and complain a lot, but the truth is most of us just enjoy having a moan about ultimately inconsequential things.
The example that comes to mind is just how many of the blokes I know will complain about reality shows like Married at First Sight or Love is Blind, yet will sit down with their partner each evening to watch them.
The uninformed might suggest they simply don't watch the shows if they're annoyed by them, but if they didn't watch they'd have nothing to moan about, and that's half the fun!
While I'm sure the blog post was made primarily for sparking discussion around the point of la guage differences, I wouldn't be surprised if simply having a moan about something perceived as mildly irritating but otherwise inconsequential wasn't also a driving factor. :)
It would be more of a joke if there was a connection between "west" and "terfs".
> Here in the UK, there is a significant section of the population whose base state is mildly dissatisfied and the external manifestation of that is low level grumbling about minor things
Does that have a name? What causes it? Is it a proud cultural tradition, or more a sort of disease?
Huh, that's a good observation. I, too, find that this style of text irritating. I looked through my own blog to try to look for such examples and found a few that do fit the frame. Reading this skeleton of such structure I realize I find such posts boring to read but have definitely written them before. Mortifying. A good negative example to add to the mental gate.
Americans often don't twig how many random american terms we brits have to learn the double meaning of and don't pipe up about. I'm not talking the well-known ones like cookies, but even things like "the ER" meaning "A&E"
If you want to read some hilarious reactions of Americans panicking when they are suddenly exposed to non-American English/British accents, check out these threads:
I'm not sure "panicking" is the best word to describe a couple of parents wondering why the characters suddenly have different accents. But maybe I'm too American and "panicking" means something else for Brits.
Not even the accents - different voices are annoying enough. When I was young I watched some cartoons in English, and hearing them in Dutch later, despite being my native language, was still uncomfortable.
As far as I'm aware the US does have free OTA TV. A quick google tells me that basic cable means the cheapest tier of cable. So maybe equivalent to a sky/cable entertainment package?
Yep, we do have free OTA television. Basic Cable generally comprises the local free OTA channels plus a number of mostly ad-supported channels.
The basic cable A&E began its life as “Arts & Entertainment” and was originally a mix of British import shows and high culture presentations (e.g., televised orchestra concerts). But much like carcinisation in aquatic invertebrates, for basic cable, apparently channels tend to evolve towards mostly showing Law & Order reruns.
I've watched the World Cup over free-to-air TV, US has a really fun match last night. I don't know where you got this idea from. I haven't paid for television service in decades.
I have one personal example where the inches, pounds, centimeters and stones don't matter - the archery community. "This bow was measured to produce 50 pounds of force at 28" draw length." Nobody argues about it, or takes it personally or tries convert to joules. It's a convention. Everyone uses it, from English Long Bow makers to the Koreans and the Chinese, et al. Similar with the firearms, American enthusiast don't insist on converting 9mm Luger to 0.354" and many of us know what Kurtz means.
I'll die on the Fahrenheit hill though. A 100F is 100% torture. 70% (70F) is tolerable. 35.3C tells me nothing on a scale.
Being proud of your culture including your language and exercising it, at the risk of readers not understanding everything immediately, is not racism. In the worst case, a non-British gets curious about one expression or the other and looks it up. That's engagement.
It's funny, and perhaps not entirely unwarranted, that "racism" pops up here?
As a Black American, I find the author's idea extremely interesting and naturally began to wonder -- what might this idea (in code?) look like for us?
Owing to history and whatnot, the role "Black American English" might play is of course very much a moving target, but it's interesting to think about.
As a writer and amateur linguist I can always spot the people who don’t understand how AAVE works because they seem to think that it’s just “bad grammar” and don’t realize that it does in fact have its own grammatical rules. One that’s not exclusive to AAVE, but is common across most informal spoken English in the US (maybe beyond—I know there’s at least one Genesis song that uses this which suggests it may exist in informal British spoken grammar), is the use of the oblique case when a subject has two or more elements joined by and: “Steve and him went to the store” insted of “He and Steve went to the store.” (Ordering is also subject to different ordering with formal English dictating that the first person pronoun comes last, but informal English putting it first: “Me and him” vs “He and I.”
The other thing I find interesting is that formal English has eschewed the double negative as an intensifier while most (all?) other Indo-European languages employ it. Compare Spanish “No veo nadie” (literally ”I don’t see nobody“ which is the informal English formulation) to English “I don’t see anybody.”
Is there an internationally agreed upon standard for designating AAV? I suppose it's a large and influential enough dialect it wouldn't hurt to have one
The main people who'd want such a thing would be linguists, so that they can label samples.
The non-prestige dialects of a language don't usually attract official interest, not least because officially the people who understand that dialect could also understand a prestige variant. Scousers may not talk like King Charles among themselves, but if he speaks they're not confused about what the King is saying even if they wouldn't use those words or say them that way.
This might get sketchier for Chinese topolects where the official government policy is that China has a single language, "Standard Chinese" but, those topolects sure do seem like different languages if you didn't know about the policy. However AAV is nowhere close to that, I can't imagine that anybody who uses AAV normally watches "Last Week Tonight" and goes "That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?".
In fairness, I think that's partly because AAV doesn't have the political and national identity that some other similar dialects have. I (as a lay person with no training in linguistics) feel like AAV and Scots are similar in terms of how far away from English they are, and many people would describe Scots as its own language, distinct from English.
Scots is complicated because there was an entirely distinct language "Gaelic" which just isn't even close to English at all, spoken in that geographic area historically. Now, today there aren't very many people who live there who would even claim to actually speak Gaelic, but the influence of that language seeped into the dialect spoken there, so while the random bloke you meet in Scotland may not speak any Gaelic, if you (maybe as an academic study) know Gaelic some of the vocabulary of their speech is obviously from Gaelic, not English.
Linguists would tell you that Scots is a sibling to English rather than just a dialect of English, having both descended from Middle English and that the dialect of English people in Scotland speak is instead "Scottish English". In practice of course humans don't language tag their speech (indeed they rarely even language tag written text) so it's murky. Maybe one word in ten that a Scottish bloke just said to confuse a tourist was technically Scots not Scottish English and perhaps some of it was even Gaelic. The important thing was that they confused the tourist as desired, for which frankly even an inside joke would work.
Sociolects are fun. In one of my friend circles the word "fish" is understood to mean the controller for a video game, I don't know why exactly, but if you said to one of us "Pass the fish" they'd hand you a controller without even seeming puzzled, that's just obviously what you'd call it. But in another circle it means nothing and you'd be greeted with confusion.
But I think that national identity doesn't exist in the same way, do you know what I mean? Like, being Black/African American in the US is an important part of a person's identity, but it doesn't necessarily have the trappings of nationhood in the same way that Scottish identity does. That's not to say that the identity is any weaker, just that it manifests itself differently.
This means that AAV is culturally important, but there's not necessarily the same sense of "this is a separate language" that there is with Scots, even though in many ways it has all the same claims of being one.
I have an amateur interest in linguistics, that's partially why I asked.
>That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?
Interestingly enough, I remember reading somewhere that you could be legally entitled to an interpreter in a court setting (take that with a grain of salt, I forget where I read it)
The article strongly implies it is a response to a comment complaining the blog is not inclusive because it uses British English.
There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm and we should all adjust our language to fit their definitions and culture. I intend to keep eating faggots, having a master branch in git, etc.
> There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm
You write it like it is a moral flaw in American culture. This cultural phenom isn't special to the United States. In my personal experience, any country with a large population suffers from the same: Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, India, China, etc.
> having a master branch in git
This is a weird cultural battle to pick. In the 2010s, when renaming the git master branch was at its cultural zeitgeist, none of the Americans that I worked with did the rename. It was always someone not from the US who would raise the issue on a team call. It happened so many times that I asked a few of them why they did it. Almost all of them told the same rough story: They say a "nerd news story" about the trend, then did a little bit of reading on Wiki to learn about the cruel history of slavery in the United States. Motivated by this, they decided to do the rename. All in all, pretty wholesome stuff. Never once was it some weird social justice warrior type of bullcrap. But anyway, you do you: Keep rockin' the "master" branch in git.
When I read "inclusive", my mind jumped to accessibility, in that colloquialisms can be difficult to understand for a subset of people with autism (and other conditions), and also that they translate poorly when run through a translator, for those that do not speak English at all.
4.3 Limited Use Nonce Values
The Digest scheme uses a server-specified nonce to seed the
generation of the request-digest value (as specified in section
3.2.2.1 above). As shown in the example nonce in section 3.2.1, the
server is free to construct the nonce such that it may only be used
from a particular client, for a particular resource, for a limited
period of time or number of uses, or any other restrictions. Doing
so strengthens the protection provided against, for example, replay
attacks (see 4.5). However, it should be noted that the method
chosen for generating and checking the nonce also has performance and
resource implications. For example, a server may choose to allow
each nonce value to be used only once by maintaining a record of
whether or not each recently issued nonce has been returned and
sending a next-nonce directive in the Authentication-Info header
field of every response. This protects against even an immediate
replay attack, but has a high cost checking nonce values, and perhaps
more important will cause authentication failures for any pipelined
requests (presumably returning a stale nonce indication). Similarly,
incorporating a request-specific element such as the Etag value for a
resource limits the use of the nonce to that version of the resource
and also defeats pipelining. Thus it may be useful to do so for
methods with side effects but have unacceptable performance for those
that do not.
That third word, starting with 'n' is British slang, which you are welcome to look up.
Presumably the etymology was in place before it took on its present meaning, but it is not a word I would use in a professional context.
My comment was oblique, but not sarcastic. Partly because I didn't want to use the word directly, and partly in keeping with the tone of the original blog post!
In British slang, "nonce" is a highly offensive term for a sex offender, particularly one who has harmed children. It is considered derogatory and should be used with caution.
I'm guessing this is very context/region dependant. Calling someone a nonce as a bit of banter would be more acceptable than calling them a paedophile when I was growing up. I assume because using the officially recognised term made your accusations seem more ernest, though I've never actually thought much about it before.
"There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm"
This is now far more than an American assumption. I have seen younger continental Europeans bristle at UK English because they grew up in a world of social media that is converging on usage that is closer to US English.
Real question: Post 2010, are there any non-English speaking nations that get most of their English language media from the UK? Since everthing went online after 2010, I assume US has the highest influence (linguistically) only because of "mass". Dear UK readers: Please don't interpret my comment that UK language culture is somehow inferior. HN knows and loves UK humor!
I agree, but some people seem to think it is, which i think what the article is a response to: just just in the comment, but in the wider push to use certain language.
Fully agree with the author, just like I write Portuguese in European Portuguese, not Brazilian Portuguese, African Portuguese or any other variation, just because our population is smaller.
Incidently I always change automatic language correction tools to English GB, I live in this side of the Atlantic, and that is variant I learnt while growing up.
I'm using custom en-CH locales, because I want numbers to use the Swiss format for decimal and thousands, € instead of CHF, standard units, and some version of English :p
How's that going with the numbers? Microsoft had this page where they explained that monetary amounts are formatted one way whereas other numbers are formatted another way. I found that most fascinating, but I don't know whether it matches reality. Also, how does software cope?
(Back in the eighties,) I had a teacher who taught both French and geography (I think), and he used the apostrophe as the thousands separator. With a twist. For example, he would write three million as 3'000'000, and then he would abbreviate that to 3''. Very fascinating. I wonder if that was somehow inspired by Swiss conventions.
The Portuguese speakers really ought to sort out how their language is supposed to work, it was fine before the internet but now I can only see the differences causing trouble
This is more or less completely false. English has an unusually high number of loan words from French (on the order of 10k or so, I think), and this has made the language less Germanic than its historical origins would suggest. But English existed before Norman French arrived in the British Isles, and is still at heart a Germanic language.
According to wikipedia, there's 128 millions of en-IN speakers, of which only few hundred thousands are native - while there's 248 million native en-US speakers.
You raise a great point here. At what point will a non-English speaking country become the nation with the most English speakers? In my mind, surely that is Indian by 2050. If they can become upper middle income by that time (I am sure of it), then I guess more that half of adults will speak English at least at elementary to middle school level. (Dear reader: Please don't read that as a slight against the English language skills of Indians. I know from personal experience: With five grade level language skills, you can get a lot done!) They would way out number the number of English speaking Americans.
Go to France, or Japan, or Hungary, or somewhere like that. Someone there is visiting a web site that is in English. Now, what English is it most likely to be?
My guess is US English, not UK English, not Indian English, not Chinese English. Sure, they may visit some of those sites, but I suspect that the most frequent will be US English.
I'm in IT right now having travelled through FR, DE, NO, PL and half a dozen more countries. When selecting the EN option on a website it is almost 100% of the time with a GB flag. The spelling is mostly en-GB as well.
In this case, Japan is special. There relationship (post WW2) with the US is unparalleled compared to France or Hungary. It will absolutely be US style. Japan was never very close with the UK.
Most countries in North East Asia or South East Asia (exclude South Asia) teach US-style English. A few that come to mind: South Korea, Taiwan, Mainland China, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia.
Correct, generally speaking they will have their own default locales on their computer and local sites will be in e.g. French but going to Instagram it will render in US English - unless the app has been translated, which it probably has so it's not the best example.
