Joey Learning English

[Sylph]

Indeed there is and I selected simplified deliberately after some thought.

Simplicity is a relative concept. US English is simplified. But this conversation has brought home just how small and inconsequential those simplications must seem to a non-native English speaker.

Now I'm not a patriot in the traditional sense and I'm not among the Englishmen who take some sad pride in the empire or WW2.

The one source of patriotic pride I have in my country is our place in the arts. There is not a people on Earth that do not enjoy British made music, TV, theatre and literature*. Considering the size of our population our artistic contribution is massively oversized.

So I guess my point is simply..... who gives a damn about the numbers right now. Languages shift over long stretches of time like cultural glaciers. There is a union Jack emblazoned on the very soul of mankind and it's not going anywhere. That alone will sustain British English long past the point where all the Westerners are singing corporate songs in Mandarin before starting their work day with Kalastetics.

Also the Spanish and French languages are a great example of history repeating itself. That's exactly what happened to the ancient Latin those languages are descended from.
It's a sort of linguistic Karma.

*if you don't count remote jungle tribes and whatnot.

You are indeed correct in most of what you said, particularly about lingual evolution;

But perhaps I was not clear enough in my analysis:


British English is not as nor any less important than any other, so I don't see why the humour in an American needing to learn "English" holds any validity.


I simply don't speak neither, however find that British tend to like to hold dominion over the English language, in that they gave birth to it over the many years ago.

Tho likewise Americans do very much the same thing. So don't think I'm bashing England alone;

Simply the humour and of course the fact that in the grand scheme of things, the density of American outweighs British, and history itself cannot even balance it out. Like with European vs Latin American Spanish.

Neither one is "better" than the other, but Latin Spanish holds more speakers, variety, learners and so forth. As such, it is the most dominant variety of Spanish spoken today.

As is American English.

Which now holds dominion over English globally speaking. Perhaps not historically, but now so in the modern era.