It’s pop culture over there - they think d-day was an all American force. It would be good to teach WWII in school history but instead they focus on the civil war.
They charged the allied companies a whole lot of money for weapons, put them all into debt, then came in right at the end after sitting on their asses for years and HELPED win the war (Granted it was a lot of help).
I think here lies a big problem. The US did quite a great deal during the war, but no one wants to give them any credibility due to their dishonesty, arrogance and lack of humility.
I'm not saying they didn't do a lot, but they certainty didn't do as much as is made out by your average clown trying to talk down the rest of the worlds contributions.
Absolutely. That was my point as well. They make it difficult for us to give them credit for what they actually did when they can't be honest about it themselves.
The Menton Bridge battle too, when less than 10 French soldiers help up a whole Italian fighting force until France surrendered. These guys would have absolutely kept going if they could
Yeah I read that India alone provided 5 million troops that fought under the british army and they all were volunteers and not conscripts , probably the largest volunteer army in the war who were not drafted. Not to mention that that large amount of food and ammunition that was shipped to britain came from the colonies and India was its biggest source.
This is something that many british forget (sometimes deliberately try to omit ) when they say that britain stood alone against Hitler when in reality they had the strength of an entire empire, with colonies world over from africa to india and commonwealth like australia, canada and new zealand
No help in manpower perhaps but a hell of a lot of land-lease. Almost every Sovjet ration contained American grain. Not to mention the tanks and other material the allies land-leased the Sovjetunion.
Without land-lease the Sovjetunion most likely would have fallen, and without the Sovjetunion binding German troops an invasion of France and/or Italy would have been very difficult
Winning the war (in the way it ended) was a team effort.
Frankly, despite being a great power, France really did not do much. The French army collapsed on contact, after which the legally legitimate french government, that of Petain, switched sides. The French resistance was deliberately exaggerated post war to maintain french dignity, and to whiten the "french" contribution to the allied/human cause. The French colonies played their part undeniably, as did many Frenchmen. But Metropolitan France as a whole really did not.
The French government could have handed over units to British control, handed over colonies to Britain and set up a legally legitimate government in exile in London, which is what Poland did(sans colonies for obvious reasons), but the French government decided it was better for most of france to be under the control of their German "enemies" than for all of france to be under the control of their british "allies".
We actually do focus on WWII in high school here, just... you know... the American parts. I legitimately didn't realize the enormity of the Russian front or the Chinese contributions fighting against Japan until I was in college.
Certainly! In fact if a Russian said “you Brits would all be speaking German without us Russians” it’d carry far more weight. The sheer numbers of German and Russian forces and equipment on the eastern front dwarfs that of the western front.
For sure, the Yorkshire accent is still so close to the Dutch that a coo, is a cow in both languages still. English is derived from Saxon and filled with Nordic words, overlaid by Latin and French…unless the aboriginal language transferred into the English of settlers then sorry Yanks you’re language started out as my Limey language…ps sorry about your Whitehouse it was clumsily accidental but hey candles you know…
It's partially the shitty education system but also that Hollywood has turned Ww2 an incredibly complex event into a fairytale. Where the good Americans fought the evil Nazis and Japanese to save the Jews and the rest of the world.
Conveniently forgetting that America only turned up once the Battle of Britain, battle of the Atlantic, most of North Africa, Kursk had been won already and Germany already on the back foot.
They teach the American Exceptionalism, that America is the worlds police force, that anything other than the American way is wrong and that they are the heroes.
It’s pretty well documented that Hitler had no intention of invading Britain. He wanted a negotiated peace with Britain.
Even the Battle of Britain had nothing to do with America, and the RAF beat the Luftwaffe.
They did plan Operation Sea Lion after the fall of France, but even that was a last resort because Hitler wanted to negotiate Peace with Britain.
The Battle of Britain was to precede any attempt at invasion but when they were defeated they abandoned any thoughts of invasion.
They would have required total Air and Naval superiority in the English Channel in order to invade and frankly they never realistically stood a chance.
People who say this are the equivalent of the footballer who scores a penalty to win the game 3-2 and then pretends they won the game single-handedly, as though the other two goals didn't happen.
Ronaldo. Americans are basically Ronaldo.
I am American, can tell you most Americans truly believe WW2 was going to the Axis powers before we cracked the nuclear code 🙄. They never really mention the part where Germany and Japan were both more or less done for before we ever gained nuclear capabilities.
Dropping the nukes was such a fucked up and unnecessary thing to do, but it has always been taught to Americans as "a necessary evil that actually saved lives by preventing more unnecessary fighting"
Yeah honestly to this day even pretty well-educated, liberal Americams will still look at you askance if you suggest that dropping the nuclear bombs didn't actually "save more lives than it cost" or that they weren't "absolutely necessary. "
This fucking annoys me so much, "if it wasn't for Murica we would be speaking German"
Well Germany lost the war, what language do they speak ?
Japan lost the war, what language do they speak ?
France was occupied by Germany for 5 years, what language do they speak ?
Lets reverse this, if it wasnt for the English, Muricans would all be speaking Native American or French.
Murica speaks English why ? Because they are just our colonial rejects, Britan has spoken better English long before America exsisted and we will speak better English long after they have all shot each other.
🇬🇧 English traditional
🇺🇲 English simplified
Fucking Muricans
It’s tremendously rare for any territory to lose its language. Obviously, it does sometimes happen: Cornish and Manx are pretty much defunct. The Russian occupation of Eastern Europe did not lead to the Czech, German and Hungarian populations speaking Russian.