See my other comment, the world follows the US. It's about where the influence is primarily coming from, and that is currently America. And in terms of English it has a distinct advantage in that it is full of native speakers. Many Indians are proficient in English but they're not native speakers.
The amount of times that darn keyboard selector appears for no reason in Windows because its once again added en-US as a language, which it then switches to randomly for seemingly no reason and all of a sudden my symbols are all in the wrong places. One day someone at Microsoft is going to look at that bug and fix it....
I discovered just this week that the numbering of weeks within the year is different between US and Europe, thus, cal -w can show different numbers for some years depending on the locale. Outlook can probably also show different things depending on the system settings.
Europe uses the algo according to the ISO 8601 standard, where the week no.1 is the one with January 1st occuring between Monday and Thursday, inclusive. If the 1st happens on Friday or later within a week, it's considered a week no.52 or 53 of the previous year.
US does not use this scheme and [EDITED] I am not sure what method is applied there.
Some companies use week numbers in business talks, planning and scheduling, so be aware who is speaking about which weeks!
I think that by exploring how different cultures and languages communicate about things opens the mind. There are concepts that can't be easily/succinctly explained in English but can in other languages. I think that we should be encouraging such breadth of thought because it allows us to appreciate new aspects of the world we live in.
You could postulate that a language developed specific words for family and relatives because they prized those specific family structures? Or that language copied another language that did.
Similarly, you can categorise languages by how they group numbers, e.g. French is vigesimal while English is decimal.
I don't know. I mean it's not a longing for just a place, as I understand it. I am not even sure that hiraeth is necessarily longing for the beauty of a place or time. Hiraeth, it seems to me, could equally be a longing for the wordless Welsh expressions of emotion, or for rainy days, or damp, or a time that has passed, depending on where the bearer of the emotion is currently feeling it.
(I am not Welsh, but it has been described to me as an ever tightening elastic emotional rope that is anchored in a place and time that it might not be possible to go back to)
OK, here's one: My wife grew up in Latin America. Sometimes, instead of saying "I knocked it over", they say what literally translates to "it fell itself to me". Same idea - it fell - but hey, not my fault, it just happened.
Here's another: "fíjese". It kind of means "you'd never guess what happened". It's like "something that was completely unpredictable and totally outside my control happened, and it negatively affected my ability to do what I was trying to do", except with a lot fewer syllables.
Here's one going the other way: I was talking to a systems engineer about a specific issue, and I said that "we might be able to sweep that under someone else's rug". He was from Russia, and didn't have "sweeping it under the rug" as an idiom, and so didn't know what sweeping it under someone else's rug might mean.
Now, none of these are things that you can't say in another language or culture. You can. They're just a lot more unwieldy to say, and so people express that idea a lot less frequently.
This was my starting point, a belief that other languages were 'better' at expressing different things. However, I have done a few projects requiring translation over the years and I have found European language speakers, notably Italian and German, preferring the freedom of English to the relative straightjackets of their respective mother tongues.
As a Brit I am biased, however, there is a crucial difference between 'free range' British English and 'simplified' American English. Superficially, American English seems the more 'free', with liberties taken to create cool words and brand names. However, American English is constrained by the work of Webster, with there being a definitive dictionary, very much cast in stone, with changes such as 'no u in colour' made purely because of a rejection of everything English, including tea and spellings.
Currently we have something more extreme going on with the language that Ukrainians are expected to speak, with their 'government' seeking new and improved ways to move the language away from Russian. If this was OG English then it would be like getting rid of every French sounding word, so 'beef' becomes 'cow meat', 'mutton' becomes 'sheep meat' and so on. These changes can be made quite easily since it is not a whole new language has to be learned (or unlearned) at once. The lists of banned/allowed words changes all the time, much like Newspeak in 1984.
This won't be the last attempt to determine what a language is by decree, however, the result of such efforts is that languages get stuck in time. Hence the observations of my translation 'helpers', preferring English to their mother tongues.
IMHO American English is British English, stuck in time for 250 years, or whenever Webster got his special dictionary to schools. Meanwhile, OG British English has evolved in its own way, a form of direct democracy, where words change based on how they are used in the here and now.
I don't believe there is such a thing as an actual English word, all of it is 'stolen' from various colonial adventures of the past, or inherited from invaders of the past, notably the 'old enemy', as in the French.
French used to be the language for arts, diplomacy and the aristocracy. But they lost out, in part due to the fixed dictionary. Had they allowed their language to accept English loan words, chances are that French could still be the language it once was.
Currently there is an existential threat to English as the language for science and technology due to the rise of China. It gets worrying when data sheets for Texas Instruments components are released first in Chinese, to be followed up, months later with English translations. Therefore I am rooting for en-GB rather than en-US, due to that minor detail of there not being a 'Webster' dictionary of the past, casting a shadow on our future.
IMO this take really overstates the importance of prescriptive efforts to control the evolution of languages. In particular, the relative decline of French is easily explained by geopolitics. Outside officialdom the Académie is mostly ignored. French today is as packed with English loanwords as every other European language.
I think idioms and cultural references are fine - the rest of the world has worked out what US baseball and football cliches likely mean, people can decode most references with context.
But there are some interesting issues with UK <> US english, things like 'quite' which works in different ways in each locale. I was also very surprised to discover the difference in what we consider a frown - which makes a lot more sense of the US 'turn that frown upside down'. Interestingly my uncle who'd lived in the US ~20 years had never uncovered that difference till I asked him about it.
So it's good to know differences - especially when you want communication to be clear.
Good lord. I just three finger tapped on the word quite to see what the macOS dictionary says - "to the utmost or most absolute extent or degree; absolutely; completely", although it does offer a second definition "to a certain or fairly significant extent or degree; fairly: it's quite warm outside".
For context, I'm British though I have spent a fair amount of time in the states over the years and somehow never picked up this difference.
This is interesting because I assume it has suffered the same linguistic degradation as the word "fine" which in some cases means "of the highest quality" but mostly means "meh". I suspect it comes down to the dialect and social rank of the person saying the sentence. Compare how you would perceive:
Have you ever played runescape? As a kid, I was obviously a little confused initially by NPCs referring to "the first floor" of a castle/shop/etc meaning "the floor above the entry level", but it wasn't THAT hard for a 12 year old to contextualize "ah yes, this is a British game so it's a little different". (Admittedly growing up with british parents in Canada probably helped with understanding a bit, but I still don't think simply being aware of a few cultural differences to be impressive for anyone.)
If english speaking adult-aged people, with a wealth of opportunities to meet people and explore the world, are genuinely befuddled by en-GB to the point where they have to ask you to "translate" it, that's immensely embarrassing for them.
There's two dimensions here, one is US-American readers, the other is how a lot of the rest of the (non-English) world is mostly exposed to US culture through (social) media.
But that's more of a thing for millennials, I would've thought younger generations get exposed to more diverse cultures / languages / etc.
Anyway, for British-English full of cultural references, watch some of these compilations https://www.youtube.com/@OneGazillionEccentricGoldfish, Scouse is nearly incomprehensible (to my ESL ears). For difficult US-English full of cultural references, watch The Wire or Treme. Try both without subtitles.
The funny thing is for younger British people this tends to be highly asymmetric - we can (sort of!) understand Scouse or Glaswegian due to growing up here, but also almost everyone under the age of 50 grew up on a steady diet of American TV shows, hip hop etc.
I can understand The Wire fine without subtitles because most of the actors just speak relatively generic African American English instead of a proper Baltimore dialect, and that's no problem at all for someone who spent their formative years consuming Nas and Biggie and all the rest of it.
On the other hand Snoop who is the only main character with an actual Baltimore street accent is pretty much unintelligible to me, but I suspect she would be for a lot of middle class americans as well
Regarding spelling: As an unbiased foreigner, many American variants seem superior to me (color, defense, program, meter) with british just being weird (and/or tainted by the french).
Regarding Rowling: It seems to me that she gets more pushback/hate being, say "50% modern left-ish" than people that are even less aligned with left values. This gives me kinda medieval religion vibes (better an unbeliever/outsider than an apostate). I think such a valuation system is inherently flawed. Curious about your view on this.
I personally have massive problems with Rowling because of her transphobic views, as I am a transexual woman and she completely misunderstands us and has used her influence to make our lives hell in the UK. The rest of her political views aren't something I give much thought as she isn't nearly as influential in those areas
>Sidenote: If you're referring to the zombie-ant fungus, those go by Ophiocordyceps nowadays
Neat. I should probably explain why I called her that. She started noticeably becoming more unhinged a bit after she posted a picture of herself in a house that very clearly had a mould problem. Thus, as a way of coping, we (as in, the subset of the trans community I partake in) started joking that her views were caused by the mould
I can see how being personally affected would change the outlook on things like this.
It just seems to me that often people that are politically still "somewhat close" (Rowling) catch more flak than politicians that associate "transgender" with something inbetween "subhuman" and "delusional", but don't talk about it too much (because their whole electorate coulnd't care less about the topic anyway).
I had a similar impression with political fragmentation on the non-Trump side in the last US election.
But maybe the behavior is even net-beneficial in some cases, and you gain more as a movement by pushing against a Rowling instead of a Farage.
Counter example: Richard Dawkins and Robert Winston have both said similar things to Rowling and are on the left (one is a Labour peer). Neither have received anything resembling the backlash she has.
Should probably have told the writers of Wicked to not associate Elphaba with a (children's book level) evil witch. I think the Wicked Witch of the West is pretty appropriate for JK
I remember a naive cultural bias in the US towards regarding the English as possessing an elevated degree of education and refinement. I would have assumed the greater presence of truly idiotic British figures in American news media and comedy in recent decades might have clubbed that misconception to death like a baby seal.
Oxford spelling, en-GB-oxendict, is a nice halfway house - it uses the same -ize spellings (where etymologically correct) as American English, but doesn't have the simplifications (eg. colour->color).
Language is very personal. It's very reasonable to want to write in a way that feels natural to you, without constantly having to rephrase or simplify.
Surely most turns of phrase and references are easily googleable these days anyway, so it's not like it's even that hard to figure out. And if it is, you can do this amazing thing called 'asking'. I doubt the author will be mad that you want to know exactly what they meant when they wrote what they wrote.
I have to admit I have every device running some sort of voice assistant on en_GB or Australian the American voices always sound like parodies or the Walmart greeter. The intonation is perpetually trying to please me, as if programmed for relentless customer service. It's hard to explain, but there's something exhausting about a voice that's always smiling.
> American voices always sound like parodies or the Walmart greeter.
Timer set for “thirdy minnids”. Unfortunately the others also sound like parodies in their own way — the Californian's idea of en_GB, “Oi, you go' a loicense for that thir'y minute timah?”
TBF, some Australian accents put a rising intonation at the end of sentences, as though the speaker is always asking their interlocutor for approval. Just another thing that's reminiscent of Clive James' remark that too many Australians are descended from prison officers.
But they should just stop reading. It's actually not ok that it's unfamiliar, because makes you reread and get confused and distracted, all for some silly reference that doesn't make a big difference. Life is short! You can read the hard stuff when it's worth it, and just skip the rest. Surely that's the most common thing to do.
The answer is definitely still a big no, but for me the reasoning is because it will make it worse. And you apparently aren't the target audience anyway, so why should I care if you stick around.
(Whereas in the case of harry potter, the goal was to sell books, not just to produce something good).
I decided to have a bit of fun with the Accept-Lang header, if you're british it shows a totally different version of my blog including changing my name to a more british variant, a background including tea, phone booths, kings guards, busses, bulldogs and flags... and the colour scheme changes to RWB.
The original plan was actually to write two variants of every blog post, one where I write using dry wit, banter and colloquialisms, and the other with a more to the point and professional tone.
The reason I chose not to was because I thought it might be confusing when discussing the content on link aggregators (like HN)- I'm not so arrogant as to believe I write anything worth discussing, but it would violate the principle of least surprise... so I chose not to do it.
I'm curious to hear other peoples opinions, since this is the exact right subject to ask the question to relevant crowd..
You might be interested to know that the BBC has a Pidgin version.
> BBC News Pidgin now dey on Whatsapp
> No dull yoursef, be di first to get latest tori, analysis, exclusive interviews and ogbonge coverage of Nigerian and International news from BBC News Pidgin, straight to your Whatsapp.
It reads very similar to the Hawaiian Pidgin Bible.
Da time wen eryting wen start, God make da sky an da world. Da world come so no mo notting inside, no mo shape notting. On top da wild ocean dat cova eryting, neva had light notting. Ony had God Spirit dea, moving aroun ova da watta.
Day Numba One
Den God tell, “I like light fo shine!” an da light start fo shine. God see how good da light. Den he put da light on one side, an da dark on da odda side. Da light time, he give um da name “Day time.” Da dark time, he give um da name “Nite time.” So, had da nite time an da day time, az day numba one.
Day Numba Two
Den God tell, “I like get someting inside da middo fo no let da watta up dea an da watta undaneat come togedda!” An dass wat God do. God make someting fo no let da watta up dea an da watta undaneat come togedda. Da ting inside da middo, God give um da name “Da Sky.” Had da nite time an da day time, az day numba two.
