why do Americans have to ruin everything?

[ringo110879]

Including the english language

[jno]

they are currently almost the only ones keeping the language alive and changing. The British just imitate their use of it.

[spacechimp]

I don't want it to change in ridiculous unnecessary ways. Take the way they have reclassified the meanings of billion, trillion etc..

[jno]

well, the French guard their language very carefully, not allowing any change unless the Academy okays it. Result: slow death.

[spacechimp]

French isn't dying.

[spacechimp]

Everyone still learns it at school, don't you know?

[waimarie]

That's a bit of a broad statement ringo110879. Have you been to the Costas, Canary Islands and one or two other places in July/August ?? You will no doubt see that the Brits don't do so bad at cringe making bad behaviour nor indifference to other people's culture..

Come to think of it, you can see a fair amount in any town in UK on a Friday or Saturday night. So, we don't do so bad at runing things either. The phrase 'People in glasshouses', springs to mind,

[Quizmonster]

The English language belongs just as much to the Americans as it does to the English. There are all sorts of 'Englishes'...Indian English, Caribbean English and so on as well as British English. There are constant borrowings to and fro amongst them, all of which enriches the borrowers' tongues. It's nonsense to claim Americans 'ruin' language...or anything else for that matter.

I think that, if the Acad�mie had its way, J, French would be dying. However, the French people don't seem to pay much attention to their diktats. Nobody's going to stop them from eating 'le sandwich' or looking forward to 'le weekend'. The law-givers are on a hiding to nothing in my view.

[Drusilla1S]

I don't think the Americans ruin everything, including language. The present US government might make my blood boil, but the people are friendly and polite and could teach the French and many Brits about manners. (My kids are French, so I'm not being racist.)

In fact, it is fair to state that Americans use words and sentence structures that would be more easily recognised by English people from the 1700's than the language we use today in England. In other words, their language has progressed more slowly than ours.

[spaced]

well the Americans did invent the words "Friendly Fire" and "Obese"

[spacechimp]

Still, they have made a dog's dinner of the billion and trillion classifications... That's what annoys me intensely.

[mycatis]

But they aren't speaking english, they are speaking American

[Lonnie]

English is an evolving language, in its home country, and abroad, it takes from other languages, and incorperates them into itself, because of the distances involved with other English speaking countries, eg, America and Australia, those countries speak a different English than us, and no, America is not ruining our language, its just evolved in a different way.

[Lonnie]

And referring to what mycatis has put, at present, the Americans do still speak English, their own version, but I can see in the not too distant future, it being reclassied as American.

Also, if any Americans on this site read this, or somone in the know, I believe that America actually has no official language.

[Xollob]

Many years ago at university, our linguistics lecturer started his course by claiming that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would sound more American than British. It is often the case that isolated communities (and for a couple of hundred years or so the United States were to a certain extent isolated) are more conservative in their language development. The Pennsylvania Dutch are an extreme example here - speaking an archaic form of German. I also read somewhere that of the Romance languages, Romanian is in many respects closest to the vulgar Latin whence it came, again presumably due to its relative isolation.

One could argue that the Americans have ruined many things, but as Lonnie says, it's just evolving in a different way. We Brits actually owe the Americans a debt of gratitute here - English would not have such global importance if the US had chosen Spanish or German as their (at least de facto) official language.

[ringo110879]

Well what about netball and rounders?

[spacechimp]

What would be so bad if the Americans had chosen Spanish or German? Not that it was really conceivable.

[Xollob]

What's so inconceivable about the US speaking Spanish? There are hundreds of millions of Spanish and Portugese speakers in South America. It's all just an accident of history as to who grabbed which colonies when.

Like it or not, the US are the most influential nation on this fragile planet and their primary language is English. This means, for example, that there are over 1,000,000 articles in Wikipeida in English, against around 100,000 in Spanish. Many Brits don't realise what an advantage this is - there is a vast amount of knowlege readily available in their native language. If German or Spanish were the dominant world language, the British would have to learn a foreign language - not necessarily a bad thing, of course.

[spacechimp]

I'm saying, the fact that we grabbed North America (apart from a couple of Frenchmen) alone, makes it inconceivable that English would not be the USA's language.

[Xollob]

I still think it's one big accident of history: the Vikings were there before the not-as-English-as-he-could-be Columbus; the Pilgrim Fathers could all have starved to death during their first winter (many of them did); at one time the French colony of Louisiana stretched from the Mississipi to Canada - what would have happened if Napoleon hadn't been strapped for cash in 1803?; what if German immigrants to the USA had vastly outnumbered those from the British Isles?; what happens when current demographic trends continue and Spanish becomes the language of the majority in California and other southern states?

There is an information revolution happening right now, and I consider myself very fortunate to have English as my native tongue. But I don't take it for granted.

[spacechimp]

I'd rather it if French was the language of America.