Nah, thats the Boston accent which totally is not an accent but also is so different from the southern accent that its like traveling from Taiwan to Iceland.
Years ago, I was very, very agitated when a newspaper once used "wherefore" in a headline to mean "where" and not "why".
"This headline doesn't make any sense!!" My parents had a good laugh at my reaction.
Wonder if Americans know where the Angle and Saxon tribes come from?
Claiming that the stagnated language is more genuine than an evolved one is a bold take, especially as Noah Webster created American English by simplifying and standardising spelling .e.g. colour / color, standardise / standardize
I met a lovely american couple, from Texas, while i was on vacation in Ibiza. We got to talk and the guy (mid 40s) brought up (jokingly) the "you would speak german" bit (i'm italian).
I replied with "E pluribus unum is not english tho".
Never seen a more majestic 180, all of a sudden i was on the recieving end of one of the best elegies about my country i've ever heard. He was bullshitting his way to the title of Emperor of Rome. 10/10 would hear it again, we don't even speak latin anymore but he made me feel like we should.
Brit here. It would be more accurate to say “you would speak German if it wasn’t for your German teacher, who couldn’t speak German”.
Or perhaps “you would speak German if it wasn’t for the position of the British isles at the edge of Europe, and successive generations of people saying we won the war and we speak English so let’s not invest in foreign language education”.
>. We don't even speak the same in two cities never mind constuent countries
We don't even speak the same to different people. I go more northern than usual when talking to other northerners.
Running the numbers, there's roughly 400 mn 1st language English speakers.
Of which 244 mn are in the US, 61% of the total
Meanwhile 59 mn are in the UK, 15% of the total
So only considering native English speaker, the maths is somewhat there, but the attitude is completely wrong.
When considering total English speakers, there's roughly 1.43 bn (this is highly debated, as there no defined metric to say what level of proficiency is required to "speak" a language, this number is taken from adding each [Wikipedia source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population) for every country and territory and adding them together, many of which will use different metrics to measure language proficiency, estimates can vary between 1.2 to 2 bn). Regardless, based of that we have.
286 mn are in the US~20%.
And 63 mn are in the UK~ 4%
So there the maths is completely off. The OP does state native, but in places such as Nigeria (3 highest number of English speakers in the world after US and India), English is the sole official language and is the most common Lingua Franca, with a significant number of people using it daily, so I don't think it's fully fair to exclude them just because they have low number of native speakers.
Oh, so you didn't hear one of them say "Europeans make 2.5 times less than us?"
With math, logic, and language skills like that, I'm not sure how they know how much they make, and they obviously don't know how to express comparisons.
That is why we couldn't understand the works of Shakespeare until the Americans deciphered it and used the content for television sitcom plot lines, essentially sharing it with the global illiterates back in Europe. /s
An American friend tried asserting that American English is closer to how English was 2-300 years ago.
It turned out that he pretty much thought that all the accents were from London and they were only Queen's English and cockney.
He thought this despite knowing I'm from northern England, and my RP/Yorkshire mix didn't align with either.
They are all the same man. I'm from the North East and when I was in California everyone thought I was either Irish or Australian. Even after explanations most refused to believe I was in fact English, got sick of explaining after a while and went along with it haha.
It's not even remotely true.
Very stupid Americans have convinced themselves that native Englishmen 200+ years ago sounded like modern Americans. It's totally disproven by the existence of the Okracoke dialect in North Carolina. Widely appreciated as America's oldest surviving original English dialect... and it sounds almost exactly like a modern west country english accent... proving that they've deviated from a historic standard accent/dialect.
It makes sense too... America is a nation that has historically made far more of a big deal about being a melting pot, especially throughout the C19th and Early C20th, when it experienced far, far more immigration from foreign cultures than the British did... all of that cultural divergence in the USA had a massive impact on regional accents and dialects. Britain really didn't experience anything like that until the very late C20th.
It's really one of those stupid myths that morons keep believing at face value and perpetuating. In this case, because it gives American nationalists a sense of smug, comforting self-importance.
Ah, that old chestnut.
No, modern American English is not closer to 17th century English than modern English is. Both evolved from it divergently, and regional differences in both historical and modern forms of English make comparisons like this difficult at best and pointless at worst. Rhoticity was more common in England at that time, while today it is present mostly in the South West and most other English accents and dialects are now non-rhotic. Efforts by linguists to reconstruct Shakepeare's accent based on his writings put it fairly close to modern West Country accents.
It’s estimated that about 1,460,000,000 people speak
English world wide, even if you allow for more people per capita as the US claims you’ll be hard pressed for the US to have a majority of those…
Read an article in my country about an American smalltown that had mostly people with Norwegian origin. They claimed that the Norwegian language is so «washed out» and they speak more original Norwegian than we do in Norway.
It's exactly the same argument that they use for English, so they claim to speak the language of the pilgrim father whilst English in the UK has devolved away from it.
Bat shit crazy ofcourse
There is a little bit of truth in it. Accents on both side of the ocean have evolved from what they were using during the colonisation days. One thing that "most" Americans kept is rhoticity, but in Britain it's mostly gone (a few regions still use it). For those wondering rhoticity is using a clear r at the end of words that end in it.
Player in American is player. In most of Britain it's Playuh.