Day Numba Three
Den God tell, “I like da watta unda da sky come togedda one place, so dat get dry land!” An dass wat God wen do. Da dry groun, God give um da name “Land,” an da watta dat wen come togedda one side, he give um da name “Ocean.” God look da dry groun an da ocean, an he tell, “Real, real good, all dat!”
It's technically West African Pidgin English, AKA Guinea Coast Creole English, (perhaps) AKA Cameroon Pidgin, which seems to be much the same thing and has an ISO-639 code (wes).
IMO if these are all the same language then they should perhaps be dignified with a proper name that doesn't involve the generic term "pidgin".
This is definitely manageable: canonical meta tags and other metadata; update the URL to a canonical permalink that encodes the language preference; a banner that informs people that there is an alternate version, etc.
I would love to be able to write in proper narfuck, and have which ever screen reader read it out in the authentic accent for that area (central norfolk, not norwich, broadlands or the wierdos in the fens.)
There is something deeply joyful (to me) about a thick regional accent.
TFA mentions s/Philosopher/Sorcerer/ in HP, which I confess to having confused me greatly (are Americans THAT ignorant that they are unaware of the concept?) and pleased me, since the Canadian publishing house stuck with en-GB throughout, AFAICT.
As a multilingual Canadian capable of understanding most English and French accents, I'm grateful for those who preserve and persevere with their home patois.
Funnily enough, I had a hard time with Bradley's accent the first time viewing Hot Fuzz but many hours of BritBox and Acorn and a few hours of HarbourCustoms later, no problems at all!
It reminds me of the game localisations of the 90s, where all too often they decided a game was just too Japanese for our small American brains to comprehend
I declared my blog to be `en-GB` as well, but I'm fairly sure it's neither that, nor any other pre-catalogued locale. There's just no way I'm able to know where any of the references I use came from, let alone which weird contortions I came up with by myself. There are probably a few in this short comment alone.
I was raised by an English mum[0] (scouse, to be precise -actually, her mum was scouse, me mum was posh).
I've traveled all over the world, and the one place that I've had the most difficulty understanding, was London. Cockney is hard. It's not just the patois. It's the cultural references and slang.
This was a great read and it reminded me of Bill Bryson's book, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. Such an awesome overview o how diverse and quirky and globally distributed English has become today. With the web and now the bots herding us into a more homogenized language, I'm a huuuuge fan of what this dude is doing here!!
Bill Bryson The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way was written by a journalist with no actual training in the subject matter, and there is a factual error or urban myth on virtually every single page of the book. In fact, among shoddy pop-sci books, this one is particularly notorious. You might want to read about this and see why this is a book that deserves to be forgotten.
There's a surprisingly big cultural chasm here. Acrington Stanley are a football club, that's not so weird - the US has plenty of professional sports teams and distinguishes "major" leagues, but AIUI the US doesn't have anything like the "Football Pyramid": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_league_system
If the Green Bay Packers lose every game, I think they're just back next year anyway like nothing happened? If Manchester United lost every game they're relegated and cease to be in the Premier League, some team you've never heard of which won the EFL Championship become a Premier League team next season [subject to various extra rules they can probably meet] and Man U take their place in the EFL Championship.
As a speaker of English as a second language and being educated using American English, I find British English richer in a cultural and expressive manner. It also conveys more properness.
Excuse me, but I believe you meant to say this bloug is written in en-GB.
More seriously... you know, 30 or 40 years ago, I can sort of understand this attitude. Today, in the amount of time it takes you to complain, you could have popped the word into Google or something instead and learned what it was instead. Probably in less than the amount of time it took you to complain for an online blog. And you might learn something interesting.
When I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a thing called the "generation gap". It originally referred to something closer to the difference between the Hippies and their Greatest Generation parents, but it was smoothly repurposed into the differences between GenX and the Boomers, and the way we could have slang that was not decodeable by our parents.
I haven't heard the term in a while. The "generation gap" isn't what it used to be and there is less need for a term for it. I'm not entirely certain but I probably heard about "6-7" before my kids did. Urban Dictionary may not be the most reliable source in an academic sense but you can get a very fast sense of what something means from its entries, especially if you read them with a postmodern analysis eye and not just for the plain text.
I also find it a bit weird when people my age or the boomer generation complain about the kid's slang, because it's so easy to decode. You can't possible have a national-level kid's slang without an internet explainer 15 seconds away. It's not that hard anymore.
I've had a weblog since 1999. I know where the word comes from. Try rereading in light of that; if you need more hint consider why the author's spellchecker might put a red wiggly underline under the letters "color".
Consult BigTTYGothGF's reply to my post for more cluestick. (If I'm channeling the late 1990s might as well go all the way and pull out some dead lingo.)
Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but nobody has any moral obligation to be inclusive in content they share on their personal blog, for free, and nobody should reasonably expect it.
I’ve seen a lot of blog entries using typography so horrible, I had to use reader view to read the page—there was a trend in the mid-2010s to use pencil-thin fonts and there is now and then still a blog out there using one of those unreadable pencil-thin fonts.
However, this blog uses a very readable font called “Atkinson Hyperlegible” and I had no problem reading it. If the color scheme bothers you, click on “eInk” in the theme switcher on the top.
Disclaimers: No relationship to the owner of this blog. No AI used in this posting; I have the em-dash (—) in my custom keyboard layout.
Indeed, unreadable typography (and the need for Reader View) is one of my most common annoyances with sites posted to HN - but I don't see how it's applicable to this site in any way?
I think that "en-GB" is not sufficiently descriptive. There are 160 dialects of English [0]. Within the island of Great Britain there are three historic countries with distinctive usages of language: England, Wales, and Scotland. There might be more mutual unintelligibility within GB than across North America.
The French didn't like it when the Lingua Franca switched from French to English and the Brits still whine that British English is no longer the dominant variety.
It's a trade-off: you can write in your regional dialect or you can write in a more widely understood global style.
It's not really comparable, almost every native English speaker can understand most British English fine, it's only when people use excessive slang or regional accents that people have issues (and that's an issue with any language - it can easily be an issue among native speakers within the UK!).
It doesn't really matter if you natively speak British English instead of American English, whereas French and English are obviously completely different languages and the switch made French a lot less useful and English a lot more useful
If I (a Brit) moves to the US, I'd absolutely get a Yorkshire-branded tea caddy filled with teabags on my desk. Sometimes you need to live up to the stereotypes.
May be decorative only —- Isn’t it due due to their wimpy electricity that it takes forever to boil a kettle and that’s why everyone gets coffee externally? Or, absolute horror, they microwave teacups….
I've always wondered, do that many brits actually like tea or is it more of a cultural thing? I've very rarely had a tea I like (though, I've never had one I actively disliked), and I can't imagine that's the case for most people but it makes me wonder
The majority like it, though there's always a debate about the correct preparation method. I've always felt like a bit of an outsider whenever a brew is offered and I ask if they have coffee, and I've lived here all mi life.
I've never heard of this depite being from the UK. It seems to be some ad from 1989. Although I do remember many classic ads from the 1980's I don't recall this. Is it an English / Scottish thing ? Who knows.
Why is Accrington Stanley so famous?
Ian Rush reflects on famous milk advert ahead of Liverpool v ...
Accrington Stanley achieved worldwide fame primarily due to a legendary 1989 television advert for the Milk Marketing Board. In the iconic commercial, two young Liverpool fans debate whether to drink milk. One claims that football star Ian Rush told him, "If you don't drink lots of milk, you'll only be good enough to play for Accrington Stanley". The other boy questions, "Accrington Stanley? Who are they?", prompting the reply, "Exactly". The slogan became a massive pop-culture catchphrase in the UK, turning a then-obscure non-league team into the most famous minnows in football.
the irony of an Englishman complaining about Americans assuming cultural expectations, whilst simultaneously doing the same thing to fellows from outwith England and Wales. Yes I did say 'outwith'.
My first thought after reading is that I fear for the author's safety. From the outside, this does not appear to be a safe time to express nationalism or cultural pride in the UK. The Internet is not free in the UK and decreasingly so in the rest of the world.
There's a rather large and easily understood difference between wanting to preserve your Britishness in the face of the Americans, and joining Lennon-Yaxleys band of gammon faced flag shaggers (though flying the flag is less of a signal while the footies on).
More generally, we Brits draw a measure of distinction between cultural pride and nationalism: the former is good, and we have plenty of it; the latter is viewed with suspicion, for good reason.
Their comment is even funnier considering the sudden rise of Farage and Friends.
Their attempts to claim culture is governed by strong borders is also hilarious when an hour's drive in any direction from London would expose them to people they probably wouldn't even realise are speaking English.
I've always wondered why people who so proudly claim to not be from here speak with such authority about how it is to live here.
It's Fox news claimed no-go zones and Sharia law cities all over again. Utter bullshit.
If you are from Europe, even if you're not living in the UK, the en-GB locale will feel a lot more familiar to you than the en-US one.
It uses the dd-mm-yyyy date format like the rest of Europe, the start of the week is on Monday (vs Sunday in the US), the default paper size is A4 (vs US letter), measurement defaults are metric (indeed UK roads use imperial, but the default is otherwise metric), the time format uses 24hrs (vs AM/PM in the US).
So thankful that we use the correct date format (yyyy-mm-dd) in Sweden.
Can I just say that, as someone born and bred in the UK, YYYY-MM-DD is the only correct way to display a date wherever you live.
Anything else is as bad as using mm:hh...
> Anything else is as bad as using mm:hh...
Please tell me that's not a thing.
It is now.
In a moment of whimsy I briefly considered a date format where digits were sorted alphabetically.
2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667
Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.
Well that's just totally ambiguous. What you should do instead is treat the date as one long number and present its factors, for instance 2⁴⋅11⋅7649⋅15050023, much more practical.
How about just sort the numbers from biggest to smallest?
2026-07-02 16:45 becomes
2026-45-16-06-02
Bonus points for using a very confusing separator... Maybe {?
Wait, can this format be transformed back to the "normal" format? If so, then it could be kinda viable for some operations... :thinking_emoji:
No, it can't be transformed back because it has lost information.
2025-06 and 2026-05 both have the same digits, for example.
No, it's an unreversible hash function. I use this for passwords - no one will ever be able to figure out what ehntru2 was originally.
No, because "12".sort_by_digits() == "21".sort_by_digits()
as an American this is my favorite format. Sortable, and the mm-dd order reflects the standard American way of writing month+day, and yyyy is unambiguously the year since it's 4 letters. Best of both worlds.
That's also the ISO standard since it sorts correctly
I believe it's the ISO standard because it is obviously distinguishable from both the MM-DD-YY (US) date order and the DD-MM-YY (UK/EU/Others) date order and so is unambiguous.
https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html
The fact that they are then sortable is a nice side benefit!
Wrong decimal tho.
Why isn't there an en-EU or en-ISO locale that has:
The European Commission published its own language guide. In terms of English it's only a small deviation from en-GB, but my first thought was indeed: when can I set en-EU?
I've taken to using the Swedish locale for that very reason (French-American living in the UK).
The superior date format. Superior to all others.
Not to mention the fact that English basically everywhere else but the US is essentially en-GB with a few choice changes and anachronisms. Consider en-IN, en-IE, en-SG, en-MY, en-AU, en-NZ, etc.
I started writing something a while ago with preliminary title “Do en and en-US, not en and en-GB”.
If you cluster English dialects by various characteristics, you’ll end up with en-US as a clear outlier. I believe that, if you’re going to divide English into two camps, the best is “English (International)” and “English (US)”. Canadian English is the one that’s closest to US English, but even it works at least as well based on International English as regards spelling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s... is an interesting read).
But there’s a lot more to it than spelling, and here the distinction is even clearer: the US has its own length, area, volume, weight and temperature units that no one else uses; its own stupid date format that everyone else loathes; its own paper sizes that no one else knows what to do with.
Not everyone else agrees on which date format to use, but we do all agree that any of our formats (DD/MM/YY, DD-MM-YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD, &c.) are better than the US’s middle-endian monstrosity. Though if we see the likes of DD/MM/YYYY we may mistrust whether it’s actually MM/DD/YYYY.
I also believe that you should default to English (International) for all users geolocated outside the USA.
Once you’ve get this divide right, adding further dialects also probably becomes quite a bit easier. But I do wish for diamond inheritance of locales: so you can mix in -ise/-ize, -yse/-yze, -re/-er, -ence/-ense, program/programme, and thereby deduplicate a fair bit across locales.
(There are still plenty of differences: such as time formats; decimal/grouping separators though I believe all places where English is a main language use . for decimal and , for grouping; even number grouping varies: en-IN does 1,23,45,678 rather than 12,345,678; keyboard layout; word choices; and lots more.)
(One last point: the naming is a bit fiddly. “Spanish (International)” means Spanish as used outside Spain. “English (International)” means the broad international/non-US consensus of what English is, generally following what England does but probably with kilometres instead of miles for long distances.)
Unfortunately en-CA is not really supported as a locale and we have to choose between en-US and en-GB. I’ll usually choose the latter, because despite more differences in language, there is more alignment between Canada and British English in spelling, units, and style.
