When I was visiting Paris, a tour bus we got on had a audio guide, the languages were all labeled with national flags.
English -> UK flag French -> flag of France Spanish -> Flag of Spain Portuguese -> Flag of Brazil
Even in Europe Portugal plays second fiddle for it’s own language
Brazil became such a cultural powerhouse, almost anyone in the world would recognize its flag. So it makes sense. But it’s funny because only Portuguese speakers would need to recognize the flag on that tour.
Yes, but the guys who made the guide (I mean the developers who assigned each audio track a flag, not the ones recording the audio) might not. I guess that might not even been developed in France and nobody cared enough to fix the bug.
I wouldn’t call it a “bug”
Me neither, just lacking a better word.
I bet too that the audio itself is in Brazilian Portuguese
Sounds likely
Traditional English vs Simplified English. I won’t tell you which is which.
Traditional English vs Yankee English.
Ah, one more way in which post-colonial America and Mao’s China are similar.
Brit here it’s our laugauge don’t like it? Get your own instead of spelling ours wrong
Canadian here. Choosing between UK English and US English feels like choosing between an abusive father and abusive husband.
What’s all that aboot?
We are a reformed crazy dad we are trying to be part of your life but we’re still drama
350 million Americans, 70 million British.
Your minority opinion is noted but outvoted, micronation.
Colony
I’m here for this English on regressed English violence.
Regressed English are the Welsh mate the colonys are known as the new indies
Hmmmm yes but the average American reads at a grade 6 level, so I daresay UK beats USA there.
Do you have a comparable statistic for British adults, or could no one afford to fund the study?
https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/
https://www.prosperityforamerica.org/literacy-statistics/
These are what I found after searching literacy statistics for both nations. I haven’t gone and checked through the data but it seems that the UK has a lower illiteracy rate than the US.
I don’t like using country flags for languages. For one thing, not every language has a country of its own – there are 700+ languages in use today, but <200 countries. Many languages don’t even have any obvious insignia to represent them at all.
If you’re making a piece of software and you want it ported to many languages, just use text to represent the language.
America has one of the largest Spanish speaking populations in the world, so in future web applications I will use the American flag to indicate Spanish, for the lulz
Bonus points from TTS users.
As an Aussie it really grinds my gears that office defaults to American spelling. And even after I change the dictionary to Australian or UK english it still continues to insert ‘z’ into words. It’s colonise, not colonize!
I thought in Aus and other international areas the Z was considered correct spelling, even though most of the rest follows British convention?
Australia follows British conventions. However both spellings are correct and there has been a rise in ‘z’ over the past few years with American influence.
All government websites etc use British spelling.
Of course it’s worth adding that the Oxford English Dictionary argues (argued?) that the z is proper in British English! I disagree ;-)
What!
My world doth shaketh
Mine too. I had to stop believing in the OED as the foremost authority on correct English!
Besides, they probably put commas in the wrong places over there too.
How do you pronounce that word
Haben Sie schonmal von germanischen Sprachen gehört, wo ein ‘S’ duraus so wie englisches ‘Z’ klingen kann?
I bet that sounds really good if you say it out loud
I replaced the US flag with a UK one on my website for this reason x)
As an American who does web development, “You guys have multiple languages on your websites?”
it’s worse when it’s an American flag because I’m always looking for the British one
British English is the OG English. They should always use that flag.
Old English would like to have a word.
Old English, where is that from?
ingerland
America
You’re another that doesn’t understand “Received Pronunciation”, aren’t you?
Received from the great founders of England: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob Lincoln, and Lord Martin Luther King Sr I.
I don’t get the joke sorry.
yeah otherwise you might as well use the Australian flag or whatever
Or even the Canadian flag, to make it even more fun for the US people lol
ok that’s even better yeah
and also Canadian for french, because it’s never wrong to mess with the french
Well if we want get technical it’s roots are in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Well if we want to get technical its roots are in the Indo-European which comes from the Iranian plateau
I replied to the wrong person but you are right!
The way ‘herbs’ or ‘erbs’ (as some pronounce it) drives me absolutely nuts.
Also, ‘mirror’ where it sounds like ‘meer’ drives me nuts.
I definitely prefer British English. Love reading the old Agatha Christie books. E.g. “My word!” The colonel ejaculated, “I do believe that she’s dead!”
In the Black Panther they talk about the “heart-shaped 'erb,” and it sounds so strange to me, I always think it should then be “'art-shaped 'erb!”
Wakanda is a high-tech nation hidden in the jungles of the East Riding.
That “meer” thing has to do with where you are in America. Same with words like “roof” or “pecan”.
Yep, I’m not doubting that.
I have to say, though, my most favourite American accent is the Minnesota one. Fargo helped make it all sound very endearing. Unsure how they pronounce mirror. Perhaps it’s ‘meer’.
I wish there were some internationally recognized symbols to represent languages as distinct entities from their countries of origin, but the idea of trying to make some seems really unpopular for some reason.
There’s other languages that have far more politically contentious flags representing them - at least all the English-speaking countries are broadly allies. Spare a thought for the Taiwanese who have to select a People’s Republic of China flag, even though the language is as much theirs as it is the PRC’s, or the large number of Russian-speaking native Ukrainians who have to select the flag of the country who’s bombing them and their families.
The notion of a country owning a language is fraught with toxicity (indeed, Russia’s claim to vast swathes of Ukraine leans heavily on it), and if languages had their own flags we could sidestep the whole issue.
French has the fleur De lies which, although it was a symbol of French royalty is still used on the flag of Quebec and some places in Canada identify the French language option with the flag of Quebec.
Realistically, the best option would just be a shorted abbreviation of the language in that language. Ex. Eng for English and deu for German
There is a set of ISO codes for each language, but it’s not catchy used as an icon, and are also implicitly Western-centric by virtue of using the Latin alphabet.
The unnecessary "u"s haunt us
Or in American …
The nnecessary ""s hant s.
I woke up screaming last night because I dreamed I went to grab my colored pencils and they said “colour” on the box. Almost as bad as that time I dreamed I had to take a driving tests and all the speed signs were in KM.
At this point point, people who speak English as second language usually go “awww, how cute, the native speakers really think this is the biggest controversy of English orthography.”
(Instead of, you know, everything.)
Its more just the easily memable one.
Sobs quietly
I just want a consistent spelling system.
The British, when they have to click the American flag for English, and then they see “color” without the “u”:
We save it for u wot M8?
Col-or what, that’s what I want to know.
Speak native american!!
Seeing recipes from everywhere but the US, and Americans asking to have the recipe ingredients converted “for them”. Sheesh…
Yeah, but it’s not obvious how many galoshes of diced onion I need when it says 100g.
I had a roommate in college royally fuckup huge batch of very expensive ribs we’d bought for a party because the online recipe called for 2 cloves of garlic abbreviated as “garlic - 2c” and he put in 2 cups of garlic powder.
Fake - you can never have too much garlic.
Honestly at that point just use the whole onion
I saw a New York Times recipe once that called for ¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons of all purpose flour.
They meant 125g.
Ok, it’s driving me crazy.
Who is that? The actor, not the character they’re playing.
Isnt that Lin-Manuel Miranda?
I thought so, thanks!
Lin-Manual Miranda
I thought so, thanks!
Languages and nationalities are not a one-to-one match anyway. What would you expect from a Canadian flag? French, or English? The USA has NO official language, so that makes even less sense.
I wish people would stop trying to replace words with cute little images.
