English is not always English
David Singer and I are having a conversation about the differences between British, US, Canadian and Australian English that started with his comparisons between the US and the British edition of Harry Potter. Today, David writes on his weblog:
Andrea and I are having a chat about the differences between various national dialects of English on her weblog. I find it intriguing that differences which are so obvious to me are invisible to her.
David, the differences are not invisible to me. I know there are certain differences between British and US English: some words (pavement – sidewalk) and the spelling of some others (many words have a single “o” in US English, while the British spell it “ou”, e.g. labo(u)r). We even learned about that at school and took vocabulary tests in which we had to “translate” words from British to US English. However, nobody told me about Canadian or Australian English. Since US English is referred to as “American English” most of the time, I assumed Canadian English was the same as US English – which seems not to be true.
By the way, there are different kinds of German, too. You can tell whether someone is from Northern Germany, Bavaria, Austria or Switzerland. There are Rheinländer, Schwaben, Sachsen, Berliner…
I recently read that the “ß”, which is a sharp s-sound, is not used in Switzerland at all. They write “ss” instead, which is the common way to write ß if Umlaute are not available. I think they do use the other ones (ä, ö, ü = ae, oe, ue), though.
In Lower Saxony, the part of Germany where I grew up, Plattdeutsch (literally: flat German 
) is still spoken. It’s kind of like a mixture of German, English and everything in between, close to Dutch in some ways, too. There are very subtle differences in pronounciation depending on the village you’re from! So if you grew up in the area, you can tell whether someone is from your village or the one 5 miles away, and you certainly know if you’re talking to someone from around Bremen or Hamburg – if they do still speak Plattdeutsch, of course. Sadly, it’s becoming more and more uncommon, and few young people speak it. I understand it and can speak it if I must, but I’m not really used to talking in Plattdeutsch. But it was my parents’ first language! They had to learn Hochdeutsch, the “normal” German, at school.
Weblogs are incestuous
Serious Instructional Technology:
“Staying afloat on WEBLOGS (7/17/00; 6:46:45 AM)
Quote: ‘Sites are water wings for surfers sinking in sea of cybermadness’
Comment: via Blivet (Hal) via John via Andrea about John (the Curmudgeon). And they say weblogs are incestuous…“
Susan’s Trip to Pasadena
Susan:
Andrea commented on my trip to Pasadena on Saturday. Somehow her wording implied that it was a big deal. Actually, it’s a pretty quick trip–just a matter of three freeway exits to get within Pasadena’s city limits, and 8 exits to get to my destination. By the way, I love that Monet painting at the Norton Simon museum; I will stare at it just about every time I go there.
I didn’t mean to imply her trip was like a trip around the world. It just made me remember my trips to Pasadena, which certainly felt like a big deal. But I was only 17 then, and the student exchange was the first time I went to another continent; everything was new and thrilling!
Susan mentioned she has a membership to the Norton Simon Museum so she can visit any time and even for only half an hour to have a quick look at a few pieces. It’s great to be able to take your time and don’t feel you didn’t get your money’s worth if you don’t spend hours and hours in the museum at a time.
Loose socks and Miniskirts
Wanna know what really cool Japanese teenager girls wear, do, like? Read The Japanese Teenage Girls’ Manual of Style. It’s a site with little essays written by Japanese girls for a student exchange with the USA, complete with photos. (The loose socks and miniskirts are in the clothes section.)
The manual is part of a website about the Kyoto Nishi Highschool’s Course of International and Cultural Studies.
Point of View
Yesterday, Susan had some interesting thoughts and a little story about changing one’s point of view.
Egosurfing
Here’s the search engine for all you egosurfers: www.egosurf.com.
Sports with an office chair
This is a really cool story… 
Since US English is referred to as “American English” most of
the time, I assumed Canadian English was the same as US English
Interesting that you assumed that ‘America’ includes Canada. I’m sure that being referred to as ‘Americans’ would be hugely insulting to most Canadians! Calling them ‘North Americans’ would be OK.
Germans seem to be confused as to whether America is a country or a continent,at least when they come up with silly terms like ‘US-Amerikaner’.
I assumed that ‘America’ referred to the continent, and that was the reason why I assumed ‘American’ included both the USA and Canada and was just short for ‘North American English’. The word ‘North’ is obsolete anyway because they speak Spanish and Portuguese in South America.
America is a continent, while the USA and Canada are both countries in America. And to me, the term ‘US-Amerikaner’ makes sense. It’s the word for the citizens of the United States of America. People from America (the continent) are called Americans, people from Europe are Europeans, the same goes for Asians and Africans, too.