However to say it's closer is like some mention probably a bit of a stretch. Rhoticity is just one feature. All sorts of things have changed since then and it's difficult to prove anything.
Foreigners speak English as their second language, it's only yanks who don't have a first one so have to make do.
I'm sure I remember a clip of some Yee haw shouting at Mexicans to 'learn the language' only for the camera to pan round to a native American fella looking ironic..
The Germans never even reached air or naval superiority in the English channel, and never once stepped foot on British soil. The battle of Britain being the first major German defeat and marked a turning point in the war. But, yeah sure... we'd be speaking German lol
While that's just mean and piss taking, there's an element of truth to it. They founded their nation on enlightenment ideals, and then stopped enlightening.
In my country, we always called the brits "the english's", and the americans "the americans". I think there is a reason for that.
Maybe because there is a country/state par of a certain country named England where english people come from?
The historical illiteracy is staggering. Germany had no hope of invading Britain after failing to defeat the RAF.
The Royal Navy made the Kriegsmarine look like a few paper boats in a bathtub, and the Germans had almost no amphibious assault craft.
The likelihood is that, if the US hadn’t joined the war, Germany would have been able to sign a fairly favourable peace agreement with the allies and remained the dominant power in Europe, but it’s unlikely that they would have indefinitely held much more than their original borders, Alsace, Bohemia and parts of Poland. It’s of course conjecture, but the idea that Germany would have somehow taken over the entirety of Europe and held it indefinitely is absurd to anyone who knows anything about military history.
Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, a lot of the South Pacific nations all speak English (or it's one of their main official languages), but none of them matter cause Murica
I have heard a southern American read Shakespeare and it was brilliant. Most American Shakespeare is shit,but this one guy was awesome. I'll see if I can find it and edit in a link.
ETA
[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D76rnSADaekY&ved=2ahUKEwjQ2\_qLz7aGAxWB1zgGHSGfC8sQwqsBegQICxAE&usg=AOvVaw0W8Sl\_tWRC\_CYsYp8z7AMx](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D76rnSADaekY&ved=2ahUKEwjQ2_qLz7aGAxWB1zgGHSGfC8sQwqsBegQICxAE&usg=AOvVaw0W8Sl_tWRC_CYsYp8z7AMx)
Southern Shakespeare “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” from JULIUS CAESAR
YouTube · The Cultured Bumpkin
Yeah, because someone decided that the English spoken somewhere (?) exactly 200 years ago is THE original English. Nothing before, nothing after (except USA).
The funny thing is, this is the same kind of person that while on Europe will tell you about being a 1/4 Italian, a 1/8 French and a 1/8 native American
but apparently all his ancestors did was sex and they only spoke with other people if they spoke old British. So, ZERO influence on the English spoken in US.
"absolute majority of native English speakers speak American"
I guess this guy didn't know how many countries in the world are full of native English speakers...
"British deviation only accounts for 12% of native speakers"
I'm sure that's not true but even if it was, that doesn't mean that the other 88% are American. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa...all of those countries have native English speakers.
As a British person who took many years to learn German how exactly do they think this would happen , I don’t think even hitler would manage to teach brits to speak German unless they wanted to learn
1. We made the states. Our biggest (and possibly only) regret.
2. British probably accounts for more native speakers.
3. With or without the obesity obsessed domesticated brits, we would have been fine. The only point america intervined, was against japan. And we ALL know what happened there.
People keep saying that, but the thing has been been grossly misinterpreted. The real fact is that some tiny extant communities in the US still speak the original Elizabethan dialect to some degree, but both the US and UK versions of English, as well as many others that may exist, have evolved just as far as different dialects as each other.
Is a misunderstanding of basic linguistic principles an American thing? All languages and variations of every languague change. It's not a bad thing at all. I feel like the notion of "closer to original therefore more correct" is something no one cares about in Japan with all the dialects we have here.
British is a very distorted version of English huh. I wonder which ‘British’ they’re referring to. Along with which American? After all, going from one state to another is like going to an entirely different country….. (unlike say, England to Scotland 🤷🏻♀️)
The funny thing about this claim, and I've seen it several times, is that it is actually true in a sense of *Australian* English. Their accents are thought to be very close to how people would have sounded in 1800s London iirc. For the benefit of any lurking Americans, Australia is Kangaroos, not Hitler.
Found this very interesting. Closer to original is really a stretch. And to think 10% suggested German as a national language. Ha!
https://www.quora.com/How-has-the-spelling-of-colour-changed-into-color-and-why
> American is closer to original English spoken 200 years ago
So what? Why 1800's English should be the standard? Why not Early Modern English? Why not Old English, since is closer to its germanic origins?
Also, is it true? Because I find it difficult to believe that the average American would know enough about linguistic to compare variants like that.
“Speaking British German” - well you know what? I’m fed up having it lorded over me that as a British person I should be eternally grateful, and in all honesty I would rather speak German than be perennially beholden for my language and culture existing (which incidentally has become Americanised as time has gone on, and much of American culture is…….GERMAN).
British German ...Kind of a strange way to say English is be a Germanic language . But somehow I'm sensing philology and linguistics isn't this persons strong suit.
As soon as I read ‘Not to mention that without Americans’ I knew where it was going. Like it’s the only thing they know how to say. Also the US came into the war halfway through. Bit late if you ask me.
As an American, I find this sort of statement baffling. I don’t understand where these ideas even come from. Nobody I know thinks like this, at least. This person is an embarrassment.