I really wish en-CA was as well supported as fr-CA honestly.
> preliminary title “Do en and en-US,
You mean "English" and "English (Simplified)"?
Some of the spellings are simplified, but the rest of it (units and such) is complicationified.
I can’t find en-En…
So in East Asia they basically teach British English. Seeing that made it clear to me.
Same as in Balkans. We literally used coursebooks from Britain.
In Europe (at least DE and NL), we also usually are taught British English in schools.
Except that if you were brought up in the 50s/60s/70s/80s in the Netherlands, you may have learned to speak English with what sounds to a Brit like an American accent, in part because so many of your EFL teachers were former US soldiers or their spouses who settled. (Exposure to US media is a secondary aspect)
This was a very noticeable phase in the UK; I knew several Dutch people who were fully unaware they had American accents and some American linguistic traits until they got here.
Whereas Dutch friends of my father who learned English before WWII had actually quite plummy English accents.
In a number of European countries now, US English is now taught, and this superseded UK English already a generation ago.
I prefer en-IE, which is the same plus Euro as the default currency.
And kilometers instead of miles.
In earlier versions of OS X, setting your date format to have the day before the month was sufficient to also alter the default paper size to A4, which was really inconvenient for me since I prefer the day-month ordering (and as a consequence of buying a digital watch in the Netherlands which only had instructions in Dutch which I didn’t understand, I developed the habit of using 24 hour time), but I live in the US and only rarely encounter paper which isn’t 8.5x11.
Don't you mean paper which isn't 215.9 by 279.4 mm?
Go on, switch your thermostat in the US to degrees C. Join us.
> It uses the dd-mm-yyyy date format like the rest of Europe
Everywhere sane uses a monotonic order: either increasing or decreasing units. Americans had to be different, somehow - it's a compulsion.
The time format in the UK is mostly 12hr, although people are generally aware of 24hr time. In my experience, while there are usually more similarities between the UK and the rest of Europe, Europeans also have more exposure to American English than to British English, so it ends up being a bit of a wash, particularly when it comes to pronunciation, spelling, or idioms.
In the UK anything "serious" like a train/plane ticket/timetable uses the 24 hour clock. That includes the default way to show a digital clock on a watch, phone or computer.
Timetables yes, but whenever I've bought a digital watch or set up a new device, the default has always been 12-hour. If you ask people the time in the afternoon, they will almost always give you the 12-hour format. People can understand both, but typically default to 12-hour times.
This is in stark constrast to Germany, say, where people colloquially use 24-hour times, with some exceptions for round times (e.g. 17:00 might be called "um fünf", but 17:05 would usually be described as "siebzehn uhr fünf", roughly translated as "seventeen oh five".
This might have changed in the last five years or so since I was living in the UK, but I've never noticed this be different when I was visiting, nor when speaking to British friends or colleagues.
Not "serious" per se, but anything which can be subject to misunderstanding.
It’s been years since I saw any am/pm time in written form, while people will say 7:30, they will write 19:30
In my experience, people do sometimes still use am/pm for whole hour times ("4pm"), especially in informal writing.
But it would be beyond bizarre to write "3:59 pm"
"Beyond bizarre"? Why? "3:59pm" (and 7:30pm, regarding the post above) is exactly what's usually written in the UK. Technical use (24-hour) is different from the standard use used by the general population.
I read several blogs that use British English, including this OP's blog. Some of my favourite blogs in my RSS reader are British English blogs, or at least they use British English spellings and grammar. I find their use of the English language very charming and funny in a unique way.
It surprises me that anyone would feel entitled to ask a blogger to change the variety of English they use. American English is only one of many forms of English. The world is richer for its many varieties of English, and languages, and that diversity makes it more interesting, not less.
The way Americans speak and write, when compared to actual English, is terrible. No structure, wrong and misplaced punctuation, and lax grammar (if any). Speaking is even worse: a diarrhea of filler words, like 'like', 'I mean', and 'you know'. Practically no living American knows neither the word 'whom' nor when to use it. It's as if grammatical casing had been declared unconstitutional. If you ask me, it's more a speech impediment than any other classification.
But the thing is that every one (at least those below a certain age) speaks like this these days, thanks to the non-stop American content online. So it's basically normalized. This is why it's on my publish wish list that someone develops an AI that can filter out the American-ness, thereby Making English Great Again (MEGA).
Further, I think that institutions (those pertaining to education, at least) elsewhere in the world should issue PSA about too much exposure to American content--both written and spoken--and offer or mandate detox sessions.
Perhaps the only American to whom (there it is!) I can bear listening, is Steven Pinker.
Actually, it's "either the word 'whom' or when to use it". I guess you should learn actual English.
Certain cultures teach that diversity is a bad thing to be feared and extinguished. Diversity is only a good thing when your mind has been poisoned by "education" and "experience".
It requires an open mind to see diverse experiences as a good thing, and certain cultures think having citizens with open minds is an unprofitable way to run a society.
More approachable framing: tribalism (generally accepted human tendency) is inherently anti-diversity.
Just today
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/mandarin-...
Mainland Chinese gov't claims to have 56 official ethnicities in their country. They are certainly celebrated by official media. In particular, they seem to love the southwest portion of the country (Guangxi and Yunnan) with many mountaineous regions and various ethnic groups, mostly because they do not protest the central gov't. Also, look at the coins and bills of yuan -- many different ethnicities.
The one where I live :(
I'm sorry for that. Where?
Is it bait? I'm pretty sure it's a reasonably factual, albeit general claim. Asking chatGPT for country-specific examples for instance gives this:
> Yes—some countries have (at various times, and in some cases still today) adopted policies aimed at making the population more “homogeneous,” through segregation, assimilation pressure, or exclusion/deportation. Concrete examples:
- South Africa (apartheid era, 1948–1990s): An official system of racial classification and enforced separation (“separate development”).
- Germany (Nazi period, 1933–1945): State ideology enforced a racial hierarchy and pursued forced removal and mass murder of those deemed “undesirable.”
- Israel (state policies affecting Palestinian citizens and occupied territory, especially since 1967): Includes laws and administrative practices that many observers describe as producing or enforcing unequal status by group; key issues include citizenship status differences and restrictions tied to national/ethnic identity.
- Myanmar (Rohingya): Policies and law enforcement that stripped/blocked citizenship for Rohingya and enabled persecution, culminating in mass violence and displacement.
- Canada (Indigenous assimilation policy, especially 19th–20th century into 1996): Forced assimilation via residential schools and bans on language/cultural practices; many have characterized this as cultural genocide.
- United States (Jim Crow + earlier immigration/citizenship rules; and internment): Historical legal regimes created segregation and restricted citizenship/naturalization based on race/national origin (e.g., earlier Asian-exclusion immigration restrictions).
You may disagree with some examples on this list, but I'm sure even you would consider that the first two are clear examples of diversity-fearing 'cultures' rather than 'bait'. And this is even before considering the wider definition of the word 'culture', which can be even more exclusionary.
I would edit the US item to remove “historical” given the current efforts to reinstate everything in parentheses and add new ones.
Fair point. I did not write my response from a historical viewpoint. I was writing from a current persepective. To give credit to their reply, many of their example are correct. With the exception of some very backwards dictatorships, at this point, pretty much most countries value some diversity. Plus, after 2010, all people under 30 have watched thousands of hours of YouTube, so they know the world is big, cool, and very diverse.
Have you never met a pro ICE person from USA?
Ok sure. The Home Secretary just banned new asylum seeker housing near schools and nurseries, fyi.
Right. As a Brit I am entitled to think we speak the best version (because we do; ISE is a close second) but I am not entitled to believe everyone else's is wrong, because that is ahistorical. They have diverged repeatedly and thus ours is one of the divergences.
Much of British English was standardised long after several waves of the US settlers left our shores, so US english has some traits of pre-standardised English dialects, and ours is different again.
It's equally silly when some Americans claim their English is closer to the "true" English as a result, because, again, there was really no standardised "true" English when they left.
Along with some simplifications and some things reintroduced from german settlers, it has some traits of older English that the British abandoned in our own simplification of the language.
Is ours the best? Of course it bloody is :-) But is it "true" English? No more than anyone else's. That is the enormous power of English.
What is ISE?
I mean Indian Standard English here.
I have never heard of a thing called “Indian Standard English”, nor (as an Australian who has moved to India) does it sound a very realistic concept. Can’t find any search results for it as a phrase, either.
Sometimes used as a term in linguistics.
Put it in quotes: "Indian Standard English" and you will see plenty of results.
https://www.google.com/?q=%22Indian+Standard+English%22
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/eww.24...
It doesn't mean a written standard exists.
Maybe it's called Standard Indian English or just Indian English in other contexts; I'm only using a term I've seen used.
For comparison: <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22indian+standard+english%22>, exactly zero results.
OK
I agree in general, but there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'. This means roughly the opposite in British and US English, and there's often insufficient surrounding context to alert the reader to their error.
(OTOH I don't think you should suppress 'false friends' like biscuits, pants etc.)
>there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'.
Another exception: "moot", as in "moot point". In the UK it means "subject to debate", while in the US it means "inconsequential and therefore not subject to debate".
I'm British but I always understood it as the second meaning. e.g. "We were going to consider XYZ but now it's a moot point because the project is cancelled."
I've heard it used that way in the UK too, but the first meaning is traditional. Wiktionary has some examples:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot
I expect the US meaning will eventually become standard everywhere.
It sort of means both simultaneously, doesn't it (we could discuss it but it's inconsequential), but we do tend to use it in that formulation most.
There are a few others. “Quite” comes to mind — “I am quite hungry” or “that meal was quite good” can mean opposite things, depending on the speaker region and even voice inflexion if spoken.
Once you start going in that direction, a lot of things that British people say can require some amount of translation, see e.g. this table: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:640/format:webp/0*0Fs1...
Honestly it's not the first time I read such comments, and... they're not about the British as much as they are about the Americans, I'd say.
I think almost all of the expressions in the left-hand side have direct, almost literal equivalents in French for example, with the same meaning as they have for the British, including being very context-dependent.
Also works for Flemish by the way, although the Dutch are supposed to be more literal so maybe Flemish/Dutch is to be seen the same way as British/American.
Quite, indeed, has no simple meaning in British English. Any non-British attempt to assign one meaning that is different to their regional meaning is doomed to failure :-)
I use it in different senses all the time.
Imagine someone wrote a blog in some obscure language that few people speak. If you happen to know that language, you'd think wow this is great. If you don't happen to know that language, you'd just think it's a shame. This is the same thing, just to a lesser degree. Some people might be interested in putting in the effort to learn a bunch of foreign cultural references, but not everyone.
I am the only Brit in the department I work in. No one gets the cultural references or British idioms I use, and I've found myself significantly changing the language I use to a very utilitarian and direct style to prevent the endless blank stares... reading this blog post just made me realise that this self-editing has made my interactions rather more 'flat' and unnatural, as they now lack spontaneity, with everything passing through a secondary filter before leaving my brain.
Unfortunately in multi-cultural workplaces language is driven to common denominators for efficiency.
I have a cunning plan: Sneak as many Brits into Hollywood as possible, and have them slip in as many British references into American films as they can. Over time, they'll effectively BECOME British, and Robert's your father's brother!
Just whatever you do, don't mention the taxes! I did once, but I think I got away with it...
Is it as cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford university?
Oh Baldrick, you must have attended one of the great Universities. Oxford. Cambridge. Hull.
I got that last reference. That episode has the funniest exchange in the history of television:
—He keeps talking about the war.
—Well you started it.
—No we didn’t.
—Yes, you did. You invaded Poland!
Wasn't that already attempted once, in the 1950s?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_American_Speech
I do wonder how many americas say “dayta” instead of “darta”, and “fewtile” rather than “fewtill” due to Patrick Stewart’s influence.
I experienced this. I only lived in the U.K. for 6 months, but the number of chiefly British phrases/words/idioms that nestled their way into my way of speaking and stayed (20+ years on) was interesting and somewhat surprising.
For example, I never said "supposed to" again — "meant to" has always sounded and felt so much better. Similarly, "can't be bothered/asked" often exactly describes the situation in a way that "I don't want to" seemingly can't.
I'd also like to add "bum bag" v. "fanny pack" was a valuable lesson and a memorable laugh.
> can't be bothered/asked
Aussie translation: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/can%27t_be_fucked
> can't be asked
What you heard wasn't what they were saying.
what was it then
Arsed. Both are used in my experience, though arsed seems more common. Could be regional.
I live in Sweden (and have for 11 years), a lot of the "charm" in my speech has been filed away, I speak in a very neutral accent (which barely registers as british anymore) and I use americanisms a lot, avoiding "false friends".
(IE; I never use the word "chip" to mean crisps or fries - I will instead use "Crisps", despite it being british, and fries, despite it being American; in order to avoid ambiguity.)
The more difficult one is "pants", I would say underwear or trousers.
It's interesting how I only notice how much it's contrasted when I go back to the UK and hear others, I notice people using words that I've put a mental "X" on, and its only then that I realise that I've put the mental "X" on the word... because it no longer feels natural to hear it.
