Talk:English language

Broken External Link to "The Global English Survey Project"

The last External Link "The Global English Survey Project - A survey tracking how non-native speakers around the world use English", is broken. Page no longer exists. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.234.35.247 (talk • contribs) 16:25, 17 July 2009

100 words of English: How far can it get you?

Interesting article in the BBC today http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12894638 JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 14:51, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Spread into Scotland

This confuses me. English didn't spread into south eastern Scotland because of Northumbria. Northumbria included south eastern Scotland, the same way as north western England was at this time part of Scotland. When Scotland conquered Northumbria and took part of that kingdom's territory, it of course inherited a population of English speakers. It's false to imply that just because Scotland today has the borders that it does, it should be thus regarded as having this extent at the time of the English heptarchy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.223.71.210 (talk) 13:57, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Official language of the United Kingdom

Someone has added that English is not the official language of the United Kingdom, quoting 'us-english.org' (gakkk!). This is false, for a few reasons. Firstly, there IS written legislation favouring English officially with respect to immigration, etc. Secondly, it is the de facto official language of parliament and government (and very often quoted as such). To say that 'de facto official' is a contradiction in terms is to misunderstand how English law works: British government and English law are governed by convention, precedent and an unwritten constitution, and place far more weight on the unwritten when it comes to political institutions than most countries, including the US. Thus, deeply rooted convention can make things official, especially when there is no written constitution in which one can write, 'the official languages of this country are...' - and the fact that this is omitted in the US constitution is more significant. The official Commonwealth and Home Office websites agree that English is the official language, as do other pages in Wikipedia. Harsimaja (talk) 09:17, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Edit Request

A recent edit or edits has caused a 'cite error' in red at the bottom of the page. I can only suggest reverting. Alternatively whoever kindly deals with this could correct the offending syntax? Sorry, I can't be more specific! :( - 220.101 talk^\Contribs 21:02, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

 Done — Bility (talk) 23:26, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Just a further note to both above. The "recent edit" to this article had nothing to do with it. It was before me that the error was happening. I hadn't noticed it. I didn't add a ref but a bibliographic reference. Upon further research, the bad reference problem has been there since August 11, 2007 and appears to have been introduced with this edit:

• (cur | prev) 06:24, 11 August 2007 IeieieieFrenchenenenene (talk | contribs) (63,758 bytes) (→Dictionaries) (undo)
  

The offending change, an addition, from 11 August 2007 6:24 by User:IeieieieFrenchenenenene added this: {{Official languages of South America}} macro invocation which somehow threw everything off and caused the error.
User:Bility actually and properly fixed the source of the error in the "Official languages of South America" template source code and removed my temporary work-around. Well done. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 23:58, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

For the record, it actually happened yesterday with this edit. — Bility (talk) 00:12, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's true, since the error was in the macro/template which you fixed. But it appeared on comparing a lot of English language article histories and diff's, delusionally, to go back to a time when the actual code to call the macro was inserted in 2007. I didn't realize it was that macro that was in error. Hmm. Also, it seems that older copies of an article call a present edition of a macro (template) and don't call an archived past version. I was fooled. Apologies. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 00:21, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Edit request

Please add to the Significance section the fact that English is also the language of seafaring. Citation: http://www.imo.org/OurWork/Safety/Navigation/Pages/StandartMarineCommunicationPhrases.aspx 93.172.56.90 (talk) 08:24, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Anyone with editing right mind adding this? 93.172.56.90 (talk) 13:08, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Done. Rwessel (talk) 01:03, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Mutual intelligibility with Scots

A minor point, but under "Classification and related languages" the article says:

With the exception of Scots, none of the other languages is mutually intelligible with English

I feel uncomfortable with the article stating this so bluntly, and I feel this view needs heavy qualification. (Or at least a cite.) Mutual intelligibility is very ill-defined and variable according to many factors. Especially in the case of Scots, which lacks any kind of standardisation and consists of a continuum ranging from very distinctive rural local dialects to something that might be more like Scottish English with various Scotticisms thrown in. Native speakers (especially those from Southern England) seem to agree that at least Insular Scots is so divergent as to be unintelligible to them.

How about rephrasing this to With the exception of Scots, all the other languages are completely mutually unintelligible with English or some such? I don't think any monolingual speaker of English has ever proven capable, or even claimed, to understand Norwegian, German, Dutch, or even Frisian with an effort no greater than that required to get used to a different (national) variety of Standard English. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 06:12, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Read the present content again: it does not say Scots is mutually intelligible with English. Indeed the difference is just the placement of the negative (none/intelligible vs all/uninelligible), which doesn't change the meaning. Beside that proposed rephrasing is somewhat awkward IMO. —teb728 t c 07:25, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

A more important difference is the inclusion of "completely", which does change the meaning. But I agree that it's a bit awkward. However, I also think that the sentence as it stands in the article does imply strongly that Scots and English are mutually intelligible, which is not ideal. How about: "English and Scots are mutually intelligible to an extent, but neither is mutually intelligible with any of the other languages..."? garik (talk) 13:14, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

How about

With the exception of Scots, which is to a{n} {varying} {extent|degree} (or: varying {extents|degrees}) mutually intelligible, all the other languages are {fully} mutually unintelligible with English?

