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>Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “default one” for the world. The language is so sloppy with

>Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “default one” for the world. The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on. It arguably became the default international language of trade because it's so sloppy, and more precisely because the language is a mish-mash of other languages, readily borrowing words from everywhere, and this is why it seems so sloppy. Some other, highly regular language like German would never have become the international language of trade because those languages aren't sloppy, and so aren't very good for non-native speakers to use daily, and aren't products of a culture that got rich from trade. As for tiny differences in pronunciations being used to discriminate against people, try learning German and moving to Germany and see how the natives treat you. You'll always be an outsider there, because you're never going to learn the language or pronunciation to that level as an adult, and the culture is known to be pretty insular. English-speaking cultures are generally far more welcoming to immigrants and people who don't speak the language like a native, and it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade.

gavindean90 2y ago
I always thought that the reason English is used in international trade is that English-speaking countries have huge economic interests, both historically and currently, and have always flat-out refused to speak anything else.
- tyre 2y ago
  Yes. Spanish isn’t widespread in the Central and South Americas because of the language, nor Portuguese in Brazil. It’s not a coincidence that stores on the Champs Élysées speak Mandarin. Languages are used because they’re useful.
g15jv2dp 2y ago
English becoming the "international" language for the west has nothing to do with English as a language, and everything to do with geopolitics and economics. As for being treated as an outsider, I actually moved and lived to the US for close to a year. I made tons of effort to try and speak good English. On the face of it, the locals were very appreciative - French accent is so romantic, am I right? In reality, they made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  I would like to hear from someone who lived in Britain for a year, but I think British people are far more tolerant and willing to listen. (Failing to realise the L in would, should and could is silent, so would and wood are pronounced identically, is half the French accent.)
- milch 2y ago
  > In reality, they made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried. I found this quite interesting about Japan. I went on vacation there recently, and especially in more rural places many people do not speak English. I don't speak Japanese, just picking up a few words while there. The people there put an immense amount of effort trying to understand what you're saying, e.g. somehow we managed to explain to a taxi driver the location of our hotel using only some elementary words like water, station, train tracks, up/down/left/right, yes/no, please/thank you. They are also very appreciative and often find it quite funny/interesting when you try to speak Japanese, even just simple words. As another example we also had an incident where a random passerby noticed we were trying to find our way, so (I assume) he asked us where we were trying to go, and then led us to the right bus stop. IME any similar situation in the US would more likely lead to people avoiding eye contact or pretending to be busy than trying to help, certainly not proactively without being asked to
yongjik 2y ago
I think you reversed cause and effect. English became the world's lingua franca not because of its inherent quality, but because the British Empire once conquered the world, and then the United States took up the baton. Basically the same reason why Latin America speaks Spanish and Portuguese. It's not because the languages were "better" in some way, but because it was conquered by speakers of those languages. And a side effect of being a global language is that you will have to get used to everybody from India to Australia to Kenya speak your language. English speakers are expected to meet widely different dialects even at the most formal business meetings.
- Retric 2y ago
  Most languages weren’t in the running. However, Spanish, French, Latin, or English could easily have become the international trade language. German was in the running for Scientific publishing etc yet somehow English won in multiple domains. And it doesn’t just win officially. I’ve seen groups without a common language default to English with people translating back and forth to other languages as needed even when more than one language was known to several members of the group. It’s not absolute, but there does seem to be an inherent advantage to English when translating across multiple languages.
  - yongjik 2y ago
    The "inherent advantage" of English is basically the same advantage of Facebook and Instagram: people use them because other people use them. When a Korean meets a Greek, chances are that neither knows each other's language but they both know English. So they converse in English.
    - Retric 2y ago
      I’ve seen groups use English even when other languages are more well known in terms of number of people or levels of fluency. Broken English works better than broken French / German. Not sure about Spanish, but something is going on beyond English winning because it was already ahead.
- 2y ago
lolinder 2y ago
> it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade. Which, while I'm here geeking out about linguistics anyway, allows me to break out one of my favorite tidbits about the history of English: "Broken English" is super easy to understand in large part due to the fact that Modern English was forged as a sort of pidgin at the intersection of Old English, Scandinavian, and then French. The crazy admixture of peoples in England between 800 and 1200 meant that most of the complicated grammatical bits of the language got sanded down to the essentials. English lost grammatical gender, its full case system, noun classes (mostly), most declensions, and on and on. What replaced all that is actually a relatively simple grammatical system (on the scale of Indo-European systems) that relies a lot more on adding words than on modifying suffixes. And adding words is a game anyone can play—you may not pick the same modifiers as a native would, but you'll get your point across!
- philwelch 2y ago
  Is this also why English has so many words? I know we doubled up on words by keeping both the Anglo-Saxon and Norman French words for the same basic concepts, but did we really be up with even more to make up for the simpler grammar?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Probably not. Most of our words are content words, and the near-duplicates are, as you say, the result of borrowing from various other languages. These words don't serve a grammatical role and we could make do without them just fine. The words that serve to replace grammatical features that exist in other Indo-European languages are a very small subset of our words—words like "will", "may" the prepositions, and similar. Non-natives will reach for other words to substitute for these grammar words when they're unsure which grammar word to use, but I don't think that's why those other words exist.
- garof 2y ago
  "The Year 1000" by Lacey and Danziger explains this well in slightly more detail, with some references, for anyone that would like to learn more. The other reference I have on the shelf that I will check for this is David Crystal's "The Stories of English". Any other good references out there?
brettp 2y ago
English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Any language with a large number and geographic spread of speakers will develop varieties and accents. In fact people do it deliberately to distinguish themselves from other speakers of the same language (just take a look at how teenagers' language innovates). French, Spanish, and German all have huge variation in dialects and accents too. English, like many other languages learnt widely as a trade language by non-native speakers, has lost a lot of complexity, notably case system and gender. (Indonesian is perhaps the canonical example of this.) Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners. It didn't become the default international language of trade due to any features of the language itself (it did that thanks to the British Empire and in particular its former colony in North America) - but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it. Because it is so widely spoken by so many people, it does have a large vocabulary and a lot of idioms. But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy ("put an 's' on the third person singular"), and so on.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Yes it is, and you say so yourself: >Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. >A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners. Most other languages don't borrow words so profligately, and have much more regular relationships between their written form and their pronunciation. >but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it. Right, and that makes the language "sloppy", which was my point before. You can't have a language shared by so many different people and cultures as a common trade language and have it stay as orderly and precise as German, for example. >But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy Yes, and these features all make the language much easier for people to adopt as an international language, despite the sloppiness. I have a hard time imagining Russian or German having had this success in a parallel universe. As an example, look at Dutch: the Netherlands is another country that got rich from trade, and was also a colonial power. But who outside of the Netherlands speaks Dutch? South Africa is the only place the language actually went anywhere. Meanwhile, the former colonies of Spain all still use Spanish.