I don't do the "chips" one, because it's usually clear enough from context, and the people I speak English to generally know me and my foibles. But I do religiously say "half past 6" now, instead of shortening it to "half six". In Germany, you count towards the next hour, so our "half past six" is their "half to seven".
To avoid ambiguity, I always say "half past" in English so that Germans (and I!) remember to compensate for the language barrier. Unfortunately "half to" isn't really a thing in German, so I can't do the opposite when I'm speaking German.
It's more complicated than this and how you say "quarter to eleven" is A Whole Thing in Germany, but everyone agrees on the half hour at least
> (IE; I never use the word "chip" to mean crisps or fries - I will instead use "Crisps", despite it being british, and fries, despite it being American; in order to avoid ambiguity.)
In Australia we don't care about ambiguity or clarity and refer to both the thin sliced cold things and freshly fried rectangular ones as "chips"
I live in Denmark, and for such basic words (crisps, trousers, maths, aluminium, football, quid, couldn't care less, fire engine, motorway, petrol, public transport, railway, tram) I use my native British words.
People occasionally comment that it's a British word, but being misunderstood is so unusual I can't remember a recent example. Essentially everyone has read/watched Harry Potter, Dr Who or Midsomer Murders, and Europeans are probably ten times more likely to have visited the UK as the USA.
Fire engine and railway aren't specifically British. There are much better words like boffin, or my favorite, bellend.
Wait, "couldn't care less" is British?
I think everyone says “couldn’t care less”. But Wiktionary does say “could care less” is “American, nonstandard, proscribed”, so I guess only Americans have that (defective) alternative phrase.
Many/most Americans say something like "I could care less about the World Cup".
British people say "I couldn't care less about the World Cup".
Both are saying they have no interest at all in the World Cup. I don't know why Americans phrase it that way.
To give a documented example, the lyrics of Teenagers by My Chemical Romance:
I always assumed the American version was using "could" ironically. Now I'm wonder if is an unintentional neologism.
Ah, I'd heard that latter one, but I thought that was just a mistake in the sense of "could of". TIL!
I have a similar experience, for the last 5+ years I've worked in companies where very few of the people I work with are British which does require care on both language and idiom. Combined with being older than a lot of colleagues, cultural references need to be picked with care :D
I had that when workign with a lot of other Europeans. When I moved to a company where everyone was British I had to re-adapt, particularly because I'd become more direct after working with a lot of Germans.
I am the only Brit in the department I work in. No one gets the cultural references or British idioms I use…
Oh, fer feck’s s sake, it’s not like the U.S. hasn’t had Monty Python for fifty years. Me, after a steady diet of British motorcycle magazine’s for the last 40 years, I speak Brit just fine. But I would think the diversity and prevalence of online forums would get folks up to speed. I dunno, maybe people just don’t pay that much attention.
OTOH, I do recall an Australia coworker who expressed appreciation that he didn’t have to explain idioms to me (Oz has moto mags, too). Obviously it’s a real problem even in this age of connections.
I wish you worked with me, in that case.
I've had the pleasure of working with many different people from different backgrounds, including many Brits. I've always found the dry, understated humor from them to be endearing, making casual conversation more interesting. My parents are both from the Middle East, my wife is from Southeast Asia, and I have many Middle Eastern, Desi, African American as well as African (as in continental) friends, so I may not be a "typical" American in that regard.
That being said, don't underestimate the value you bring by sharing your cultural insights. I don't think I told anyone to their face that appreciated their cultural value, but I hoped that my engagement and cheerfulness in dealing with them at least communicated that I was happy with their presence.
It might be that your engagement with someone opens them up to a part of the world they've yet to experience or know much about. Granted, there are lots of places with more gaps than the US and the UK, but there's still value in that and I started with those examples but mentioned it comes from all sides.
Cultural insights are one thing but the issue is if you slip into full flow of Britishisms and let your accent loose people who only speak English as a second language can't understand what you're saying.
There's nothing unique about this though, it's the same for every language - it's one thing knowing Spanish well enough to hold a conversation where the other person is speaking slowly and making it easy for you, it's quite another to be able to slot into a group of native Chilean Spanish speakers in full flow.
I travel a lot so I'm used to adapting my use of English depending on who I'm talking to. I find there's a way to express things and still enjoy using the language without making it hard for non-native speakers to understand. But also, when you do end up in a group of entirely Brits it is fun to be able to just let loose
When I moved to the states nearly 20 years ago, my pronunciation sharpened up (stopped dropping consonants) very quickly. Over time I stopped using idioms, and the few bits of Cockney Rhyming slang I used (Butchers, Scooby; which are look, and clue, respectively).
I think it was less as a conscious act and more as a result of just not being around people that use them. There's a sizeable element of cultural reinforcement involved.
That said, they'll pry my British spelling out of my cold, dead, hands.
I worked in a US office for a while (but with a few other British people as well). I didn't feel the need to edit my sense of humour luckily, but I purposefully switched to saying things like "sidewalk", "elevator" and "bathroom" because it made interactions a lot easier.
I'm American, but I've said "washroom" for a long time because I'm not asking to take a bash, but at least I wash at some point afterwards. Most people seem to understand fine, but I do get a few now and then.
Funny story, I was visiting Hong Kong one time, and asked the young waiter, who seemed to speak English just fine, where the washroom was. Blank stare. Bathroom? Cesuo (Mandarin)? All blank stares. I was a little out of options at that point... Turned out the word I was looking for was "toilet", which is a word I never use.
Are your other department members (a) native English speakers, but not British, or (b) non-native English speakers? In my experience, there is a huge difference. I am a native English speaker. When speaking with (a) but from a different region, you can usually speak in your normal style, but don't use too much slang. With (b), I remove any slang and choose my words much more carefully. My goal is to communicate well, even if I need to adapt my style.
I'm often shuffled into teams where I am the only American and everyone else is Indian, working in India, and I take a small measure of pride in switching to the formal register that Indians like to use in workplace English, and using the idioms they have.
There's a big difference between live discussion and blog. A blog reader can search what something means, live listeners cannot.
+1 very similar situation, one of only two Brits the rest from all.over who speak "international English"
Despite all the woke stuff I still have to hide my en-GB background in my BigCo
> "Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."
Well, then... G'day, mate! Let's put another shrimp on the barbie!
Think of it as learning a second language. It should be a lot easier for you than most people.
The ultimate irony is that many folks asking for things to be “more inclusive” are asking for someone else to modify their behavior to fit the requester’s preference and definition of the “right” way, which is the literal opposite of being inclusive.
This blog calls that out brilliantly.
It’s always the ones shouting loudest about inclusivity
This French person has taken to writing in en-GB, as a token of protest against current USAian politics. I thank the USA for this step in French-British rapprochement !
Also, in the late 90's, The Register made me love British English... Local accents are great branding.
I really want to see a local Euro English[0] develop as an actual, recognized variant of English. Both because it would be really funny, but also as a way for Continental Europe to develop a common language we can shape our own way
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English (we don't have to take the examples in this page as-is, we can definitely make better local oddities!)
> Euro English
I call it Eurospeak, for extra outrage - though that word currently has European Union civil service connotations (cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eurospeak)
Eurospeak is definitely the language of international corporate meetings !
I think it's a bit quick to want that variant to be actual already, but eventual we might be able to make it work.
well done, took me a bit to notice :)
It's a weird broken import of French (could be because the EU Parliament) is in Brussels so highly French-speaking. It's also still very incoherent, it mixes up billion and trillion, and it mixes up milliard (the French equivalent) with billion. You absolutely do not want ambiguity there when you work professionally as a politician.
deadline supposed to come from delay but it is incorrect use in French. cabinet is toilet. etc
It's an artificial invented variant, like a kid would invent its own language to speak to other kids, not something that was born out of habit and unified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto shares a similar issue but at least it's cute and more logical though.
AI would be good at creating an international language
I would much prefer French be used for that purpose as the brits clearly no longer want anything to do with the rest of Europe
ETA: Esperanto or Interlingua would also be acceptable
I did not know "Euro English" was a thing. By the look of it, it isn't a language, it's just a euphemism for incorrect English as spoken by non-native speakers in Europe.
That's how a local language starts
How I long for an Esperanto-speaking Europe...
I love Esperanto and would love to see it more widely adopted, but I feel like Interlingua is better for the specific purpose of EU usage
I can’t say I understand this new current of culture/writing. It’s something like: get angry, turn small acts into grand acts of social defiance, and signal your social ingroup by referencing other things we are angry about.
“Do you remember that JK Rowling lady we all hate because she’s an evil witch? Haha, yeah. Anyways, I’m British and I’m going to keep writing like I’m British.”
Edit: I agree with the thesis. You have a culture; don’t filter it. Differences are beautiful. I’d rather live in a melting pot. Etc. Separately this new communication style is hard to stomach. Ive seen it growing in popularity in the U.S. - seems like there too?
You seem to be unaware of one of the British idioms used in language, it's called "A joke".
Calling her 'the wicked with of the terfs' was one of those. I found it quite funny personally. I can find the joke funny despite my opinion of Rowling as a person or her statements on particular topics. Sometimes, here in the UK, we make jokes featuring people because the joke is funny, not just to virtue signal.
Here in the UK, there is a significant section of the population whose base state is mildly dissatisfied and the external manifestation of that is low level grumbling about minor things. It's not a virtue signal, it's not a statement, it is just how they are. You may do better understanding if you take off your glasses of American Exceptionalism and view things more objectively.
Ironically, your post could very easily be read that you were upset by the article, wanted to express that to strangers, and signalled your social ingroup by referencing other things you were upset about, like the joke.
This post contains more than one joke also. Some people will get them, some will not. And that's OK.
I feel this post is also an example of the the British past time of having a moan.
It's a stereotype that Brits can be miserable and complain a lot, but the truth is most of us just enjoy having a moan about ultimately inconsequential things.
The example that comes to mind is just how many of the blokes I know will complain about reality shows like Married at First Sight or Love is Blind, yet will sit down with their partner each evening to watch them.
The uninformed might suggest they simply don't watch the shows if they're annoyed by them, but if they didn't watch they'd have nothing to moan about, and that's half the fun!
While I'm sure the blog post was made primarily for sparking discussion around the point of la guage differences, I wouldn't be surprised if simply having a moan about something perceived as mildly irritating but otherwise inconsequential wasn't also a driving factor. :)
It would be more of a joke if there was a connection between "west" and "terfs".
> Here in the UK, there is a significant section of the population whose base state is mildly dissatisfied and the external manifestation of that is low level grumbling about minor things
Does that have a name? What causes it? Is it a proud cultural tradition, or more a sort of disease?
I've lived in the UK all my life and have the same thoughts as GP.
Huh, that's a good observation. I, too, find that this style of text irritating. I looked through my own blog to try to look for such examples and found a few that do fit the frame. Reading this skeleton of such structure I realize I find such posts boring to read but have definitely written them before. Mortifying. A good negative example to add to the mental gate.
Americans often don't twig how many random american terms we brits have to learn the double meaning of and don't pipe up about. I'm not talking the well-known ones like cookies, but even things like "the ER" meaning "A&E"
Sometimes it's their turn to repay the favour
If you want to read some hilarious reactions of Americans panicking when they are suddenly exposed to non-American English/British accents, check out these threads:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PawPatrol/comments/1q68v16/british_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PawPatrol/comments/17wcsdm/my_digit...
I'm not sure "panicking" is the best word to describe a couple of parents wondering why the characters suddenly have different accents. But maybe I'm too American and "panicking" means something else for Brits.
Not even the accents - different voices are annoying enough. When I was young I watched some cartoons in English, and hearing them in Dutch later, despite being my native language, was still uncomfortable.
If those posts are examples of 'panicking' we have yet another idiom I've just learned about.
Sometimes Americans wonder why English characters start talking about a basic cable channel when they really should be seeking medical help.
Cable channel? Are you talking about fibre-optic frequency channels? What kind of cable are we talking?
Perhaps you can be more inclusive in your language on the future.
As a non-American I don't know what "basic cable" is (or what the other tiers are), just that you don't have free-to-air TV
As far as I'm aware the US does have free OTA TV. A quick google tells me that basic cable means the cheapest tier of cable. So maybe equivalent to a sky/cable entertainment package?
Yep, we do have free OTA television. Basic Cable generally comprises the local free OTA channels plus a number of mostly ad-supported channels.
The basic cable A&E began its life as “Arts & Entertainment” and was originally a mix of British import shows and high culture presentations (e.g., televised orchestra concerts). But much like carcinisation in aquatic invertebrates, for basic cable, apparently channels tend to evolve towards mostly showing Law & Order reruns.
I've watched the World Cup over free-to-air TV, US has a really fun match last night. I don't know where you got this idea from. I haven't paid for television service in decades.
I wish US english had a term as good as ‘twig’ for when someone doesn’t get something.
You could just use the US terms, then you wouldn't have to learn both.
I have one personal example where the inches, pounds, centimeters and stones don't matter - the archery community. "This bow was measured to produce 50 pounds of force at 28" draw length." Nobody argues about it, or takes it personally or tries convert to joules. It's a convention. Everyone uses it, from English Long Bow makers to the Koreans and the Chinese, et al. Similar with the firearms, American enthusiast don't insist on converting 9mm Luger to 0.354" and many of us know what Kurtz means.