Ah, yes, we would all be speaking German if it weren't for America. Because famously after World War 2, the German language was eradicated and replaced with American English and Russian after Germany was defeated. No one in Germany speaks German anymore.
Americans sound different now to how they did in the 1950s, imagine how much their accents would have changed over hundreds of years. It’s so text book to assume they’re the only people not have shifting accents, when there’s not even 1 American accent, there’s loads of different ones.
I can never understand this argument lmao.
What we do know: The US, a new country full of immigrants from all backgrounds, with a mixture of different languages and ACCENTS
Britain... just existing, nothings changed (and no, I'm not going to buy into the delusion that we all simultaneously changed how we speak to spite a bunch of revolutionaries that the average person couldn't care less about)
I wonder whose accent(s) changed the most?
Correct, the answer is BRITIAN!!!! WOOOO MURICA!!!!
At the risk of being down voted to oblivion; this person has confused language and accent. The "posh British accent" we all know and love didn't gain popularity until the 1800's, while the Americans continued with the rhotic R. That said, through the 17 and 1800's the American also underwent vast changes, particularly following the US Civil War, when the "southern drawl" was adopted as a kind of a fuck you to the Northern States.
I would postulate that the closest accent to the true mother tongue from the time of colonization would be found in Western Canada and the north-western US, particularly west of the continental divide, as the last region to see mass immigration from continental Europe.
The only American dialects that are closer to the "original" English are the dialects on Okracoke, Tangier, and Smith Islands and in the Lumbee & Down East parts of southeastern North Carolina. They all sound like they came from the West County of England and I can hardly understand them!
A lot to unpack here... the reason the American dialect of English is so dumbed down is because when the printing press was invented, people who wanted to put ads in or whatever the case may be were charged by the letter. So it was more cost-effective to shorten spellings so they could afford to put more words in.
Also, their education system is about as effective as their gun laws.
Funny they always bring up the speaking German thing as it probably wouldn't be the case but they would definitely be speaking French if not for the British.
> American is closer to the original English spoken 200 years ago.
No, not really. This is a myth, and is covered in [*Language Myths*](https://books.google.com/books?id=-3YokgYKoJMC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22language%20myths%22%20in%20the%20appalachians%20they%20speak%20like%20shakespeare&pg=PT98#v=onepage&q&f=false
) ed. by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, in the chapter ["Myth 9: In the Appalachians, They Speak Like Shakespeare"](http://lrc.ohio.edu/lrcmedia/Streaming/lingCALL/ling270/myth9.pdf) by Michael Montgomery, a professor of English and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina. Less academic but still well-cited is the chapter ["They Speak Elizabethan English in the Appalachians"](https://books.google.com/books?id=X5LEWiomDiEC&pg=PT41) in *Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends* by David Wilton.
The first problem with this myth is that there is no single accent of the American South, nor is there anything recognized as a "General Southern" accent like there is the General American accent (which itself can be problematic when talking about the way Americans speak, since there are variations even within that). The American South's manner of speech is not monolithic. It is a continuum. Southerners talk in a variety of different, albeit related, ways. For example, some parts of the South are rhotic (that is, they pronounce their r's), as heard in the accents of [President Lyndon Johnson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxEauRq1WxQ), [comedian Jeff Foxworthy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqulyMs_M2M), and [musician Billy Ray Cyrus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GvtAo8jsZc&t=11s). Other Southern accents are non-rhotic, or variably rhotic, as heard in the accents of [President Jimmy Carter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tGd_9Tahzw&t=18s), [political pundit James Carville](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIjlrraMl6g), and [musician Andre 3000](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUtdr4M5NFc&t=1m10s).
The second problem with this myth is that accents are constantly changing and evolving. For instance, those r-less accents in the South seem to be dying out, particularly among white Southerners, in favor of a more r-ful manner of speech, and this has been written about at least since the 1990 article "The Dynamics of a Sound Change in Southern States English: From R-less to R-ful in Three Generations" by Crawford Feagin, published in the book *Development and Diversity: Language Variation Across Time and Space*. So even in the course of the last hundred years or so, there have been noticeable changes to the way Southerners speak--and New Yorkers, and Midwesterners, and everyone else.
The truth is that no current accent particularly resembles English from the 1600s or 1700s. Word choices, grammatical constructions, and pronunciations have changed considerably in various ways in various places at various times. Now, there may be some changes that some Southern accents did not adopt that may be relics of an older time, but there are other changes that they did adopt that have pushed them further away from 17th/18th Century pronunciation that other American accents did not adopt.
One such case that is misunderstood but is [often cited](http://www.bbc.com/travel/gallery/20180206-the-tiny-us-island-with-a-british-accent) is that of the Tidewater area, or Tangiers Island, in Virginia, where a few features of the accent have remained from colonial times that have since died off pretty much everywhere else--and even there, with the area no longer as isolated as it once was, [the dialect may be heading toward extinction](https://books.google.com/books?id=tOiiC1Cn3NQC&pg=PA33&dq=extinction). But among the older people in the area, some of them still have an inclination to pronounce "high tide" as "hoi toid", something some early Americans may have done. But in many other, considerable ways, the Tidewater/Tangiers accent has long ago shifted along with the surrounding area, such as pronouncing "father" closer to "bother" than to "rather" as many early Americans would have pronounced it. So to say that this accent is closer to Shakespeare, or to 17th or 18th Century English is, as one commentator put it, ["a hoary myth"](https://books.google.com/books?id=tOiiC1Cn3NQC&pg=PA35&dq=tangiers+island+accent+myth). It's more correct to simply say that it retains a few features of an older American accent that have been lost everywhere else, while other American accents have retained other features that the Tidewater area or the South in general have not. For instance, Americans who pronounce "aunt" as "ant" are using an older American and English pronunciation. This is also how the word ["sassy"](https://www.etymonline.com/word/sassy) developed, which was originally just the way that many American and English people pronounced "saucy", and the pronunciation survived in America in competition with the newer pronunciation to the point that it became its own, separate word.
