An ’AMERICAN LANGUAGE’ should it exist? (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

An ’AMERICAN LANGUAGE’ should it exist?
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

12 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

Chung
Diglot
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Message 9 of 12

07 April 2011 at 12:42am | IP Logged

canada38 wrote:

Cainntear wrote:

Moldovan and Romanian would have to be a comparable pair -- almost
entirely mutually intelligible, but with different names.

who really wants to speak "someone else's" language as their first language?

This isn't just about the name but also about maintaining a standard. A dominant
variety can impose its norms on a minority form just by strength of numbers. Creating
an explicit Moldovan norm gave Moldovans control over their own literature, exams etc
that didn't have to follow fashions across the border.

English's problem is that the Americans are the dominant group now, so they don't need
a new label to protect their norms -- it's the rest of us who need it.

I'm getting sick fed up of putting a foreign-language film in my DVD player and being
bombarded with phrases that look wrong to me, or translations of things like French
procureurs to "DA" and all young offenders' institutions being "juvie". These
things make the films (or "movies" as they'd say in the subtitles) much harder to
watch, because the language is genuinely harder for me to process, and it's
distracting.

It would be nice if there was an Americanese, and then we could have English
translations too....

Imagine how the Portuguese feel. Whenever I see something (usually websites or movies)
with a language option, it lists only Brazilian Portuguese, but not the Peninsular
variety.

Perhaps a stronger example would be for Slovaks whom I observed to this day still put up with foreign products (including movies) presented with product descriptions/lists of ingredients/subtitles in Czech translation rather than a Slovak one. The mutual intelligibility there is high, but not as high as that between American and British English.
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Juаn
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Colombia
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Message 10 of 12

07 April 2011 at 4:31pm | IP Logged

I think it is silly for the same language to go by different names.

The politics of it though, that's an entirely different matter.
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roots
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United States
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Message 11 of 12

08 April 2011 at 11:17am | IP Logged

Southerns are certainly discriminated for their "red neck" accents in the north states. People in Maine sound like Brits...
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Calibration
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Message 12 of 12

18 April 2011 at 7:15am | IP Logged

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landover_Baptist_Church

Just making sure that people don't take the thread the TS posted seriously.

That being said, I doubt Americans would have a truly distinct language.

Edited by Calibration on 18 April 2011 at 7:18am

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