Or simply: With the partial exception of Scots or: With the exception of {some|many|urban|Anglicised|southern|some less divergent|some less distinctive} varieties of Scots? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:57, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Or even better, just delete the whole sentence. In spite of the fact that it is a rambling run-on sentence that touches on many many topics, it really doesn't say anything of real value.

As for mutually intelligibility, it really doesn't mean all that much. I, an American, have had conversations in perfectly standard English with South African (not Afrikaans) speakers that were a major challenge to understand, solely because of their pronunciation. After living a year with a South African roommate, it's hard for me now to believe that I had so much trouble undertanding it when I first heard it. Also, I speak Danish, and I can't understand Norwegian Bokmaal at all, even though it is extremely similar to Danish on paper. Mutual intelligibility depends a lot on getting used to the pronunciation of the person you are speaking with, as is therefore in large part a characteristic of the listener, than of the languages or dialects themselves.Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 20:47, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

You're probably right that simply deleting the sentence would be no big loss. For closely related varities, so closely related that the whole language-dialect issue comes into play, mutual intelligibility is generally difficult to determine and differs according to the precise subvarieties/lects chosen and many other factors, as I've already said in the outset, so we are in full agreement there.

However, one could argue that if you fail to understand a foreign "accent" pretty much immediately, mutual intelligibility is simply not present, as "getting used to" an "accent" basically involves/means learning a different, just very closely related, dialect, much the same as Danish speakers tend to "assimilate" or "absorb" Norwegian or Swedish relatively effortlessly without realising that they are actually learning a new variety. For this kind of "bilingualism" that involves languages so closely related that speakers basically feel about them as variants of one and the same system, not clearly distinct systems, Linguasphere uses the term translingualism.

If we keep the sentence, the proposal With the partial exception of Scots sounds like the simplest fix to me, not perfect, but not worse than the others; but if you prefer to delete the sentence, go for it. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:57, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

I've changed the article now.

As an aside, I wonder if children raised in (say) rural Southern England without exposure to other varieties of English (through mass media, especially TV), only the local/regional dialect/accent, might not also have major difficulty understanding (say) American English, when first getting in contact with it, just like you had with South African English. After all, American English might conceivably have diverged from Southern British English even more since Shakespeare's time than South African English has diverged from Southern British English, which, after all, has happened much more recently. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:15, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Edit request: some external links

My proposal - add some external links to other Wiki projects:

• Category in Wiktionary;
• Category in Wikisource;
• Category or Subject in Wikibooks.

--Averaver (talk) 11:05, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

PLEASE UPDATE IT

America has 300 million people now, not 250 million. Added to UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the total must be much more than 300. The numbers for english are very out of date here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.13.168.139 (talk) 05:54, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Fair enough. Do you have a good source? I found the 2007 Census Bureau report, which gives an over five population of 280,950,438 (vs. 262,375,152), an English only number of 225,505,953 (vs. 215,423,557), and a non-English primary number of 55,444,485, of which 52.6% and 18.3% fall into the "very well" and "well" categories, yielding approximately 39.3 million (vs. 35,964,744). I think I'm doing this the same way as the numbers that were sourced from the cited 2000 report (although the 2000 report had numbers instead of percentages for the categories). It does not appear that more recent numbers are available (if the follow the apparent pattern, the 2010 number will be available in a couple of years).

2000: http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-29.pdf

2007: http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/acs-12.pdf

An issue this raises is how well these numbers actually apply. The Census Bureau reports have as their top-line number the "Population 5 years and older", and *not* the total population. Further it's entirely unclear that "English only" is "First language" (as used in the article) or that "Spoke a language other than English at home" "Very well" or "Well" (leaving out "Not well") is "As an additional language" (article), yet that is how the numbers in the articles appear to have been derived from the Census report.  :Rwessel (talk) 07:09, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

I want to point out that the main page claims 1.8 billion people speak English world-wide, even though the source is very dubious. I thought at first that it might represent the total population of countries where English is an official language but there's no indication of where the number came from or what it actually means. Please look in to it, it appears this number was posted once on the Internet without any source and it's simply been copied over and over again. The original site reads like a poorly written research paper so it wouldn't surprise me if whoever wrote it simply made up that number for his paper. 173.80.110.206 (talk) 15:58, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Final Section

The final section of the article is written like an advertisement for Basic English. Should it perhaps be removed? Interchangable|talk to me|what I've changed 21:52, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somaliland

I posted this over at List of countries where English is an official language, but it occurs to me that this might be a better place to point it out.
According to both the CIA[1][2], and Ethnologue[3][4], English is either an official or national language of both Ethiopia and Eritrea.
It's also an official language of Somaliland, as noted in the infobox. Though Somaliland is not a recognized country, perhaps striping on the map would be in order? --Quintucket (talk) 21:14, 23 July 2011 (UTC)