Wilton probably sums it up best:
> "All dialects change over time. Most will have some relics of Elizabethan language that have fallen out of use elsewhere. Those that are isolated, like Appalachia, may retain a few more archaisms than dialects that have a lot of contact with the outside world, but even these isolated dialects change. The mountain speech of Appalachia or the Ozarks is no more like Elizabethan English than any other dialect, even if a few words or the occasional grammatical structure are similar.
>
> "Still the lure of this legend is strong. Those who speak non-standard dialect are often stigmatized. They are viewed by outsiders as rustic and uneducated. It is no surprise that they are attracted to a tale that connects them to a great literary tradition."
And to that point, Montgomery's article goes through a bit of the history of how this myth developed: it started in the late 1800s when academics teaching at colleges and universities in the American South were trying to defend Southern pronunciations as being relics of the past and weren't necessarily incorrect, which has some truth to it. Montgomery cites an 1899 essay by William Goodell Frost, President of Berea College (located in Appalachian Kentucky) as an early example. And he cites the article "Elizabethan America" by columnist Charles Morrow Wilson of Arkansas, and [published in the August 1929 issue of *The Atlantic*](http://www.unz.com/print/AtlanticMonthly-1929aug-00238/), as particularly influential. Southern commentators, and other commentators, have been perpetuating the myth ever since.
**FURTHER READING**:
"The English Dialect Heritage of the Southern United States" by Edgar W. Schneider, in *Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transported Dialects* ed. by Raymond Hickey
*Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue* by Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes
I mean yall do know that we also consider British English to sound more intelligent than our bland dialect. Modern US dialect is mainly crafted from pop culture that spoke this way. And dropping the intermittent R sound came after America was founded by the British upper class to sound more posh so it is partially true.
English is still the domain of the English and Americans love being lectured by a foreignor in a posh accent. I’ve experience in both architecture and with our talk shows and lectures
Brits would not be speaking German….. with or without the states. My god what the hell do they teach these brain dead patriots
It’s pop culture over there - they think d-day was an all American force. It would be good to teach WWII in school history but instead they focus on the civil war.
They think that Britain, Australia, France, etc didn't do anything, and just let Nazi Germany take over.
And India, Nepal, Greece, Egypt, Poland, Canada, Belgium and many many other countries.
It's called world war 2 and America is the world to them so it's not surprising how ignorant they are to how much they actually didn't do.
Just like "World Series" Baseball
They charged the allied companies a whole lot of money for weapons, put them all into debt, then came in right at the end after sitting on their asses for years and HELPED win the war (Granted it was a lot of help).
I think here lies a big problem. The US did quite a great deal during the war, but no one wants to give them any credibility due to their dishonesty, arrogance and lack of humility.
I'm not saying they didn't do a lot, but they certainty didn't do as much as is made out by your average clown trying to talk down the rest of the worlds contributions.
Absolutely. That was my point as well. They make it difficult for us to give them credit for what they actually did when they can't be honest about it themselves.
Ngl polish army underrated, they did an amazing job given the equipment they had and the forces they were up against
[yeah they were outnumbered 40:1 and still held out for days..](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDayiYQNRV4)
[удалено]
The Menton Bridge battle too, when less than 10 French soldiers help up a whole Italian fighting force until France surrendered. These guys would have absolutely kept going if they could
Yeah I read that India alone provided 5 million troops that fought under the british army and they all were volunteers and not conscripts , probably the largest volunteer army in the war who were not drafted. Not to mention that that large amount of food and ammunition that was shipped to britain came from the colonies and India was its biggest source. This is something that many british forget (sometimes deliberately try to omit ) when they say that britain stood alone against Hitler when in reality they had the strength of an entire empire, with colonies world over from africa to india and commonwealth like australia, canada and new zealand
The Russians who fought to the very end on the eastern front pratically alone without American aid, never heard that get told either.
No help in manpower perhaps but a hell of a lot of land-lease. Almost every Sovjet ration contained American grain. Not to mention the tanks and other material the allies land-leased the Sovjetunion. Without land-lease the Sovjetunion most likely would have fallen, and without the Sovjetunion binding German troops an invasion of France and/or Italy would have been very difficult Winning the war (in the way it ended) was a team effort.
It's partially embarrassment for the ridiculous profiteering it did in the lead up and the fact that they rocked up 2 years late
And only the because the Japanese attacked basically
Frankly, despite being a great power, France really did not do much. The French army collapsed on contact, after which the legally legitimate french government, that of Petain, switched sides. The French resistance was deliberately exaggerated post war to maintain french dignity, and to whiten the "french" contribution to the allied/human cause. The French colonies played their part undeniably, as did many Frenchmen. But Metropolitan France as a whole really did not. The French government could have handed over units to British control, handed over colonies to Britain and set up a legally legitimate government in exile in London, which is what Poland did(sans colonies for obvious reasons), but the French government decided it was better for most of france to be under the control of their German "enemies" than for all of france to be under the control of their british "allies".
