4 ms·

OTOH, English speakers are happy to accept that you speak decent English with a relatively low bar. I can have a conference call with French, German, or Russian

OTOH, English speakers are happy to accept that you speak decent English with a relatively low bar. I can have a conference call with French, German, or Russian accented people, where nobody questions whether those people understand the content of the conversation. Certain languages are so specific that as soon as someone says one wrong thing, everyone switches to... English. Happens all the time in every other language that I know anything in. Someone shows up who gets a der/die/das wrong, or they can't do a soft Danish D, or they muck up a tone, and everyone else looks at each other and reply in, of all things, foreign accented English.

theobeers 6y ago
Yeah, part of the bargain of making English the international language is a shared understanding that bad English is good enough. It doesn’t fly in any other language that I’ve used. Sometimes I point this out to mollify friends who complain about English linguistic/cultural hegemony. The flip side is that, e.g., my French colleagues are much more able to insist upon standards in their mother tongue.
- nickkell 6y ago
  It's a blessing and a curse. Being able to work almost anywhere in the world whilst speaking your first language is a privilege. Being replied to in terrible English after addressing somebody in their native language is very frustrating.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I’ve gotten the “Please, sir, we do this in English” response most often in Paris, but I don’t get frustrated by it. I tried, but it wasn’t good enough. Fair enough.
- ghaff 6y ago
  And, even if not bad, relatively simple. If you do what I'll refer to as business writing, even if you don't totally dumb it down and chop it up into short sentences as tools like Grammarly will nag you to, your editor is still not going to want a lot of long sentences, "SAT words," complex tense structures, etc.
tartoran 6y ago
It’s also because English is currently the bridge language, also known as Lingua franca. I find that the main thesis of this post is in agreement with my experience, been using English for 20 years and haven’t explored all the galleries and tunnels inside the language.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  "also known as Lingua franca." ... which is Latin for: language of the Franks - French!
  - JPLeRouzic 6y ago
    Wikipedia says [0] "However, the terms "Franks" and "Frankish" were actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Period." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca#Hi...
    - funnybeam 6y ago
      By the Byzantines
    - gerdesj 6y ago
      You might as well call me English too (I live in Wessex after all)! What WP seems to have forgotten to mention is who actually used those terms. I'm prepared to be shot down but I doubt there was a properly defined concept of "Western European" between say 300 to 1500 in the right hand side bit of what we now call Europe. What you are on about is the left and right Roman Empires (my terms) and how they talked about each other. The left lot is now nominally modern Germany and France and much besides, what was called the Holy Roman Empire. The right lot is the Byzantine Empire. Now, your Franks were part of the left lot. The Franks were a tribal identity, cf Saxon, Angle, etc. The Franks is where la belle France gets its name (cf Frankreich, and Französisch - German names for France and French.) I am English (by assertion and routine) but my family name says I am descended from Germans on the male line (Brits being patrilineal.) As it turns out 300 odd years ago from a Hanoverian merchant seaman and (very) loosely on my matrilineal line 500 odd years ago I have a ancestor from Padstow in Cornwall. I also have inroads from all of the home nations (England, Ireland (both), Scotland and Wales). There are also quite a few other inputs to my blood line from much further abroad. One of my uncles is quite fastidious in his research and has many thousands of people in the DB.
orbital-decay 6y ago
This has another side: non-native speakers are expected to understand different accents and flavors of English just like an anglophone would. For example, as a Russian native speaker, I had real trouble comprehending even a slightest French accent, while having zero issues with others. I'd imagine there are a lot of ears "incompatible" with my own accent, so I spent a fair amount of time on getting rid of it.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  Even accents from Britain itself can be weird. Ever spoken to a Scot, a Liverpudlian, or a Brummie? Even people who've spoken English daily for decades will do a double take if they're not used to it. If you listen carefully, the range of vowels is quite wide, for the same word in different accents. The probably throws off a lot of people.
  - vinay427 6y ago
    More of a tangent as I agree with your point, but... I think this diversity, while large, is still less than in many other languages. As one example of many, just within Europe there are accents/dialects of German in Switzerland that are largely mutually unintelligible even to some other Swiss German speakers, and nearly entirely unintelligible to most Germans. This is also true for dialects of Italian, or even Dutch, according to friends from those countries. It's generally even more fragmented outside of European languages. Unlike English, some of these cases don't even have easily standardized registers. In my experience, people in Birmingham or Glasgow, for instance, can fluidly switch to a more standardized accent and dialect that's natively or "intuitively" understandable to a speaker from North America or South Africa.
    - lordnacho 6y ago
      This is a good point. When I was in Switzerland they had a guy from Muothathal on TV. TV decided to subtitle him. I thought Swiss German was weird, but this fellow seemed to be speaking a completely different language, to my beginner ear. The thing is though, you can ask people to speak High German instead of mundart, eg at meetings. They admit it's different enough to warrant explicit statement. You can't be telling your Liverpudlian or Brummie to speak the Queen's English, that would be rude.