gavindean90 2y ago

I always thought that the reason English is used in international trade is that English-speaking countries have huge economic interests, both historically and currently, and have always flat-out refused to speak anything else.

tyre 2y ago
Yes. Spanish isn’t widespread in the Central and South Americas because of the language, nor Portuguese in Brazil. It’s not a coincidence that stores on the Champs Élysées speak Mandarin. Languages are used because they’re useful.

g15jv2dp 2y ago

English becoming the "international" language for the west has nothing to do with English as a language, and everything to do with geopolitics and economics. As for being treated as an outsider, I actually moved and lived to the US for close to a year. I made tons of effort to try and speak good English. On the face of it, the locals were very appreciative - French accent is so romantic, am I right? In reality, they made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried.

Symbiote 2y ago
I would like to hear from someone who lived in Britain for a year, but I think British people are far more tolerant and willing to listen. (Failing to realise the L in would, should and could is silent, so would and wood are pronounced identically, is half the French accent.)
milch 2y ago
> In reality, they made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried. I found this quite interesting about Japan. I went on vacation there recently, and especially in more rural places many people do not speak English. I don't speak Japanese, just picking up a few words while there. The people there put an immense amount of effort trying to understand what you're saying, e.g. somehow we managed to explain to a taxi driver the location of our hotel using only some elementary words like water, station, train tracks, up/down/left/right, yes/no, please/thank you. They are also very appreciative and often find it quite funny/interesting when you try to speak Japanese, even just simple words. As another example we also had an incident where a random passerby noticed we were trying to find our way, so (I assume) he asked us where we were trying to go, and then led us to the right bus stop. IME any similar situation in the US would more likely lead to people avoiding eye contact or pretending to be busy than trying to help, certainly not proactively without being asked to

yongjik 2y ago

I think you reversed cause and effect. English became the world's lingua franca not because of its inherent quality, but because the British Empire once conquered the world, and then the United States took up the baton. Basically the same reason why Latin America speaks Spanish and Portuguese. It's not because the languages were "better" in some way, but because it was conquered by speakers of those languages. And a side effect of being a global language is that you will have to get used to everybody from India to Australia to Kenya speak your language. English speakers are expected to meet widely different dialects even at the most formal business meetings.