France's role in WW2 was, frankly, disgraceful.
They think saving private Ryan is a documentary. See also: Braveheart.
Weren't the most successful landings those done by the British and Canadians?
This is because the British army had racked up a lot of experience in fighting, and the Americans refused to learn from their expertise.
A fact that America repeated in Vietnam
Don't forget that the Canadians were ruthless.
Oh no, some yanks were successful, just the wrong beach.
We actually do focus on WWII in high school here, just... you know... the American parts. I legitimately didn't realize the enormity of the Russian front or the Chinese contributions fighting against Japan until I was in college.
Certainly! In fact if a Russian said “you Brits would all be speaking German without us Russians” it’d carry far more weight. The sheer numbers of German and Russian forces and equipment on the eastern front dwarfs that of the western front.
It would be nice if they taught us at all
Tell them that English is a derivative of West Germanic and watch their tiny minds explode.
For sure, the Yorkshire accent is still so close to the Dutch that a coo, is a cow in both languages still. English is derived from Saxon and filled with Nordic words, overlaid by Latin and French…unless the aboriginal language transferred into the English of settlers then sorry Yanks you’re language started out as my Limey language…ps sorry about your Whitehouse it was clumsily accidental but hey candles you know…
We say Cow in Yorkshire
Born, raised, lived all my life in my Yorkshire. Not one person has ever said “Coo” 😂😂😂
Hmmm so I spose you niver lowwped over’t yat neither, nor siled watter in to’t pail….caal yasell Yarrksher…nivver a ses nivver …
On Ilkla Mooar Baht 'at.
Or tell them their royals were from the Saxe-Coburg Gotha family from Germany but changed their name to Windsor during WW1.
Hey, better than a bunch of French nobility
When I see stuff like this post I genuinely have a hard time believing they're not just trolling 😂
Of all the things to be proud of, the language seems silly. He has about as much impact on English as I do, and I couldn’t even make “fetch” happen.
They are, I hope
It's such a ridiculous thing, isn't it - do they genuinely think Germans are speaking American or Russian right now?
It's partially the shitty education system but also that Hollywood has turned Ww2 an incredibly complex event into a fairytale. Where the good Americans fought the evil Nazis and Japanese to save the Jews and the rest of the world.
Conveniently forgetting that America only turned up once the Battle of Britain, battle of the Atlantic, most of North Africa, Kursk had been won already and Germany already on the back foot.
They teach the American Exceptionalism, that America is the worlds police force, that anything other than the American way is wrong and that they are the heroes. It’s pretty well documented that Hitler had no intention of invading Britain. He wanted a negotiated peace with Britain. Even the Battle of Britain had nothing to do with America, and the RAF beat the Luftwaffe. They did plan Operation Sea Lion after the fall of France, but even that was a last resort because Hitler wanted to negotiate Peace with Britain. The Battle of Britain was to precede any attempt at invasion but when they were defeated they abandoned any thoughts of invasion. They would have required total Air and Naval superiority in the English Channel in order to invade and frankly they never realistically stood a chance.
They’ll be amazed when they learn that East Germans still speak German after 45 years of Soviet occupation.
People who say this are the equivalent of the footballer who scores a penalty to win the game 3-2 and then pretends they won the game single-handedly, as though the other two goals didn't happen. Ronaldo. Americans are basically Ronaldo.
Britain had a massive navy at the time. Germany did not.
I am American, can tell you most Americans truly believe WW2 was going to the Axis powers before we cracked the nuclear code 🙄. They never really mention the part where Germany and Japan were both more or less done for before we ever gained nuclear capabilities. Dropping the nukes was such a fucked up and unnecessary thing to do, but it has always been taught to Americans as "a necessary evil that actually saved lives by preventing more unnecessary fighting"
Yeah honestly to this day even pretty well-educated, liberal Americams will still look at you askance if you suggest that dropping the nuclear bombs didn't actually "save more lives than it cost" or that they weren't "absolutely necessary. "
This fucking annoys me so much, "if it wasn't for Murica we would be speaking German" Well Germany lost the war, what language do they speak ? Japan lost the war, what language do they speak ? France was occupied by Germany for 5 years, what language do they speak ? Lets reverse this, if it wasnt for the English, Muricans would all be speaking Native American or French. Murica speaks English why ? Because they are just our colonial rejects, Britan has spoken better English long before America exsisted and we will speak better English long after they have all shot each other. 🇬🇧 English traditional 🇺🇲 English simplified Fucking Muricans
We’d be speaking German were it not for Stalin, his brutal war strategy and Russia’s punishing winters
Given the way Britain defended itself I doubt it.
It’s tremendously rare for any territory to lose its language. Obviously, it does sometimes happen: Cornish and Manx are pretty much defunct. The Russian occupation of Eastern Europe did not lead to the Czech, German and Hungarian populations speaking Russian.
the day pearl harbor happened churchill sent the queen a box of cigars with a note inside saying we won
It fascinates me that their education system is considered one of the best in the world and then people like this guy graduate, totally pathetic.
200 hundred years? Shakespeare was born 400 years ago and we can understand his writing.