If you want to refer to citizens of the USA instead of people from (North) America, you call them ‘US-Amerikaner’ in German and not just ‘Amerikaner’.
If you use the term ‘Amerikaner’ for both, nobody will know whether you talk about people from America (the continent) or citizens of the USA.
This is a good case of something that seems to be totally obvious and simple, but actually is not, depending on your point of view (didn’t Susan have a good article on this recently?).
To my sense of US-learned geography, the western hemisphere has two continents, North America and South America, which you cannot really lump together into a single ‘America’. When referring to both continents, which is not all that often, we say ‘The Americas’.
I’ve never heard of Latin Americans objecting to the term ‘American’ to refer to the US, but maybe they are just silently tolerating Yankee arrogance.
(Actually, Yankee is another term that can get you in trouble… residents of the Southern United States don’t take kindly to the term at all.)
Now, the German sense of ‘America’ probably goes way back to Goethe (“Amerika, Du hast es besser”… actually, I have no idea what part of the American continents Goethe is referring to), but it is interesting with ‘US-Amerikaner’, the German language makes a distinction for my nationality that we nationals ourselves do not make. It sounds strange to me, like an attempt at political correctness (except that that political correctness is a new and distinctly, um, US-American concept).
To continue the discussion, can you explain why German uses the English pronounciation for 49 US states but not for Arkansas? Meanwhile, I’ll try to find out why we spell Hannover with only one ‘n’. :-)
To my sense of US-learned geography, the western hemisphere has two continents, North America and South America, which you cannot really lump together into a single ‘America’. When referring to both continents, which is not all that often, we say ‘The Americas’.
Yes, I heard that term from US citizens. I wonder why they are both called America although you cannot lump them together, as you said.
To continue the discussion, can you explain why German uses the English pronounciation for 49 US states but not for Arkansas? Meanwhile, I’ll try to find out why we spell Hannover with only one ‘n’.
Um, is that true? I would pronounce it Ar-kn-saa (with the long ‘a’ being between an ‘a’ and and ‘o’, like the Scandinavian å). What about California? It’s Kalifornien in German!
Hehe, André’s guess is that most Germans simply are too stupid to know how Arkansas is pronounced correctly. (He might be right about that!
) Do the Tagesschau-Sprecher pronounce it correctly?
Speaking of pronounciation: I’m still wondering how ‘Des Moines’ is pronounced… sigh.
Anyway, I’m interested in the missing ‘n’ in Hanover. I just went to their site, but they don’t seem to have a section on history.
I thought that maybe Hannover was Hanover or something like that a while back. If the name has a Latin root, it’s likely because there are no double letters in Latin.
But André says that Hannover developed from ‘Am hohen Ufer’. Maybe English-speaking people are more intelligent than Germans again and have noticed that ‘Am hohen Ufer’ includes only one ‘n’?!
To continue the discussion, can you explain why German uses the English pronounciation for 49 US states but not for Arkansas?
I expect most Germans, if they tried to guess the correct pronounciation for Arkansas, would probably end up pronouncing the second and third syllable just like Kansas. There’s at least some logic to it.
My theory is that Arkansas is a word taken from the language of a Native American tribe. If you have never heard the pronounciation, it’s quite hard to make the correct guess just from the letters.
There are definitely differences between Canadian and US English. My wife is Canadian. Examples include ‘Chesterfield’ in Canada, ‘couch’ or ‘sofa’ in the US; ‘parkade’ in Canada, ‘parking garage’ in the US; ‘zed’ for the last letter in the alphabet in Canada, ‘zee’ in the US. There are many others, but I hope this conveys the idea.
As for Arkansas, I’ve always heard it pronounced r-KAN-sas on the Tagesschau, even when the reporter is broadcasting directly from Little Rock. I’m sure the broadcast news organisations have style guides for pronouncing geographic names, and doubt that it’s an accident.
Kalifornien sounds fine to me.
I pronounce the capital of Iowa as deh-MOIN, and Sioux City (another city in Iowa) as sue-city (I’ve often hear SEE-ox for Sioux here.) Nike shoes are NIE-key (Germans say nyke), and Levi jeans are LEE-vyes (Germans say leh-VEES, although since Levi Strauss was born in Bavaria, that’s OK),
They really say r-KAN-sas? That’s horrible! They should know the correct pronounciation at least if they are right there.
