That is most definitely not a fun fact. It’s bad enough having the Yanks telling us how to speak our own language!
Useful fact: Both Ireland and Malta have English as official languages so you’re basically guaranteed availability of those locales (unlike say en-DE, which exists, (at least according to the ICU), while en-FR doesn’t).
Fun fact: Both don’t have it as sole official language, though, and each EU member only gets to nominate one of their official languages as an official language of the EU, which means that with Brexit English ceased to be an official EU language. The commission manoeuvred around that though and still kept it as working language. With the Brits out of the picture though they’re not writing passive-aggressive memos regarding language use any more and the Irish certainly will not stoop down to that level, Euro-English can finally evolve freely and within ten years we’ll start telling Anglophones that it’s incorrect to say “there were five people at the party” (you attended), it’s “we were five people at the party”. Deal with it.
HotBeef@feddit.uk 3 months ago
systemglitch@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Are you telling me to deal with it, or something else?
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
I’ve read about Euro-English and discussed it back on reddit quite some time ago, and I have to say I’m very skeptical whether such a thing exists or ever could exist. Fundamentally it’s a mis-learned standard English, and the mis-learning is to a large degree determined by the speaker’s native language - which varies extremely across Europe. Slavic speakers will have issues with articles, Germans much less so, etc. Consequently there’s hardly any definite characteristic of Euro-English (the examples in the article are too vaguely described, and I’m sure many European ESLs would find them grammatically unacceptable too). Perhaps one could speak of a variety of English used by EU politicians and institutions, but those people are hardly a linguistic model for the vast majority of other speakers.
Orygin@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Define standard English?
Both the USA and UK don’t agree on what it is.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
The sort of English you’ll see in literature, newspapers, any remotely formal communication, in grammars (which learning materials are based on as well). The stuff learners will aim to learn.
Differences between US and UK English, and the dialectal variety within each of them, is not all that relevant here. Where I live, students are taught British English, but no professor ever chastised us for using American pronunciation or vocabulary. Both are within the range of what natives will find acceptable.
LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
You’d think it’s the language spoken in England