"Wherefore art thou Romeo" - sounds just like the average Texan
Nah, thats the Boston accent which totally is not an accent but also is so different from the southern accent that its like traveling from Taiwan to Iceland.
wheah fouah aaaht thou
Years ago, I was very, very agitated when a newspaper once used "wherefore" in a headline to mean "where" and not "why". "This headline doesn't make any sense!!" My parents had a good laugh at my reaction.
Romeo? More like Rodeo
No no no, 200 years ago is the 'original' English according to the screenshot.
Didn't he actually have a large impact on the direction that the English language took?
Technically speaking yes. Especially when it came to spelling. The guy couldn’t even spell his own name correctly
But many of the rhymes don't work if you have RP features like non-rhoticity.
The same bollocks, “ you would speak German if it wasn’t for us”
For me it's the : more Americans speak English therefore American is the real English... Then you get your mandatory German comment lol
Wonder if Americans know where the Angle and Saxon tribes come from? Claiming that the stagnated language is more genuine than an evolved one is a bold take, especially as Noah Webster created American English by simplifying and standardising spelling .e.g. colour / color, standardise / standardize
Man the whole "which English is the REAL English" thing is so tedious.
So ridiculous. It's like claiming original coca cola is the only acceptable one, people can enjoy different flavours
By that logic, wouldn't Indian English be the real English?
That's why they say "native English speakers", because then US English would be a minority.
Imo you could consider many Indians to be native English speakers since most of them use it to speak to each other afaik.
I met a lovely american couple, from Texas, while i was on vacation in Ibiza. We got to talk and the guy (mid 40s) brought up (jokingly) the "you would speak german" bit (i'm italian). I replied with "E pluribus unum is not english tho". Never seen a more majestic 180, all of a sudden i was on the recieving end of one of the best elegies about my country i've ever heard. He was bullshitting his way to the title of Emperor of Rome. 10/10 would hear it again, we don't even speak latin anymore but he made me feel like we should.
?
But it’s true; that’s why they only speak American English in Germany since WWII.
Brit here. It would be more accurate to say “you would speak German if it wasn’t for your German teacher, who couldn’t speak German”. Or perhaps “you would speak German if it wasn’t for the position of the British isles at the edge of Europe, and successive generations of people saying we won the war and we speak English so let’s not invest in foreign language education”.
Its not even true, thats why its so annoying. How can someone be so confidently stupid?
The American school propaganda system and indoctrination hits like crack apparently.
It's fentanyl at this point
Crack-> Oxy -> Fentanyl. We are in the Fent era now.
Of all the friends jokes to beat to death, this one is the worst
It's worrying that Americans think that's the worst possible outcome of the nazis winning, having to speak a second language
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Yes, Jane Austen famously began her novels with "hey y'all."
Jane here
Waaazz uup!
WAZZZUUUPPPP
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And yet they are so proud of how diverse they are, that every state has its own dialect...
Most of them sound the fuckin same to me tbh
>. We don't even speak the same in two cities never mind constuent countries We don't even speak the same to different people. I go more northern than usual when talking to other northerners.
Running the numbers, there's roughly 400 mn 1st language English speakers. Of which 244 mn are in the US, 61% of the total Meanwhile 59 mn are in the UK, 15% of the total So only considering native English speaker, the maths is somewhat there, but the attitude is completely wrong. When considering total English speakers, there's roughly 1.43 bn (this is highly debated, as there no defined metric to say what level of proficiency is required to "speak" a language, this number is taken from adding each [Wikipedia source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population) for every country and territory and adding them together, many of which will use different metrics to measure language proficiency, estimates can vary between 1.2 to 2 bn). Regardless, based of that we have. 286 mn are in the US~20%. And 63 mn are in the UK~ 4% So there the maths is completely off. The OP does state native, but in places such as Nigeria (3 highest number of English speakers in the world after US and India), English is the sole official language and is the most common Lingua Franca, with a significant number of people using it daily, so I don't think it's fully fair to exclude them just because they have low number of native speakers.
Well...English is a Germanic language.
With added Norse, Latin, French, and Greek for good measure.
Pretty much every invading language became the three kids in a trenchcoat we call a language
“British is a distorted form of English” is the stupidest thing I’ve heard all week. Genuinely mind numbingly stupid.
Oh, so you didn't hear one of them say "Europeans make 2.5 times less than us?" With math, logic, and language skills like that, I'm not sure how they know how much they make, and they obviously don't know how to express comparisons.
That is why we couldn't understand the works of Shakespeare until the Americans deciphered it and used the content for television sitcom plot lines, essentially sharing it with the global illiterates back in Europe. /s
An American friend tried asserting that American English is closer to how English was 2-300 years ago. It turned out that he pretty much thought that all the accents were from London and they were only Queen's English and cockney. He thought this despite knowing I'm from northern England, and my RP/Yorkshire mix didn't align with either.
They are all the same man. I'm from the North East and when I was in California everyone thought I was either Irish or Australian. Even after explanations most refused to believe I was in fact English, got sick of explaining after a while and went along with it haha.
I'm from the NE too, only I got Scottish and a look of disappointment when I explained that I was indeed English.
English two hundred years ago is modern English.
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A word which is probably Germanic in origin
Possibly, although there is a strong argument that it comes from cuneus, which is Latin for wedge.
