Racist, funny or who cares?Follow

Canada has two and they aren't Canadian and Newfanesse. They're English and French.

tl;dr Even Simpler Version:

We call English spoken here in the States "English" because it hasn't changed enough from its origin to be a new language. It's just a dialect. Just as Spanish spoken throughout Mexico, Central & South America is "Spanish", French spoken in Canada, Haiti or Congo is "French", Portuguese spoken in Brazil is "Portuguese", English spoken in Canada, Australia or Liberia is "English", the Dutch spoken in Suriname or Antigua is "Dutch", etc.

None of the European colonized places have taken their European language and renamed it after their own nation. With globalization, it's unlikely that any language will deviate enough to linguistically count as a new tongue any time soon. Bizarrely, this somehow means America alone has an identity crisis.

Edited, Mar 29th 2011 8:29am by Jophiel

Whoops, I meant to say Aruba speaks Dutch. They speak English in Antigua. Or, as they call it there, "Antiguaese".

Also? They speak English in Australia, as well. I guess they don't have an identity, either.

Defining American English could be a real problem. Mainers still give me a blank look when I ask them what kind of pop they have?

I purposely edited my post to specifically point out what I was referring to and you still overlooked it. YOU said the following:

"I'd call it American English as its a variant of the older and more universal English language."

"The United States of America being condensed to "America" is a matter of convenience and the fact that the US was the first recognized "Western" nation in the Americas "

You did not mention "simply English" in any of those phrases. You did, however, in the phrase,
"But simply saying "Do you speak English?" is sufficient since, dialects aside, the different variants can generally communicate without much trouble. It's also shorter. ".

Except, my question was about the term "American", not "English". This is how you tried to turn the discussion on "English", when it was always on "American". I saw the potential innocent confusion, so that's why I edited my post to tell you the exact phrase I was responding to.



I know you corrected yourself later down in the thread,but I had already anticipated that response, do you have a problem with "Do you speak the American language?".



Uhhh. you missed the point. "American" is MORE specific than "English" in reference to language, because the term "American" is primarily exclusive to the U.S. Most people outside the U.S are actually taught British English, not U.S. English. So if you were to simply say "English", that would be less specific than simply saying "American".


Look at China, there is no such language, "Chinese", the two main dialects are Mandarin and Cantonese, but people often say "Chinese". In this case, it makes sense as the term "Chinese" refer to the single country "China" and they are not using a term like "East", "Oriental" or "Asia" that can represent multiple countries.



You mean like the people, you know who are based off a single origin? Weren't the settlers European who spoke English? I didn't know that there was an "America" in Europe.



Wow, did you completely over look my first sentence? Argentina has an official language. Argentia said "Our official language is 'Spanish'". The language could have easily been called "Fairy Cow Goldenese" with absolutely no change and that would be the name of the language.

If you actually study different languages, you'll see many countries actually do that. Their language or dialect will greatly resemble another language, but instead of just simply calling it a derivative of it's parent's name, they will call it another language all together. Hmmmm... I wonder why....?!?!




Read above...



You do realize that's how we have so many languages now? Once you learn one foreign language, the rest are typically much easier to learn. No one is really creating their own language. What have been done are derivations of already existing languages.

Besides, having an official language has nothing to do with declaring an established language as our own. The U.S. can simply say "English" is the official language.

I wont beat a dead horse since most of this was already addressed. Bottom line up front is that we name languages what we want to name them. We don't have an official language, so I'm not asking if you're ok with changing the official language. I'm asking about your acceptance of the unofficial terminology "American" being used to represent our language as it does everything else.

Oh, FFS. The CULTURE we choose to call "American" (including its food, music, etc.) did not exist before the creation of the U.S.A. The LANGUAGE spoken here DID exist. In England. Hence, English.

And we base that "want" on some actual reasons rather than casual whims. You've yet to present any reasons why we should have wanted to change the name of the language.

If you didn't ignore an entire post, you would have realized that I explicitly said that I was not arguing for a change of name of the language. I'm asking if you accept the unofficial terminology of "American" to refer to the spoken English here. You argued against the dangling modifier "American", so do you accept the terminology "Do you speak the American language"?

There really needs to be a rule about posting without reading posts...I posted a link of South America/Latin America expressing dislike of the term "American" being exclusively to the U.S., hence their terminologies that refer to U.S. citizens....


Edit: Doing a little research, from the same link I provided earlier, it stated that the term "America" referred to the "New World", all of the masses to include North and South America, but had evolved throughout time to simply refer to the U.S.

Thank you..

Edited, Mar 30th 2011 1:11am by Almalieque

It's not more grammatically correct. "American" is a dialect of the English language, it is not a language in of itself.

Saying "I speak the American language" is like saying "I have a Skyline tree" rather than "I have a Skyline honeylocust" or "I have a honeylocust tree".

I skipped the post because it's not addressing anything that hasn't been addressed.