I’ve heard SEE-ox instead of sue, too, but then, it’s never easy to tell how to pronounce Indian words. For example, we went to Yosemite last year. Now is that JOsy-mite or Jose-MITE or JO-se-mi-tee? We found out eventually, but I guess that one would be difficult even for Americans.
As for the brand names, I’ve heard LEE-vyes and NIE-key more and more often now. Since I had learned that Nike was nyke, I thought at first that some Germans got the pronounciation wrong when I heard them say NIE-key.
It seems Canadian English has words that are different from both British and US English, then.
I guess that’s pretty much true for every language, not just English. There are different words for ‘potato’ in the different parts of Germany, too, for example, and Austrians use many words different from the ones Germans use.
Not that Americans (be they US or Canadian) are any better at pronouncing German brand names. They insist that BMW should be spoken as bee-em-double-you. ;-)
I haven’t found anything about ‘Hanover’ yet. I think that the English only invented their own place names for unimportant German towns like Cologne, Brunswick and Munich. They left the spelling as is for important places… like Bonn, Berlin, Hamburg, Hetzwege and Lüllau.
(I’m just assuming there’s no English term for Hetzwege… would it be Hurry-way?)
(I ventured into this discussion with the intention of saying something intelligent about British vs American English. I don’t think I ever got around to it…)
Maybe they should have called the car BMV in the USA?! Americans also pronounce Mercedes like it’s got something to do with mercy!
I think that the English only invented their own place names for unimportant German towns like Cologne, Brunswick and Munich. They left the spelling as is for important places… like Bonn, Berlin, Hamburg, Hetzwege and Lüllau.
Hetzwege… I don’t know of any English name for it. What I know is that the name Hetzwege developed from Eytzwede, which came from Ittheswidi, or something like that. Nobody has found out yet what the name really means.
But as far as I know, noone really hurries away from Hetzwege. Although I live in Bonn now, I like to go back and visit my family. Besides my parents, my grandmother, grandparents and some aunts, uncles and cousins live there. No, I’m not related to the majority of the people living in Hetzwege.
I received some thoughts from Robert Blake via email. He kindly allowed me to share them with you:
Dear Andrea
I read your post “English is not always English” (17 July) and the resulting discussion. This is really about the differences between American and Standard or International English.
I am from New Zealand and use Standard English. Most people in the UK, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, English-speaking Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Indian sub-continent, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Island countries also use Standard English. While there are often differences in vocabulary between the varieties of Standard English used in these countries, they are part of a common language group with shared historical and cultural references. American English, on the other hand, is very different.
The most obvious difference is in spelling. American English, in many respects, is simplified English. American English has removed many English borrowings from other languages such as Greek (changing -oe- to -e-, -ae- to -e- and losing the silent -ph-), Latin (changing -ph- to -f-), Old/Middle English (-gh- to -f-, -y- to -i-), French (-our to -or, -ogue to -og etc.) and numerous other spelling and punctuation simplifications.
But even more important are the cultural differences. American English developed within a cultural and historical setting which is largely alien to the rest of the English-speaking world.
In part, this reflects the separation of the United States from the common cultural heritage of the British Commonwealth, such as the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, sports such as Cricket and Soccer, Commonwealth literature, and the various dictionaries of Standard English.
From this, Standard English speakers can conduct a conversation in common understanding and knowledge, but it is a conversation from which Americans are largely excluded by the insularity of their language.
Thus, to many Standard English speakers, American English is a lesser or “dumbed-down” version of English. To a Standard English speaker, American English seems to lack the variety, cosmopolitanism, and subtlety of Standard English.
Indeed, many Standard English speakers consider American English to be vulgar. Some consider its use to be offensive.
Americans, on the whole, do not seem to object to the use of Standard English, but many Standard English speakers do object—many strongly— to the use of American English.
Kind regards,
Robert Blake
Although, it is often used as an example of a Canadianism, I don’t know anyone who has a “chesterfield” in their home, but I know many people who have “couches”. (This may be a regionalism however, since I live in Southwestern Manitoba (Manitoba is the Easternmost Western Canadian province), and have never been to Eastern Canada.)
I read the message from Robert Blake about Standard English. Canadian English, while it does retains some similarities to British or Commonwealth English, is often very similar to American (US) English. Canadians also have simplified some of their words but not all, for example ‘ae’ and ‘oe’ are rare, but ‘ou’ is still quite common.
Similarly some Commonwealth cultural features are retained but many others are different. Canadians are more likely to play hockey, baseball, or Canadian football (like American football except with slightly different rules and a larger field).
Of course, many things (including language) about the States or Canada are not national, but rather regional, since both countries are transcontinental in scope.