do people in Britain and America speak the same language?
Often when I watch an episode of a US TV show it's hard to find many words that I wouldn't use. Many half hour episodes contain no noticeable differences between the words and phrases I use and those used by American actors.
Even when I was young the only real differences I was aware of was that Sesame Street was presented by the number 10 and the letter zee (not zed), Americans said tomAto and not tomahto and they had something called a "sidewalk". Aside from that I had no probs understanding it.
Assuming for the moment that there are really two separate languages now (American and British), do people in Canada speak British or American?
Well, hey, if you're going to take it that far, what do they speak in New Zealand? Jamaica? Bermuda? The Bahamas? Australia? South Africa? Nigeria? Belize? Ghana? Liberia?
English is English. They aren't all separate languages.
What do you call a sidewalk in England?
I believe Britons call it a footpath where Americans use sidewalk.
no i think Britons call it pavement where Americans use sidewalk, I'm even pretty sure in that
Footpath is usually a pathway across a field or through a garden or somewhere like that. A pavement is what it says...a paved walkway alongside a street or a road.
Yes we do, like french and italians speak the same language, spaniards and and portugueses, germans and dutchies, swedish and norwegian.
Brennus: >>The conventional wisdom is that broadly speaking, Americans and Britishers (or Britons) speak the same language.
On a deeper level, linguists are not always certain where a dialect ends and where a new language begins. One writer I read claims that 'English' really ended around 1930 and that what you've had since 1930 are two daughter languages, "British" and "American". More conservative linguists would balk at this however and might say that this notion is "outside the pale."<<
I would say that such a separation has not happened in the case of Standard British and American English yet, compared to Brazilian and European Portuguese (at least, some Brazilians consider their standard dialect almost a separate language), or Dutch and Afrikaans. This said, I feel British and American English do differ in the way they put things. I couldn't cite any specific examples at the moment, but sometimes, having been accustomed to British English, I find some spoken, colloquial American idioms rather difficult to decipher.
Brennus: >>Another debate going on in some circles of linguistics right now is the question: "Do two people who understand each other necessarily speak the same language?" They cite the fact that Spanish and Ladino are mutually intelligible though often considered separate languages. Ditto Flemish and Dutch, Hindi and Urdu, Fox and Sauk, Navajo and Apache plus some border dialects of Norwegian and Swedish.<<
Add Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. Maybe the case is the same for Bulgarian and Macedonian, which are mutually intelligible, although Macedonian may sound to Bulgarians as an archaic version of their own language. Still, many Bulgarians claim that Macedonian is actually a dialect of Bulgarian.
By the way, at least in the case of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, it is a legitimate question if they are the same language or not. I tend to think that linguistically they are dialects of the same language (which has no name at the moment, since Serbo-Croatian was abolished), although their cultural backgrounds are different. Their literary forms are closer to each other, however, than their spoken varieties. Croatian is the one which differs the most from the other two, especially with regard to vocabulary. At the same time, Croatian itself is a good case in point, since some of its dialects bear less similarity to each other than the standard dialect does to Serbian and Bosnian. It is true, the number of speakers of these non-standard dialects is steadily shrinking, but earlier all of them were in literary use.
all Germanic languages don't stink!
Scandinavian languages are nice and I LOVE English!
Easterner,
Re: "Add Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. Maybe the case is the same for Bulgarian and Macedonian, which are mutually intelligible ..."
Thanks, Easterner. I knew their must be other language pairs and triplets too which were in dispute.
I know a refugee from Bosnia here in Seattle who claims that Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian are basically the same language and that Yugoslavs who say they aren't are foolish. He is a little unusual though in that he doesn't appear to be Muslim like some Bosnians I've met; he's also a strong nationalist who says that he wishes that Yugoslavia was still one country. I think he would still agree, however, that Slovenian and Macedonian are different languages.
A few Macedonians I've spoken with on the internet are very touchy about their country and their language and refuse to acknowledge that it is a variety of Bulgarian which is the conventional wisdom that you usually see in the books and encyclopedias.
Ironically, there is relatively little Slavic blood in the Yugoslavian population. Slavic seems to have established itself there after the fall of the Roman Empire through a series of small invasions and a process called "elite dominance" . Anglo-Saxon established itself in England, and Gaelic in Scotland in much the same way.