Legit though, nobody alive today had anything to do with English becoming the trade language. It used to be French, but that went away and English filled in.
Any country where English is the primary language is going to have less people needing a second language for anything other than the general benefits it brings, which aren’t truly necessary.
It isn’t like everyone, everywhere speaks English on top of their first language, nor does everyone speak multiple languages. They do just fine with the dominant language of their country, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Also, Australians don’t speak English. They speak Cunt :)
Even the English royalty would speak in French in official ceremonies
Yup. It’s just the vagaries of time, war, and shifting alliances that put English into the main trade language. The term for that is lingua franca because of the French dominance in that regard.
The only reason English is probably going to stay in that place is inertia. Well, that and the friendliness of English borrowing words so freely. It’s easier to just adopt words with complex meanings into English than it is to translate them. But why change the trade language when it would cost more to shift things for no practical benefit.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded more and better language options in school. But it was the eighties and very early nineties, in a rural town, I was “lucky” to have two choices in high school. But I think if I’d had access younger, the way some countries do English, I would have gotten much better at Spanish than I did. Even my ASL is better than my Spanish, and I have arthritis that makes signing hard.
Interestingly, while French was the lingua franca of Europe for several hundred years, it wasn’t the origin of the term ‘Lingua Franca’.
That term meant the “language of the Franks” and was the Mediterranean trade language in the medieval through Renaissance eras. It was actually a pidgin of Italian, French, Greek and Arabic adopted as being roughly mutually intelligible among Venetians, Byzantines and North Africans.
The reference to the ‘Franks’ is because the generic word for a western European (in the Byzantine, Greek world) had long been “Frank”.
No kidding? That’s what I get for just accepting information without checking it! I heard that from an old family member and have never bothered to question it
Thank you, for the correction and doing in such a friendly way :)
I always thought the same thing! I only found this out relatively recently, and I thought it was pretty cool
Also, Australians don’t speak English. They speak Cunt :)
It’s not like americans speak english either.
Ay, all’a y’all’ns kin jist git rait on outta hyuh. Dayum yankee carpetbaggera.
More like the Bri’ish don’t (know how to) speak their own goddamn language.
Dare I ask where the “T” is?
Also, the Bri’ish decided the adopt French spelling conventions into their language because they wanted to be
snobbyfancy, like “colour” and “theatre” – it’s a mess.We North Americans follow the lead of patriot and genius Noah Webster who just wanted words to have sane, consistent, intuitive spelling conventions.
“I could care less”
Colour is couleur in French
“It isn’t like everyone everywhere speaks english on top of their first language” while it can never be everyone, every person I have interacted with from europe, brazil, india, etc has said English was pushed in school. so they are fluent in native tongue and english. And then you have Indians who often speak 4-5 languages besides english. Westerners just don’t need to learn anything besides english, since everyone accomodates for english. Especially Air traffic control.
Sgoin on cunt?
man i wish second languages were more of a thing for people in the US
ive struggled learning spanish for a while as an adult and i just wish I had went to an immersion school or something as a youngster. even if it doesnt really matter, i think its just so great. great for your community, great for your brain; besides the time i dont see any downsides to learning another language
Australians be like: dnS
I’m sure the percentage of Brits that only speak English is lower than the most of the former colonies just because of the proximity to mainland Europe. But I’d be shocked to find out it was the same rate as second languages in non English speaking countries
New Zealand is at least teaching maori languages
And if anyone reading this wants to get a better understanding of pronouncing Māori words, it’s got some similarity with Japanese. Here’s a tip:
a = ah
e = eh
i = ee
o = aw (as in hawk, but not USA’s ‘hock’)
u = oo (as in ew but less of the ‘e’)
wh = f
The r consonant rolls a bit, so it’s like a very soft d sound.And when vowels are close together they tend to kind of mesh into one, like ‘ai’ into ‘eye.’
So the word whanau (family) is pronounced fah-know, and kaimoana (seafood) is k’eye’-maw-ah-nah. And the Māori word itself is maah-aw-ree, but we’d let you off if you said mow-ree (as in mowing the lawn) because you’re at least making an attempt.
kaimoana (seafood)
TIL Moana’s name means “sea.”
Watched New Zealand bake show and I loved how many Maori words they incorporated.
I always thought it was a bit harder in Australia, given that the language changes so much across such small distances.
So much of it has been lost too. We could do better, though. Teaching what we can would at least teach the general skill of learning languages.
Indonesian is an underrepresented option in my opinion. They’re neighbours and the language is relatively easy. Couldn’t hurt to improve relations a bit. Might make a better impression during the customary pilgrimage to Bali.
Same with Te Reo in NZ, it’s kind of standardized now but when I was a kid living in the BoP I learnt a lot of Maori but when we moved to the south island the dialect was quite different so I lost a lot through atrophy.
There are something like 50 different indigenous languages across Australia. That makes it pretty hard to standardise one.
With the 3rd official language being NZSL ( New Zealand Sign Language )
Kia ora! Tena koutou Tena koutou Tena koutou katoa.
There’s a computer game called Umurangi Generation, which is like Tony Hawk’s but you take photos instead of skateboard, and you can set the language to Maori.
A lot of Americans in the south appear to speak Spanish from what I’ve noticed while traveling there.
Yeah the closer you get to Mexico the more bilingual we get. With the exception of Louisiana where it’s common to know some French
What about states close to Quebec?
