Speak American

🇬🇧 English (Traditional)
🇺🇸 English (Simplified)

🇮🇪 English (EU)
- 🇦🇺 ɥsᴉlƃuƎ
- Shots fired.
- i recently got the recommendation to switch locale to ireland in order to get normal date formatting. worked very well.
- I'd never know that's English
🇦🇺 English (Felon)
There are some English words and phrases that can't be said in American English. Like the "I inherited this government position from my father". Or, "Sure hope the King doesn't veto this legislation".
- There are some English words and phrases that can’t be said in American English. Like the “I inherited this government position from my father”
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescott_Bush
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeb_Bush
  🤔
- Lol don't watch the news
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_vetoes
- The last royal veto was in 1708, and any attempt to do so now would probably end the monarchy.
🇨🇦 English (Celeste)
- 🇩🇪🇩🇰🇳🇴 Traditional?
🇬🇧 English (Traditional)
🇺🇳 English (Simplified)
🇺🇲 English (Dumbified)
Except American English is the traditional. England kept fucking with their language and spelling, and now everything has 6 unnecessary vowels
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#Historical_origins
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#Latin-derived_spellings_(often_through_Romance)
  Webster's 1828 dictionary had only -or and is given much of the credit for the adoption of this form in the United States. By contrast, Johnson's 1755 (pre-US independence and establishment) dictionary used -our for all words still so spelled in Britain (like colour), but also for words where the u has since been dropped: ambassadour, emperour, errour, governour, horrour, inferiour, mirrour, perturbatour, superiour, tenour, terrour, tremour. Johnson, unlike Webster, was not an advocate of spelling reform, but chose the spelling best derived, as he saw it, from among the variations in his sources.
  Nope.
  Although unjerk, spelling reform and standardisation is very necessary for english.
  Rejerk

Portuguese people clicking on the Brazilian flag to see something in Portuguese 💀

Polish people clicking on the Polish flag to see something in Polish while being in Australia:
- I wonder what the Polish, Monégasque, and Indonesian folk do when they win a flag competition?
- Then : Kurwa!
Duolingo does this. English is American and Portuguese is Brazilian. Doesn't make sense.
- It makes a bit of sense because Duolingo teaches you the American variety of English and Brazilian.
  But still... why?!

It's my right as an American to not have extra 'U's in my words and you're infringing on it!

There's no extra 'U's. What you want is your right to exclude the 'U's you don't feel are necessary, it's not the same thing. There was no need for the 'z's but you guys couldn't help yourselves could you!?
- Oh, and that’s pronounced “z”, not ”z”!
- I use American English for the superior compression algorithms and the more extensive import features.
- Get obsoleted, King-haver (less of a burn now, coming from Loompa-land 😭)
- Tell me with a straight face that the word armor needs a u 😋
- At least we don't pronounce it "zed"
colour armour labour favour honour harbour
honestly it's just so much more fancy with -our
"Trmp" sonds so mch better.

A tourist wanted some directions so he asked: "Sorry, do you speak American.'

My buddy who can be a purist: "I understand American but I speak English."

Years ago I had someone ask me where the exit to the building is. The building occupies a complete city block in NYC and there are many exits. Using the wrong exit could add 15 minutes to your walk.
I asked him where he is was going. He got flustered, said "speak American", and walked off.
On Oxford Street in London, a tourist asked me for directions to Edgware.
At first puzzled by his interest in visiting far-off social housing and knife crime, I quickly realized by his accent what he actually meant and directed him to nearby Edgware Road.

As opposed to everyone else when they have to click the US flag to get English language options

There is no U in "Boston Tea Party" either.
- Bouston Teua Puarty

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.

One of these days Trump is gonna sue the UK for speaking the American language

"By presidential decree, it will no longer be called 'American English' and 'British English', it will be 'American American' and 'English American'."
- The Gulf of Obliviousness

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
- Hmmmm yes but the average American reads at a grade 6 level, so I daresay UK beats USA there.

Scottish people having to click on a British flag knowing it will display English (there is a perfectly good flag for England that people refuse to use 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿)

I think the Scots having to click on an English flag to read something would piss them off more?
Or are you suggesting having a Scottish flag that displays the site in Gaelic for that 2% of Scots that know it?
- I think you're overthinking it slightly.
  French flag represents the language called "French"
  Spanish flag represents the language called "Spanish"
  Russian flag represents the language called "Russian"
  German flag represents the language called "German"
  Portuguese flag represents the language called "Portuguese"
  Japanese flag represents the language called "Japanese"
  Korean flag represents the language called "Korean"
  Chinese flag represents the language called "Chinese"
  Italian flag represents the language called "Italian"
  But somehow, the British flag doesn't represent a language called "British", but rather, one called "English", despite there existing an English flag
there is a perfectly good flag for England that people refuse to use
Well yeah, but these days, you say you're English, you'll get arrested and thrown in jail 😆
Ami: isn't that the red cross flag?

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.

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.
How do you pronounce that word
- Haben Sie schonmal von germanischen Sprachen gehört, wo ein 'S' duraus so wie englisches 'Z' klingen kann?

We alsou have to start adding U's in places that nourmally only have O's.

Nou.
- Why nout?

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.
- Well if we want get technical it's roots are in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.
- yeah otherwise you might as well use the Australian flag or whatever

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.

Bonus points from TTS users.
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

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 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?"

The whole concept of multilingual websites is foreign to Americans. There is only one language in their mind.

As soon as Trump was inaugurated, the Whitehouse website removed the spainish language feature
- That's for another reason we clearly know
What's language?
- yes

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.

Why use many word when few word do.

https://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/

No visual alternatives to flags were given. (And that's because there aren't any. Flags will do just fine for 99,99% of the public)
- I feel like this would be a good alternative:
  English
  中文
  Español
  العربية
  Français
  Русский

Ok, it’s driving me crazy.

Who is that? The actor, not the character they’re playing.

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.

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.)
- Sobs quietly
  I just want a consistent spelling system.
- Its more just the easily memable one.

Speak native american!!

Use the flag of Scotland and watch the absolute madness in the online threads over everything.
- Och! Ye kennae use thir flag withut chenging thae langgage to theis.

As a Brit I feel like I'm going to have a cardiac arrest from cholesterol buildup every time I have to click the cheeseburger flag; so I can appreciate where they're coming from.

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.

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.
- 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.

There's no U in color. FIGHT ME!

What flavour of English do you and your colourful neighbours prefer ?
- The spicy kind.
phonetically it should really be "colur", so I think "colour" is a decent compromise
- 'kulla', or 'kullar' for the Americans
We did. Famously we lost and you got to go your own way and stop paying us taxes.
There isn't an I either.
- There's no I in denial

English (simplified) or spanglish? I'll let americans decide which is better

"hmm... this isn't the right country but let's roll the dice and see what happens"

I did that with a game I installed and couldn't figure out how to fix it. So I just uninstalled the game and tried again...

Percentage wise, more percent of the population in England speaks English than in the US.

I just hit the back button. You won’t catch me disrespecting the motherland like that

Ok, ok I may have a solution that will make everyone happy: let's all speak Esperanto! One flag for all!

The US has more native English speakers than the next 3 countries combined. England is 5th on the list. By volume alone, our way is the correct one.

There’s several people that have commented this, and it doesn’t make any sense. It’s called English cause it was invented in England, a country which still exists. There’s also a few claims we changed our language, we didn’t (Posh people created Received Pronunciation. American exceptionalism at its finest.
- I wouldn’t say invented 🤓