Retric 2y ago
Most languages weren’t in the running. However, Spanish, French, Latin, or English could easily have become the international trade language. German was in the running for Scientific publishing etc yet somehow English won in multiple domains. And it doesn’t just win officially. I’ve seen groups without a common language default to English with people translating back and forth to other languages as needed even when more than one language was known to several members of the group. It’s not absolute, but there does seem to be an inherent advantage to English when translating across multiple languages.
- yongjik 2y ago
  The "inherent advantage" of English is basically the same advantage of Facebook and Instagram: people use them because other people use them. When a Korean meets a Greek, chances are that neither knows each other's language but they both know English. So they converse in English.
  - Retric 2y ago
    I’ve seen groups use English even when other languages are more well known in terms of number of people or levels of fluency. Broken English works better than broken French / German. Not sure about Spanish, but something is going on beyond English winning because it was already ahead.
2y ago

lolinder 2y ago

> it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade. Which, while I'm here geeking out about linguistics anyway, allows me to break out one of my favorite tidbits about the history of English: "Broken English" is super easy to understand in large part due to the fact that Modern English was forged as a sort of pidgin at the intersection of Old English, Scandinavian, and then French. The crazy admixture of peoples in England between 800 and 1200 meant that most of the complicated grammatical bits of the language got sanded down to the essentials. English lost grammatical gender, its full case system, noun classes (mostly), most declensions, and on and on. What replaced all that is actually a relatively simple grammatical system (on the scale of Indo-European systems) that relies a lot more on adding words than on modifying suffixes. And adding words is a game anyone can play—you may not pick the same modifiers as a native would, but you'll get your point across!

philwelch 2y ago
Is this also why English has so many words? I know we doubled up on words by keeping both the Anglo-Saxon and Norman French words for the same basic concepts, but did we really be up with even more to make up for the simpler grammar?
- lolinder 2y ago
  Probably not. Most of our words are content words, and the near-duplicates are, as you say, the result of borrowing from various other languages. These words don't serve a grammatical role and we could make do without them just fine. The words that serve to replace grammatical features that exist in other Indo-European languages are a very small subset of our words—words like "will", "may" the prepositions, and similar. Non-natives will reach for other words to substitute for these grammar words when they're unsure which grammar word to use, but I don't think that's why those other words exist.
garof 2y ago
"The Year 1000" by Lacey and Danziger explains this well in slightly more detail, with some references, for anyone that would like to learn more. The other reference I have on the shelf that I will check for this is David Crystal's "The Stories of English". Any other good references out there?

brettp 2y ago

English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Any language with a large number and geographic spread of speakers will develop varieties and accents. In fact people do it deliberately to distinguish themselves from other speakers of the same language (just take a look at how teenagers' language innovates). French, Spanish, and German all have huge variation in dialects and accents too. English, like many other languages learnt widely as a trade language by non-native speakers, has lost a lot of complexity, notably case system and gender. (Indonesian is perhaps the canonical example of this.) Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners. It didn't become the default international language of trade due to any features of the language itself (it did that thanks to the British Empire and in particular its former colony in North America) - but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it. Because it is so widely spoken by so many people, it does have a large vocabulary and a lot of idioms. But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy ("put an 's' on the third person singular"), and so on.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Yes it is, and you say so yourself: >Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. >A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners. Most other languages don't borrow words so profligately, and have much more regular relationships between their written form and their pronunciation. >but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it. Right, and that makes the language "sloppy", which was my point before. You can't have a language shared by so many different people and cultures as a common trade language and have it stay as orderly and precise as German, for example. >But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy Yes, and these features all make the language much easier for people to adopt as an international language, despite the sloppiness. I have a hard time imagining Russian or German having had this success in a parallel universe. As an example, look at Dutch: the Netherlands is another country that got rich from trade, and was also a colonial power. But who outside of the Netherlands speaks Dutch? South Africa is the only place the language actually went anywhere. Meanwhile, the former colonies of Spain all still use Spanish.