theobeers 6y ago

Yeah, part of the bargain of making English the international language is a shared understanding that bad English is good enough. It doesn’t fly in any other language that I’ve used. Sometimes I point this out to mollify friends who complain about English linguistic/cultural hegemony. The flip side is that, e.g., my French colleagues are much more able to insist upon standards in their mother tongue.

nickkell 6y ago
It's a blessing and a curse. Being able to work almost anywhere in the world whilst speaking your first language is a privilege. Being replied to in terrible English after addressing somebody in their native language is very frustrating.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I’ve gotten the “Please, sir, we do this in English” response most often in Paris, but I don’t get frustrated by it. I tried, but it wasn’t good enough. Fair enough.
ghaff 6y ago
And, even if not bad, relatively simple. If you do what I'll refer to as business writing, even if you don't totally dumb it down and chop it up into short sentences as tools like Grammarly will nag you to, your editor is still not going to want a lot of long sentences, "SAT words," complex tense structures, etc.

tartoran 6y ago

It’s also because English is currently the bridge language, also known as Lingua franca. I find that the main thesis of this post is in agreement with my experience, been using English for 20 years and haven’t explored all the galleries and tunnels inside the language.

gerdesj 6y ago
"also known as Lingua franca." ... which is Latin for: language of the Franks - French!
- JPLeRouzic 6y ago
  Wikipedia says [0] "However, the terms "Franks" and "Frankish" were actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Period." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca#Hi...
  - funnybeam 6y ago
    By the Byzantines
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    You might as well call me English too (I live in Wessex after all)! What WP seems to have forgotten to mention is who actually used those terms. I'm prepared to be shot down but I doubt there was a properly defined concept of "Western European" between say 300 to 1500 in the right hand side bit of what we now call Europe. What you are on about is the left and right Roman Empires (my terms) and how they talked about each other. The left lot is now nominally modern Germany and France and much besides, what was called the Holy Roman Empire. The right lot is the Byzantine Empire. Now, your Franks were part of the left lot. The Franks were a tribal identity, cf Saxon, Angle, etc. The Franks is where la belle France gets its name (cf Frankreich, and Französisch - German names for France and French.) I am English (by assertion and routine) but my family name says I am descended from Germans on the male line (Brits being patrilineal.) As it turns out 300 odd years ago from a Hanoverian merchant seaman and (very) loosely on my matrilineal line 500 odd years ago I have a ancestor from Padstow in Cornwall. I also have inroads from all of the home nations (England, Ireland (both), Scotland and Wales). There are also quite a few other inputs to my blood line from much further abroad. One of my uncles is quite fastidious in his research and has many thousands of people in the DB.

orbital-decay 6y ago

This has another side: non-native speakers are expected to understand different accents and flavors of English just like an anglophone would. For example, as a Russian native speaker, I had real trouble comprehending even a slightest French accent, while having zero issues with others. I'd imagine there are a lot of ears "incompatible" with my own accent, so I spent a fair amount of time on getting rid of it.

lordnacho 6y ago
Even accents from Britain itself can be weird. Ever spoken to a Scot, a Liverpudlian, or a Brummie? Even people who've spoken English daily for decades will do a double take if they're not used to it. If you listen carefully, the range of vowels is quite wide, for the same word in different accents. The probably throws off a lot of people.
- vinay427 6y ago
  More of a tangent as I agree with your point, but... I think this diversity, while large, is still less than in many other languages. As one example of many, just within Europe there are accents/dialects of German in Switzerland that are largely mutually unintelligible even to some other Swiss German speakers, and nearly entirely unintelligible to most Germans. This is also true for dialects of Italian, or even Dutch, according to friends from those countries. It's generally even more fragmented outside of European languages. Unlike English, some of these cases don't even have easily standardized registers. In my experience, people in Birmingham or Glasgow, for instance, can fluidly switch to a more standardized accent and dialect that's natively or "intuitively" understandable to a speaker from North America or South Africa.
  - lordnacho 6y ago
    This is a good point. When I was in Switzerland they had a guy from Muothathal on TV. TV decided to subtitle him. I thought Swiss German was weird, but this fellow seemed to be speaking a completely different language, to my beginner ear. The thing is though, you can ask people to speak High German instead of mundart, eg at meetings. They admit it's different enough to warrant explicit statement. You can't be telling your Liverpudlian or Brummie to speak the Queen's English, that would be rude.