I'll die on the Fahrenheit hill though. A 100F is 100% torture. 70% (70F) is tolerable. 35.3C tells me nothing on a scale.
> OK, accents are a whole can of worms. Regional English is varied. I'm not sure if there are any BCP-style tags for intra-country accents.
This comment is written in en-GB-Brummie.
I have sometimes pondered if we could expand the language codes with ISO 3166-2.
Would en-GB-WLL be a valid variant of English?
Does en-GB-Brummie cover the whole of the Black Country?
Why would you even say something like that? Haven't those people suffered enough?
No, that's en-GB-Yamyam.
Being proud of your culture including your language and exercising it, at the risk of readers not understanding everything immediately, is not racism. In the worst case, a non-British gets curious about one expression or the other and looks it up. That's engagement.
It's funny, and perhaps not entirely unwarranted, that "racism" pops up here?
As a Black American, I find the author's idea extremely interesting and naturally began to wonder -- what might this idea (in code?) look like for us?
Owing to history and whatnot, the role "Black American English" might play is of course very much a moving target, but it's interesting to think about.
As a writer and amateur linguist I can always spot the people who don’t understand how AAVE works because they seem to think that it’s just “bad grammar” and don’t realize that it does in fact have its own grammatical rules. One that’s not exclusive to AAVE, but is common across most informal spoken English in the US (maybe beyond—I know there’s at least one Genesis song that uses this which suggests it may exist in informal British spoken grammar), is the use of the oblique case when a subject has two or more elements joined by and: “Steve and him went to the store” insted of “He and Steve went to the store.” (Ordering is also subject to different ordering with formal English dictating that the first person pronoun comes last, but informal English putting it first: “Me and him” vs “He and I.”
The other thing I find interesting is that formal English has eschewed the double negative as an intensifier while most (all?) other Indo-European languages employ it. Compare Spanish “No veo nadie” (literally ”I don’t see nobody“ which is the informal English formulation) to English “I don’t see anybody.”
As one example I have seen plenty of Code read Color redColour = .....
That is how it often manifests, the bits the Brits get to choose is in their own language and spelling.
Is there an internationally agreed upon standard for designating AAV? I suppose it's a large and influential enough dialect it wouldn't hurt to have one
The main people who'd want such a thing would be linguists, so that they can label samples.
The non-prestige dialects of a language don't usually attract official interest, not least because officially the people who understand that dialect could also understand a prestige variant. Scousers may not talk like King Charles among themselves, but if he speaks they're not confused about what the King is saying even if they wouldn't use those words or say them that way.
This might get sketchier for Chinese topolects where the official government policy is that China has a single language, "Standard Chinese" but, those topolects sure do seem like different languages if you didn't know about the policy. However AAV is nowhere close to that, I can't imagine that anybody who uses AAV normally watches "Last Week Tonight" and goes "That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?".
In fairness, I think that's partly because AAV doesn't have the political and national identity that some other similar dialects have. I (as a lay person with no training in linguistics) feel like AAV and Scots are similar in terms of how far away from English they are, and many people would describe Scots as its own language, distinct from English.
Scots is complicated because there was an entirely distinct language "Gaelic" which just isn't even close to English at all, spoken in that geographic area historically. Now, today there aren't very many people who live there who would even claim to actually speak Gaelic, but the influence of that language seeped into the dialect spoken there, so while the random bloke you meet in Scotland may not speak any Gaelic, if you (maybe as an academic study) know Gaelic some of the vocabulary of their speech is obviously from Gaelic, not English.
Linguists would tell you that Scots is a sibling to English rather than just a dialect of English, having both descended from Middle English and that the dialect of English people in Scotland speak is instead "Scottish English". In practice of course humans don't language tag their speech (indeed they rarely even language tag written text) so it's murky. Maybe one word in ten that a Scottish bloke just said to confuse a tourist was technically Scots not Scottish English and perhaps some of it was even Gaelic. The important thing was that they confused the tourist as desired, for which frankly even an inside joke would work.
Sociolects are fun. In one of my friend circles the word "fish" is understood to mean the controller for a video game, I don't know why exactly, but if you said to one of us "Pass the fish" they'd hand you a controller without even seeming puzzled, that's just obviously what you'd call it. But in another circle it means nothing and you'd be greeted with confusion.
I completely disagree. At least in the US, AAV seems to be a major cultural thing for the people who speak it
But I think that national identity doesn't exist in the same way, do you know what I mean? Like, being Black/African American in the US is an important part of a person's identity, but it doesn't necessarily have the trappings of nationhood in the same way that Scottish identity does. That's not to say that the identity is any weaker, just that it manifests itself differently.
This means that AAV is culturally important, but there's not necessarily the same sense of "this is a separate language" that there is with Scots, even though in many ways it has all the same claims of being one.
I suppose, though I feel like the tie to nationalism=language is weak at best
I have an amateur interest in linguistics, that's partially why I asked.
>That guy is speaking a completely unrecognisable language, are there subtitles?
Interestingly enough, I remember reading somewhere that you could be legally entitled to an interpreter in a court setting (take that with a grain of salt, I forget where I read it)
Not to my knowledge, and I imagine even trying to do this would stir up.. a lot.
The more I think about it, the more difficult it seems. Not that it shouldn't be done, but wow.
Nobody said it was.
The article strongly implies it is a response to a comment complaining the blog is not inclusive because it uses British English.
There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm and we should all adjust our language to fit their definitions and culture. I intend to keep eating faggots, having a master branch in git, etc.
When I read "inclusive", my mind jumped to accessibility, in that colloquialisms can be difficult to understand for a subset of people with autism (and other conditions), and also that they translate poorly when run through a translator, for those that do not speak English at all.
Equally, I doubt there was a single Brit involved in RFC 2617 Section 4.3 (for example).
I don't understand the reference. I looked it up here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2617#section-4.3
Can you explain your (assumed) sarcastic remark?That third word, starting with 'n' is British slang, which you are welcome to look up.
Presumably the etymology was in place before it took on its present meaning, but it is not a word I would use in a professional context.
My comment was oblique, but not sarcastic. Partly because I didn't want to use the word directly, and partly in keeping with the tone of the original blog post!
The British usage predates the RFC and probably the cryptographic use. I definitely heard the term in the late 80s.
In British slang, "nonce" is a highly offensive term for a sex offender, particularly one who has harmed children. It is considered derogatory and should be used with caution.
I'm guessing this is very context/region dependant. Calling someone a nonce as a bit of banter would be more acceptable than calling them a paedophile when I was growing up. I assume because using the officially recognised term made your accusations seem more ernest, though I've never actually thought much about it before.
"number used once" wouldn't be the first definition of that word which springs to mind for most people in the UK.
Translation for en-US speakers -- Trump is an example of a nonce, as is his buddy - formerly Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
"There is a constant American assumption that their language and culture is the norm"
This is now far more than an American assumption. I have seen younger continental Europeans bristle at UK English because they grew up in a world of social media that is converging on usage that is closer to US English.
Real question: Post 2010, are there any non-English speaking nations that get most of their English language media from the UK? Since everthing went online after 2010, I assume US has the highest influence (linguistically) only because of "mass". Dear UK readers: Please don't interpret my comment that UK language culture is somehow inferior. HN knows and loves UK humor!
But being non-inclusive by speaking to a particular cultural reference frame is not the same as being racist.
I agree, but some people seem to think it is, which i think what the article is a response to: just just in the comment, but in the wider push to use certain language.
> I intend to keep eating
Wait, isn't that a cigarette? Why would you eat it?
edit: nevermind, it's actually meatballs, the short version is for cigarettes
Fully agree with the author, just like I write Portuguese in European Portuguese, not Brazilian Portuguese, African Portuguese or any other variation, just because our population is smaller.
Incidently I always change automatic language correction tools to English GB, I live in this side of the Atlantic, and that is variant I learnt while growing up.
I always put my locale in Ireland: I want
It's amazing how many web applications give me a broken experience because of it.I'm using custom en-CH locales, because I want numbers to use the Swiss format for decimal and thousands, € instead of CHF, standard units, and some version of English :p
How's that going with the numbers? Microsoft had this page where they explained that monetary amounts are formatted one way whereas other numbers are formatted another way. I found that most fascinating, but I don't know whether it matches reality. Also, how does software cope?
(Back in the eighties,) I had a teacher who taught both French and geography (I think), and he used the apostrophe as the thousands separator. With a twist. For example, he would write three million as 3'000'000, and then he would abbreviate that to 3''. Very fascinating. I wonder if that was somehow inspired by Swiss conventions.
1'234'567.890 :)
One billion, two-hundred thirty-four million, five-hundred sixty-seven (the rest are the decimals)
I've never seen 3'' but that's a nice shorthand
I now live in Germany where the format is confusing to me: 1.234.567,890. It's pretty much the opposite of English format!
That's not a bad hack, thanks
The Portuguese speakers really ought to sort out how their language is supposed to work, it was fine before the internet but now I can only see the differences causing trouble
not ‘whilst’? ;)
It should be just "en", since we invented and it's the one true version:-)
English (traditional) and English (simplified)
Some of the different spellings used by US English are because of changes made to British English that did not happen in the US.
Main branch and the various forks.
Do the needful!
Is that an en-IN joke?
given English evolved from Norman French, it's maybe just a local variation than a true invention? fr-GB feels more correct :)
This is more or less completely false. English has an unusually high number of loan words from French (on the order of 10k or so, I think), and this has made the language less Germanic than its historical origins would suggest. But English existed before Norman French arrived in the British Isles, and is still at heart a Germanic language.
Did you actually think I wanted fr-GB to replace en-GB?
It was a joke based on the Norman French references from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English
That may be true, but in practice, US english has no taken over as the de-facto English. All thanks to the Internet.
I am glad someone is pushing back on this, though, and I want more multi lingual sites on the Internet in general.
By your logic, chinese english or indian english are the defacto as they massively outnumber american english
You just mean that you visit more american sites than other non-US english speaking sites
You're confusing number of speakers with convention or standard setting power.
Look at the places where US english has become the norm or convention; programming, media, apps, business, Internet in general.
And the US is in unique position - it drives technology forward quite a bit, and it's also actual native English speakers.
So in other words got more to do with technological and economic influence, not population size.
According to wikipedia, there's 128 millions of en-IN speakers, of which only few hundred thousands are native - while there's 248 million native en-US speakers.
You raise a great point here. At what point will a non-English speaking country become the nation with the most English speakers? In my mind, surely that is Indian by 2050. If they can become upper middle income by that time (I am sure of it), then I guess more that half of adults will speak English at least at elementary to middle school level. (Dear reader: Please don't read that as a slight against the English language skills of Indians. I know from personal experience: With five grade level language skills, you can get a lot done!) They would way out number the number of English speaking Americans.
Go to France, or Japan, or Hungary, or somewhere like that. Someone there is visiting a web site that is in English. Now, what English is it most likely to be?
My guess is US English, not UK English, not Indian English, not Chinese English. Sure, they may visit some of those sites, but I suspect that the most frequent will be US English.
I'm in IT right now having travelled through FR, DE, NO, PL and half a dozen more countries. When selecting the EN option on a website it is almost 100% of the time with a GB flag. The spelling is mostly en-GB as well.
In this case, Japan is special. There relationship (post WW2) with the US is unparalleled compared to France or Hungary. It will absolutely be US style. Japan was never very close with the UK.
Yeah, I think the only 2 countries that teach american english are Japan and the Philippines
Most countries in North East Asia or South East Asia (exclude South Asia) teach US-style English. A few that come to mind: South Korea, Taiwan, Mainland China, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia.
Correct, generally speaking they will have their own default locales on their computer and local sites will be in e.g. French but going to Instagram it will render in US English - unless the app has been translated, which it probably has so it's not the best example.
I've just checked my instagram and it's using the UK spelling "favourites"
Where are you, by the way?
> not Indian English, not Chinese English
There is no such thing as Chinese English, unless you politely mean "English as incorrect spoken by Chinese native speakers."
There's a national english for anywhere it's widely spoken, that's just how international languages like english and french work.
No, no I don't think it has. Americans are vastly outnumbered by commonwealth states using and teaching standard English
See my other comment, the world follows the US. It's about where the influence is primarily coming from, and that is currently America. And in terms of English it has a distinct advantage in that it is full of native speakers. Many Indians are proficient in English but they're not native speakers.
This reminds me of the time when I removed en-US from windows, leaving just en-GB, and it blue screened.
It's both surprising and irritating how many US-centric things are just assumed. (Don't even get me started on paper sizes...! ;) )
The amount of times that darn keyboard selector appears for no reason in Windows because its once again added en-US as a language, which it then switches to randomly for seemingly no reason and all of a sudden my symbols are all in the wrong places. One day someone at Microsoft is going to look at that bug and fix it....
As someone that changes the default as well, yep a pain.
I discovered just this week that the numbering of weeks within the year is different between US and Europe, thus, cal -w can show different numbers for some years depending on the locale. Outlook can probably also show different things depending on the system settings.