I have no idea tbh I don’t really talk to Mainers all that often. Like I’m closer to Quebec than Louisiana but Quebecers feel further and far more foreign than Louisianans. And idk I’ve never heard of someone from Buffalo learning French to go to Montreal. I can’t imagine why though. Every explanation I tried to come up with sounds exactly like something an ontarian would say about Quebec. They’re all these weird French speakers who understand English. But in Louisiana they use English first.
I was surprised when I traveled there and met a an employee at Mount Washington that speaks french.
There was a huge wave of french Canadian immigration to the USA in the early 20th century, in part because work was scarce in Quebec and in part because of the effort to erase them from the map in the other provinces, many came back eventually, but many families decided to stay and they continued speaking french at home. Outside of them, the french speaking diaspora isn’t big enough/doesn’t renew itself, so there’s no pressure for english speakers to learn it.
Even Canadian provinces and territories that close to Quebec are not that bilingual. Ontario is 11%, Newfoundland and Labrador is 5%. Only exception is New Brunswick that is 34% bilingual.
They’re trying to get further away from Quebec
That’s exactly how Quebec likes it, honestly.
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Some Americans (upstate NY, VT) close to Québec speak some French too.
The whole South America:
Well it depends, in my city in Colombia they pushed english a lot. Was also mandatory in my university in case your school was not bilingual. May be an oddity but you are certainly expected to learn it at some point to not fall behind in this globalized world. Also USA companies hire people cheaply across all industries and have common time zones, so it can be actually worth.
Yeah, in mine too. But if you are not going to leave the continent or study it is not so necessary. I mean the reason I know English is just to look for knowledge.
Also as just @Badass_panda says, 3 languages in the whole hemisphere.
Right? People are forgetting that we’ve got essentially three languages in the entire hemisphere.
You speak three languages in Europe? Congrats you speak 12% of the commonly spoken / national languages.
Speak one language in the Americas? Congrats, you speak 1/3 of them!
I’m assuming the third language is French? And I mean really how gives a fuck about Quebec. They just push the language to be assholes.
So really there are two…
Portuguese, there’s a few hundred million speakers of Portuguese in South America.
I suppose I should have included French and made it four … there’s Quebec, but also Martinique, French Guiana, and so on. Maybe 10-15 million all in all?
Vs. ~450m for Spanish, ~400m for English and ~300m for Portuguese.
What about all the African countries south of the equator? Afrikaans is the obvious one, but there must be hundreds of tribal languages. Also don’t forget Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The Amazon surely has tribal languages too.
East vs west, not north vs south.
Sorry, but you have a lot of places where different languages melt and mix, especially near Brazil. They don’t speak Spanish there
I hear Chinese might be on the rise ;-)
Australia has enough problems. We Americans can take the hit.
Problem 1: livin’ in 'straya
Problem 2: giant foockin spiders
Problem 3: whatever animal declares war on them
Problem 4: Rupert Murdoch
Much bigger problem than 2 or 3
Fucken**
foocking
Think you mean fahckin’ there, ya dumb dog
Aussies in this thread:
It’s an Anglosphere problem
It’s not a problem, though? Many people learn other languages in the US/Aus/etc. They just don’t get a chance to use them, and those skills fade very quickly.
I’m sure more people would be fluent in another language if daily life motivated retention.
I’ve studied 3 but only used French for the first time this year in my 40s. I just could never afford to travel until work sent me.
It was inevitable that some language would become the most “global.” It’s not anyone’s fault if it also happens to be their native tongue.
Even the Anglophones that live in places where they’re in minority refuse to learn the local language. That’s the case in Quebec anyway.
This just sounds like a strange form of prejudice, tbh.
Yup, same thing in anglo Canada.
I have come to realize that largely, in the western world, it’s most common that people speak their own language and English. It just so happens that is the same language for many people.
its because of how culturally relevant english is as a language to make others pick it up as a second language. Take for example coding, programming languages were mainly built around english monikers, so a very basic level of english understanding is helpful when doing that. Then you get to the large wall that is western, primarily American media and how its more or less it’s largest export.
They probably speak with their wild beasts, no way they survived this long otherwise
Sadly, I’m not sure consent culture has made it to the fields quite yet.
My relatives in australia speak english and a bit of german. They told me they had the choice to learn german or spanish in school.
But what is the point, other than you really want to learn a random language? I learned french, then english and later i had the opportunity to learn italian or spanish if i wanted to. But that’s because these are the languages people speak here and the bordering countries. My relatives never used any of their german, except when they went to europe once.Learning a language is good for your perspicacity in general. Like doing sudokus except it lets you read the news or poetry or something from another culture in its original form.
In Australia I had the option to learn Japanese and then when I went over to Europe my school specifically had a Chinese option, both for “facilitating trade and future relations”
Ngl years later I kinda only use my Chinese skills when I’m at the Chinese market and I’m trying to find the right ingredients for something, and I reckon out of my entire class I probably benefited the most out of taking the language. It isn’t the cultural trade exchange they were hoping for…but hey, it’s pretty useful being able to correctly identify stuff when the English stickers they plaster on the label are vague at best and incorrect at worst
Being from East Germany I had Russian in school, can’t speak, but I retained the ability to read kyrillian letters, come in handy sometimes, especially if there are phonetically similiar words.
One reason is that it helps you to understand your native language better.
Chuck us English in there too please.
we insert token Maori words at the beginning and end of our emails, that totally counts
Chur