Europe uses the algo according to the ISO 8601 standard, where the week no.1 is the one with January 1st occuring between Monday and Thursday, inclusive. If the 1st happens on Friday or later within a week, it's considered a week no.52 or 53 of the previous year.
US does not use this scheme and [EDITED] I am not sure what method is applied there.
Some companies use week numbers in business talks, planning and scheduling, so be aware who is speaking about which weeks!
Even the concept "within that week" depends on whether you consider the week to begin on Monday or Sunday. (or elsewhere I suppose)
Yes but for the purpose of mentioned ISO 8601, the start of the week is assumed to be Monday.
I think that by exploring how different cultures and languages communicate about things opens the mind. There are concepts that can't be easily/succinctly explained in English but can in other languages. I think that we should be encouraging such breadth of thought because it allows us to appreciate new aspects of the world we live in.
Nobody's ever been able to explain to me what those concepts are, so I don't believe it.
Family relationships are the first thing that come to my mind.
In Spanish for example, consuegro and consuegra refer to the father and mother of your child's spouse.
The Spanish words succinctly encode that relationship while English requires verbally traversing the family tree.
That's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship_terminology and yes, you can categorise languages by the extent of their kinship terminology.
You could postulate that a language developed specific words for family and relatives because they prized those specific family structures? Or that language copied another language that did.
Similarly, you can categorise languages by how they group numbers, e.g. French is vigesimal while English is decimal.
its the subject of dozens of listacles.
waldeinsamkeit, saudade, ya’aburnee, etc.
Hiraeth
That one only works when the homeland is that beautiful.
I don't know. I mean it's not a longing for just a place, as I understand it. I am not even sure that hiraeth is necessarily longing for the beauty of a place or time. Hiraeth, it seems to me, could equally be a longing for the wordless Welsh expressions of emotion, or for rainy days, or damp, or a time that has passed, depending on where the bearer of the emotion is currently feeling it.
(I am not Welsh, but it has been described to me as an ever tightening elastic emotional rope that is anchored in a place and time that it might not be possible to go back to)
That's an excellent description I think.
OK, here's one: My wife grew up in Latin America. Sometimes, instead of saying "I knocked it over", they say what literally translates to "it fell itself to me". Same idea - it fell - but hey, not my fault, it just happened.
Here's another: "fíjese". It kind of means "you'd never guess what happened". It's like "something that was completely unpredictable and totally outside my control happened, and it negatively affected my ability to do what I was trying to do", except with a lot fewer syllables.
Here's one going the other way: I was talking to a systems engineer about a specific issue, and I said that "we might be able to sweep that under someone else's rug". He was from Russia, and didn't have "sweeping it under the rug" as an idiom, and so didn't know what sweeping it under someone else's rug might mean.
Now, none of these are things that you can't say in another language or culture. You can. They're just a lot more unwieldy to say, and so people express that idea a lot less frequently.
This was my starting point, a belief that other languages were 'better' at expressing different things. However, I have done a few projects requiring translation over the years and I have found European language speakers, notably Italian and German, preferring the freedom of English to the relative straightjackets of their respective mother tongues.
As a Brit I am biased, however, there is a crucial difference between 'free range' British English and 'simplified' American English. Superficially, American English seems the more 'free', with liberties taken to create cool words and brand names. However, American English is constrained by the work of Webster, with there being a definitive dictionary, very much cast in stone, with changes such as 'no u in colour' made purely because of a rejection of everything English, including tea and spellings.
Currently we have something more extreme going on with the language that Ukrainians are expected to speak, with their 'government' seeking new and improved ways to move the language away from Russian. If this was OG English then it would be like getting rid of every French sounding word, so 'beef' becomes 'cow meat', 'mutton' becomes 'sheep meat' and so on. These changes can be made quite easily since it is not a whole new language has to be learned (or unlearned) at once. The lists of banned/allowed words changes all the time, much like Newspeak in 1984.
This won't be the last attempt to determine what a language is by decree, however, the result of such efforts is that languages get stuck in time. Hence the observations of my translation 'helpers', preferring English to their mother tongues.
IMHO American English is British English, stuck in time for 250 years, or whenever Webster got his special dictionary to schools. Meanwhile, OG British English has evolved in its own way, a form of direct democracy, where words change based on how they are used in the here and now.
I don't believe there is such a thing as an actual English word, all of it is 'stolen' from various colonial adventures of the past, or inherited from invaders of the past, notably the 'old enemy', as in the French.
French used to be the language for arts, diplomacy and the aristocracy. But they lost out, in part due to the fixed dictionary. Had they allowed their language to accept English loan words, chances are that French could still be the language it once was.
Currently there is an existential threat to English as the language for science and technology due to the rise of China. It gets worrying when data sheets for Texas Instruments components are released first in Chinese, to be followed up, months later with English translations. Therefore I am rooting for en-GB rather than en-US, due to that minor detail of there not being a 'Webster' dictionary of the past, casting a shadow on our future.
IMO this take really overstates the importance of prescriptive efforts to control the evolution of languages. In particular, the relative decline of French is easily explained by geopolitics. Outside officialdom the Académie is mostly ignored. French today is as packed with English loanwords as every other European language.
>Had they allowed their language to accept English loan words, chances are that French could still be the language it once was.
The Académie française has exactly 0 to do with the fact that French is used less as a lingua franca.
I think idioms and cultural references are fine - the rest of the world has worked out what US baseball and football cliches likely mean, people can decode most references with context.
But there are some interesting issues with UK <> US english, things like 'quite' which works in different ways in each locale. I was also very surprised to discover the difference in what we consider a frown - which makes a lot more sense of the US 'turn that frown upside down'. Interestingly my uncle who'd lived in the US ~20 years had never uncovered that difference till I asked him about it.
So it's good to know differences - especially when you want communication to be clear.
What's the "quite" difference?
Roughly:
British "quite" means somewhat.
American "quite" means very.
A Brit saying a suggestion is "quite good" is actually saying it's not good enough, whereas a US listener will think they've been told the opposite.
Good lord. I just three finger tapped on the word quite to see what the macOS dictionary says - "to the utmost or most absolute extent or degree; absolutely; completely", although it does offer a second definition "to a certain or fairly significant extent or degree; fairly: it's quite warm outside".
For context, I'm British though I have spent a fair amount of time in the states over the years and somehow never picked up this difference.
This is interesting because I assume it has suffered the same linguistic degradation as the word "fine" which in some cases means "of the highest quality" but mostly means "meh". I suspect it comes down to the dialect and social rank of the person saying the sentence. Compare how you would perceive:
or depending on who was saying it.Have you ever played runescape? As a kid, I was obviously a little confused initially by NPCs referring to "the first floor" of a castle/shop/etc meaning "the floor above the entry level", but it wasn't THAT hard for a 12 year old to contextualize "ah yes, this is a British game so it's a little different". (Admittedly growing up with british parents in Canada probably helped with understanding a bit, but I still don't think simply being aware of a few cultural differences to be impressive for anyone.)
If english speaking adult-aged people, with a wealth of opportunities to meet people and explore the world, are genuinely befuddled by en-GB to the point where they have to ask you to "translate" it, that's immensely embarrassing for them.
There's two dimensions here, one is US-American readers, the other is how a lot of the rest of the (non-English) world is mostly exposed to US culture through (social) media.
But that's more of a thing for millennials, I would've thought younger generations get exposed to more diverse cultures / languages / etc.
Anyway, for British-English full of cultural references, watch some of these compilations https://www.youtube.com/@OneGazillionEccentricGoldfish, Scouse is nearly incomprehensible (to my ESL ears). For difficult US-English full of cultural references, watch The Wire or Treme. Try both without subtitles.
The funny thing is for younger British people this tends to be highly asymmetric - we can (sort of!) understand Scouse or Glaswegian due to growing up here, but also almost everyone under the age of 50 grew up on a steady diet of American TV shows, hip hop etc.
I can understand The Wire fine without subtitles because most of the actors just speak relatively generic African American English instead of a proper Baltimore dialect, and that's no problem at all for someone who spent their formative years consuming Nas and Biggie and all the rest of it.
On the other hand Snoop who is the only main character with an actual Baltimore street accent is pretty much unintelligible to me, but I suspect she would be for a lot of middle class americans as well
His post inspired me to change form <html lang=en> to <html lang=en-US>, to make it clear I do not write in the British's quaint dialect of American.
I'm an American (unfortunately). Online, especially in places like HN, I try to use British spelling. It seems more academic if that makes sense
>When The Wicked Witch of the TERFs
Don't associate that cordyceps with Elphaba
Regarding spelling: As an unbiased foreigner, many American variants seem superior to me (color, defense, program, meter) with british just being weird (and/or tainted by the french).
Regarding Rowling: It seems to me that she gets more pushback/hate being, say "50% modern left-ish" than people that are even less aligned with left values. This gives me kinda medieval religion vibes (better an unbeliever/outsider than an apostate). I think such a valuation system is inherently flawed. Curious about your view on this.
Sidenote: If you're referring to the zombie-ant fungus, those go by Ophiocordyceps nowadays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis).
I personally have massive problems with Rowling because of her transphobic views, as I am a transexual woman and she completely misunderstands us and has used her influence to make our lives hell in the UK. The rest of her political views aren't something I give much thought as she isn't nearly as influential in those areas
>Sidenote: If you're referring to the zombie-ant fungus, those go by Ophiocordyceps nowadays
Neat. I should probably explain why I called her that. She started noticeably becoming more unhinged a bit after she posted a picture of herself in a house that very clearly had a mould problem. Thus, as a way of coping, we (as in, the subset of the trans community I partake in) started joking that her views were caused by the mould
I can see how being personally affected would change the outlook on things like this.
It just seems to me that often people that are politically still "somewhat close" (Rowling) catch more flak than politicians that associate "transgender" with something inbetween "subhuman" and "delusional", but don't talk about it too much (because their whole electorate coulnd't care less about the topic anyway).
I had a similar impression with political fragmentation on the non-Trump side in the last US election.
But maybe the behavior is even net-beneficial in some cases, and you gain more as a movement by pushing against a Rowling instead of a Farage.
Counter example: Richard Dawkins and Robert Winston have both said similar things to Rowling and are on the left (one is a Labour peer). Neither have received anything resembling the backlash she has.
They both have received significant opprobrium. But she's the one funding a massive hate campaign.
Should probably have told the writers of Wicked to not associate Elphaba with a (children's book level) evil witch. I think the Wicked Witch of the West is pretty appropriate for JK
I suppose that's fair but it also completely ignores the intentions of the story
> It seems more academic if that makes sense
I remember a naive cultural bias in the US towards regarding the English as possessing an elevated degree of education and refinement. I would have assumed the greater presence of truly idiotic British figures in American news media and comedy in recent decades might have clubbed that misconception to death like a baby seal.
I personally don't see it that way. It's used in the majority of english speaking places and academic publications
"The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, All centuries but this, and every country but his own."
? I just think british spelling looks better and am a whore for internationalism
Oxford spelling, en-GB-oxendict, is a nice halfway house - it uses the same -ize spellings (where etymologically correct) as American English, but doesn't have the simplifications (eg. colour->color).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling
It's often preferred by academic journals, which might be why the original commenter sees it as "academic".
It's also the official spelling used by the United Nations.
Internalized self loathing is a thing
It's a thing, yes. It's entirely irrelevant to the topic though.
Language is very personal. It's very reasonable to want to write in a way that feels natural to you, without constantly having to rephrase or simplify.
Surely most turns of phrase and references are easily googleable these days anyway, so it's not like it's even that hard to figure out. And if it is, you can do this amazing thing called 'asking'. I doubt the author will be mad that you want to know exactly what they meant when they wrote what they wrote.
I have to admit I have every device running some sort of voice assistant on en_GB or Australian the American voices always sound like parodies or the Walmart greeter. The intonation is perpetually trying to please me, as if programmed for relentless customer service. It's hard to explain, but there's something exhausting about a voice that's always smiling.
> American voices always sound like parodies or the Walmart greeter.
Timer set for “thirdy minnids”. Unfortunately the others also sound like parodies in their own way — the Californian's idea of en_GB, “Oi, you go' a loicense for that thir'y minute timah?”
When I still used siri I had it be a british woman solely because it made me feel like I was in a James Bond movie
TBF, some Australian accents put a rising intonation at the end of sentences, as though the speaker is always asking their interlocutor for approval. Just another thing that's reminiscent of Clive James' remark that too many Australians are descended from prison officers.
But they should just stop reading. It's actually not ok that it's unfamiliar, because makes you reread and get confused and distracted, all for some silly reference that doesn't make a big difference. Life is short! You can read the hard stuff when it's worth it, and just skip the rest. Surely that's the most common thing to do.
The answer is definitely still a big no, but for me the reasoning is because it will make it worse. And you apparently aren't the target audience anyway, so why should I care if you stick around.
(Whereas in the case of harry potter, the goal was to sell books, not just to produce something good).
Do you hear yourself now? "Life is too short to read texts which reference a culture you're unfamiliar with"? Seriously?
> Here's the thing. No.
Hahaha
I decided to have a bit of fun with the Accept-Lang header, if you're british it shows a totally different version of my blog including changing my name to a more british variant, a background including tea, phone booths, kings guards, busses, bulldogs and flags... and the colour scheme changes to RWB.
https://blog.dijit.sh
The original plan was actually to write two variants of every blog post, one where I write using dry wit, banter and colloquialisms, and the other with a more to the point and professional tone.
The reason I chose not to was because I thought it might be confusing when discussing the content on link aggregators (like HN)- I'm not so arrogant as to believe I write anything worth discussing, but it would violate the principle of least surprise... so I chose not to do it.
I'm curious to hear other peoples opinions, since this is the exact right subject to ask the question to relevant crowd..
You might be interested to know that the BBC has a Pidgin version.
> BBC News Pidgin now dey on Whatsapp
> No dull yoursef, be di first to get latest tori, analysis, exclusive interviews and ogbonge coverage of Nigerian and International news from BBC News Pidgin, straight to your Whatsapp.
> Click here to join di channel
— https://www.bbc.com/pidgin
It reads very similar to the Hawaiian Pidgin Bible.
It's technically West African Pidgin English, AKA Guinea Coast Creole English, (perhaps) AKA Cameroon Pidgin, which seems to be much the same thing and has an ISO-639 code (wes).
IMO if these are all the same language then they should perhaps be dignified with a proper name that doesn't involve the generic term "pidgin".
That is magnificent. :-)
Glad that you got the colour scheme changes
I'm very disappointed it didn't translate the $1m story to £747,000
I found it completely unrelatable and couldn't follow it at all, not having any frame of reference for how much a dollar might be worth in real money
Luckily the background reminded me i could go and make myself a cup of tea to feel better
it's made worse that those were Canadian dollars..
now we're all confused.
Pet peeve: If I go to google.ca and ask [1 gallon to liters], it uses US gallons. (But if I ask [1 pint to ml] it gets it right.)
> link aggregators
This is definitely manageable: canonical meta tags and other metadata; update the URL to a canonical permalink that encodes the language preference; a banner that informs people that there is an alternate version, etc.
As a non-brit I feel discriminated against by being unable to see that amazing page.
By eck lad, Accrington Stanley?
I would love to be able to write in proper narfuck, and have which ever screen reader read it out in the authentic accent for that area (central norfolk, not norwich, broadlands or the wierdos in the fens.)
There is something deeply joyful (to me) about a thick regional accent.
Remember the scene in Hot Fuzz where the accents are so thick they need 3 layers of translation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc
"My mum said that if I didn't drink enough milk then I'd only be good enough to play for Accrington Stanley."
"Accrington Stanley!, Who are they?"
"Exaaaccttlyyy...."
TFA mentions s/Philosopher/Sorcerer/ in HP, which I confess to having confused me greatly (are Americans THAT ignorant that they are unaware of the concept?) and pleased me, since the Canadian publishing house stuck with en-GB throughout, AFAICT.
As a multilingual Canadian capable of understanding most English and French accents, I'm grateful for those who preserve and persevere with their home patois.
Funnily enough, I had a hard time with Bradley's accent the first time viewing Hot Fuzz but many hours of BritBox and Acorn and a few hours of HarbourCustoms later, no problems at all!
It reminds me of the game localisations of the 90s, where all too often they decided a game was just too Japanese for our small American brains to comprehend
I declared my blog to be `en-GB` as well, but I'm fairly sure it's neither that, nor any other pre-catalogued locale. There's just no way I'm able to know where any of the references I use came from, let alone which weird contortions I came up with by myself. There are probably a few in this short comment alone.
I was raised by an English mum[0] (scouse, to be precise -actually, her mum was scouse, me mum was posh).
I've traveled all over the world, and the one place that I've had the most difficulty understanding, was London. Cockney is hard. It's not just the patois. It's the cultural references and slang.
[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm
Not many Cockneys in London these days, they're all in Essex
There were reasons that I was hanging with a crowd that was heavily informed by cockneys.
I tend to hang with … interesting … people.
This was a great read and it reminded me of Bill Bryson's book, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. Such an awesome overview o how diverse and quirky and globally distributed English has become today. With the web and now the bots herding us into a more homogenized language, I'm a huuuuge fan of what this dude is doing here!!
Bill Bryson The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way was written by a journalist with no actual training in the subject matter, and there is a factual error or urban myth on virtually every single page of the book. In fact, among shoddy pop-sci books, this one is particularly notorious. You might want to read about this and see why this is a book that deserves to be forgotten.
> Accrington Stanley!
Who are they?!
For people who don't get the reference, it's a classic advert for the milk marketing board. It's quite topical at the moment given the Fifa world cup
https://youtu.be/zPFrTBppRfw?si=BaHHYnP52UfWd6Fs
Ian Rush (referenced in the ad) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Rush
There's a surprisingly big cultural chasm here. Acrington Stanley are a football club, that's not so weird - the US has plenty of professional sports teams and distinguishes "major" leagues, but AIUI the US doesn't have anything like the "Football Pyramid": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_league_system
If the Green Bay Packers lose every game, I think they're just back next year anyway like nothing happened? If Manchester United lost every game they're relegated and cease to be in the Premier League, some team you've never heard of which won the EFL Championship become a Premier League team next season [subject to various extra rules they can probably meet] and Man U take their place in the EFL Championship.
The generated subtitles show that the translator doesn't know English
Exactly.
Exactly
As a speaker of English as a second language and being educated using American English, I find British English richer in a cultural and expressive manner. It also conveys more properness.
> [Twinkies] seemed like an unappealing foodstuff which, nevertheless, were inexplicably popular.
Well, there's the counterpoint to the whole post. You don't know what Twinkies are.
Brit here. I spent decades hearing about twinkies from US TV so I had to finally try one.
It was the blandest, most solid chunk of cake with a flavourless blob of sugar in the middle.
I more-or-less agree. And it's inexplicable why it's popular?
Describe a chicken nugget next, I bet people hate those too.
(For the record, a proper Twinkie would be fluffy, not a solid chunk.)
Twinkies haven't been good for decades, you need a time machine for the real experience.
Just set the page's theme to "Drunk". It'll be OK.
Here we just call it en
"This blog is written in en-GB"
Excuse me, but I believe you meant to say this bloug is written in en-GB.
More seriously... you know, 30 or 40 years ago, I can sort of understand this attitude. Today, in the amount of time it takes you to complain, you could have popped the word into Google or something instead and learned what it was instead. Probably in less than the amount of time it took you to complain for an online blog. And you might learn something interesting.
When I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a thing called the "generation gap". It originally referred to something closer to the difference between the Hippies and their Greatest Generation parents, but it was smoothly repurposed into the differences between GenX and the Boomers, and the way we could have slang that was not decodeable by our parents.
I haven't heard the term in a while. The "generation gap" isn't what it used to be and there is less need for a term for it. I'm not entirely certain but I probably heard about "6-7" before my kids did. Urban Dictionary may not be the most reliable source in an academic sense but you can get a very fast sense of what something means from its entries, especially if you read them with a postmodern analysis eye and not just for the plain text.
I also find it a bit weird when people my age or the boomer generation complain about the kid's slang, because it's so easy to decode. You can't possible have a national-level kid's slang without an internet explainer 15 seconds away. It's not that hard anymore.
Blog, from web log, from log (written), from log (wood), from Middle English logge. No French involved, which is where the `ou` phoneme is from.
I've had a weblog since 1999. I know where the word comes from. Try rereading in light of that; if you need more hint consider why the author's spellchecker might put a red wiggly underline under the letters "color".
No, it's always been blog in en-GB.
Try reading in light of basic facts, if you need more hint consider if a spell checker might put a wiggly underline under the letters "loug".
Consult BigTTYGothGF's reply to my post for more cluestick. (If I'm channeling the late 1990s might as well go all the way and pull out some dead lingo.)
> bloug
* blogue
I stand corrected.
Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but nobody has any moral obligation to be inclusive in content they share on their personal blog, for free, and nobody should reasonably expect it.
Reader View button is your friend here.
I’ve seen a lot of blog entries using typography so horrible, I had to use reader view to read the page—there was a trend in the mid-2010s to use pencil-thin fonts and there is now and then still a blog out there using one of those unreadable pencil-thin fonts.
However, this blog uses a very readable font called “Atkinson Hyperlegible” and I had no problem reading it. If the color scheme bothers you, click on “eInk” in the theme switcher on the top.
Disclaimers: No relationship to the owner of this blog. No AI used in this posting; I have the em-dash (—) in my custom keyboard layout.
Indeed, unreadable typography (and the need for Reader View) is one of my most common annoyances with sites posted to HN - but I don't see how it's applicable to this site in any way?
I think that "en-GB" is not sufficiently descriptive. There are 160 dialects of English [0]. Within the island of Great Britain there are three historic countries with distinctive usages of language: England, Wales, and Scotland. There might be more mutual unintelligibility within GB than across North America.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English
Somebody once went through one of my Stack* answers and changed (unilaterally edited) every Commonwealth spelling to American spelling...
Fun post but sort of ironic to end with a lecture on "cultural hegemony" from....a Brit!
He wants us to be exposed to different ways of speaking, yet he’s afraid to mention a book’s author by name.
The fact you think he's afraid may be a signal that you also aren't a Brit.
The French didn't like it when the Lingua Franca switched from French to English and the Brits still whine that British English is no longer the dominant variety.
It's a trade-off: you can write in your regional dialect or you can write in a more widely understood global style.
It's not really comparable, almost every native English speaker can understand most British English fine, it's only when people use excessive slang or regional accents that people have issues (and that's an issue with any language - it can easily be an issue among native speakers within the UK!).
It doesn't really matter if you natively speak British English instead of American English, whereas French and English are obviously completely different languages and the switch made French a lot less useful and English a lot more useful
Lingua Franca, an Italian phrase, referred to a form of Spanish.
Or more generally: either everyone uses it or it stays the same.
Nobody speaks the One True English. That is its power.
sips tea
If I (a Brit) moves to the US, I'd absolutely get a Yorkshire-branded tea caddy filled with teabags on my desk. Sometimes you need to live up to the stereotypes.
May be decorative only —- Isn’t it due due to their wimpy electricity that it takes forever to boil a kettle and that’s why everyone gets coffee externally? Or, absolute horror, they microwave teacups….
Or has the situation improved? :)
So, about the electricity bit. We absolutely can do 240v, we just don't make tea enough for it to be worth it.
Also, I've never understood the disdain for microwave boiling. It's just easier 90% of the time
I've always wondered, do that many brits actually like tea or is it more of a cultural thing? I've very rarely had a tea I like (though, I've never had one I actively disliked), and I can't imagine that's the case for most people but it makes me wonder
The majority like it, though there's always a debate about the correct preparation method. I've always felt like a bit of an outsider whenever a brew is offered and I ask if they have coffee, and I've lived here all mi life.
Nothing in this world beats a good sheng brewed in a gaiwan…
> Accrington Stanley
I've never heard of this depite being from the UK. It seems to be some ad from 1989. Although I do remember many classic ads from the 1980's I don't recall this. Is it an English / Scottish thing ? Who knows.
Why is Accrington Stanley so famous?
Ian Rush reflects on famous milk advert ahead of Liverpool v ... Accrington Stanley achieved worldwide fame primarily due to a legendary 1989 television advert for the Milk Marketing Board. In the iconic commercial, two young Liverpool fans debate whether to drink milk. One claims that football star Ian Rush told him, "If you don't drink lots of milk, you'll only be good enough to play for Accrington Stanley". The other boy questions, "Accrington Stanley? Who are they?", prompting the reply, "Exactly". The slogan became a massive pop-culture catchphrase in the UK, turning a then-obscure non-league team into the most famous minnows in football.
I suspect it was England and Wales only.
It was never shown in NI, which had its own Milk Marketing Board. Scotland had a separate one too, so probably didn't get them either.
the irony of an Englishman complaining about Americans assuming cultural expectations, whilst simultaneously doing the same thing to fellows from outwith England and Wales. Yes I did say 'outwith'.
My first thought after reading is that I fear for the author's safety. From the outside, this does not appear to be a safe time to express nationalism or cultural pride in the UK. The Internet is not free in the UK and decreasingly so in the rest of the world.
There's a rather large and easily understood difference between wanting to preserve your Britishness in the face of the Americans, and joining Lennon-Yaxleys band of gammon faced flag shaggers (though flying the flag is less of a signal while the footies on).
You fear for his safety!?
> From the outside
You should try visiting the inside.
More generally, we Brits draw a measure of distinction between cultural pride and nationalism: the former is good, and we have plenty of it; the latter is viewed with suspicion, for good reason.
(Edited for clarity)
Their comment is even funnier considering the sudden rise of Farage and Friends.
Their attempts to claim culture is governed by strong borders is also hilarious when an hour's drive in any direction from London would expose them to people they probably wouldn't even realise are speaking English.
I've always wondered why people who so proudly claim to not be from here speak with such authority about how it is to live here.
It's Fox news claimed no-go zones and Sharia law cities all over again. Utter bullshit.
> From the outside, this does not appear to be a safe time to express nationalism or cultural pride in the UK.
From outside this dimension maybe.
OP here.
Fuck off.
Yours etc,