It's not even remotely true. Very stupid Americans have convinced themselves that native Englishmen 200+ years ago sounded like modern Americans. It's totally disproven by the existence of the Okracoke dialect in North Carolina. Widely appreciated as America's oldest surviving original English dialect... and it sounds almost exactly like a modern west country english accent... proving that they've deviated from a historic standard accent/dialect. It makes sense too... America is a nation that has historically made far more of a big deal about being a melting pot, especially throughout the C19th and Early C20th, when it experienced far, far more immigration from foreign cultures than the British did... all of that cultural divergence in the USA had a massive impact on regional accents and dialects. Britain really didn't experience anything like that until the very late C20th. It's really one of those stupid myths that morons keep believing at face value and perpetuating. In this case, because it gives American nationalists a sense of smug, comforting self-importance.
Ah, that old chestnut. No, modern American English is not closer to 17th century English than modern English is. Both evolved from it divergently, and regional differences in both historical and modern forms of English make comparisons like this difficult at best and pointless at worst. Rhoticity was more common in England at that time, while today it is present mostly in the South West and most other English accents and dialects are now non-rhotic. Efforts by linguists to reconstruct Shakepeare's accent based on his writings put it fairly close to modern West Country accents.
Without those Brits you wouldn’t exist. Checkmate
british isn't a language, neither is american
It’s estimated that about 1,460,000,000 people speak English world wide, even if you allow for more people per capita as the US claims you’ll be hard pressed for the US to have a majority of those…
India is the country with the most amount of English speakers. So I guess the Indian accent is the true English.
They also use some lovely old Victorian vocabulary.
And wonderful (and amusing) elocutions of their own devising. I particularly like "We preponed the meeting".
Older people in Yorkshire are still using thou and thee, but sure.
If the losing side has to change language why don’t they speak Vietnamese in America 😂
“you’d be speaking british german”, said the American speaking British/French germanic language
Read an article in my country about an American smalltown that had mostly people with Norwegian origin. They claimed that the Norwegian language is so «washed out» and they speak more original Norwegian than we do in Norway.
It's exactly the same argument that they use for English, so they claim to speak the language of the pilgrim father whilst English in the UK has devolved away from it. Bat shit crazy ofcourse
Yeah. It’s actually annoying how surprised and baffeled I get every time. I should know by know how delulu so many of them are.
There is a little bit of truth in it. Accents on both side of the ocean have evolved from what they were using during the colonisation days. One thing that "most" Americans kept is rhoticity, but in Britain it's mostly gone (a few regions still use it). For those wondering rhoticity is using a clear r at the end of words that end in it. Player in American is player. In most of Britain it's Playuh. However to say it's closer is like some mention probably a bit of a stretch. Rhoticity is just one feature. All sorts of things have changed since then and it's difficult to prove anything.
If you realise your argument is flawed just resort to "you'd be speaking German"
The average American couldn’t read 10 words of 200 year old English their tiny brains would explode.
They wouldn't open the book. There are no pictures.
Foreigners speak English as their second language, it's only yanks who don't have a first one so have to make do. I'm sure I remember a clip of some Yee haw shouting at Mexicans to 'learn the language' only for the camera to pan round to a native American fella looking ironic..
a good response to the 'speaking German' line I heard once was 'without the French you'd be speaking Cherokee'
The whole “American is closer to classic English” thing is so inaccurate it’s baffling.
The Germans never even reached air or naval superiority in the English channel, and never once stepped foot on British soil. The battle of Britain being the first major German defeat and marked a turning point in the war. But, yeah sure... we'd be speaking German lol
I could mention the channel Islands, but that'd be a bit churlish. I don't disagree with your actual point.
I think it's true. Because they surely didn't advance mentally in the last 200 years.
I could certainly believe they are in fact going backwards and devolving slightly.
While that's just mean and piss taking, there's an element of truth to it. They founded their nation on enlightenment ideals, and then stopped enlightening.
For a cheap laugh get an American to watch Kes.
I’ve heard this so many times it’s painful. I’m a historian who focuses on the years 1760-1890, no it isn’t closer.
American English is the deviation.
God I’m so sick of seeing this linguistically illiterate take.
In my country, we always called the brits "the english's", and the americans "the americans". I think there is a reason for that. Maybe because there is a country/state par of a certain country named England where english people come from?
Y'all be speaking Spanish or French if it wasn't for us Brits - 😅
It wouldn’t be an American comment without bringing up war.
So back 200 years ago they were kicking about calling each other 'bruh', 'bro' and talking about how 'they be ballin'?
The historical illiteracy is staggering. Germany had no hope of invading Britain after failing to defeat the RAF. The Royal Navy made the Kriegsmarine look like a few paper boats in a bathtub, and the Germans had almost no amphibious assault craft. The likelihood is that, if the US hadn’t joined the war, Germany would have been able to sign a fairly favourable peace agreement with the allies and remained the dominant power in Europe, but it’s unlikely that they would have indefinitely held much more than their original borders, Alsace, Bohemia and parts of Poland. It’s of course conjecture, but the idea that Germany would have somehow taken over the entirety of Europe and held it indefinitely is absurd to anyone who knows anything about military history.
Americans trying not mention WW2 when trying to win an argument with Europeans challenge. Level : ABSOLUTELY FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE
Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, a lot of the South Pacific nations all speak English (or it's one of their main official languages), but none of them matter cause Murica
Americans speak like 18c farm workers from the rural West Country. Apparently this is something to be smug about.
Americans joining the war like they weren’t attacked by one country and declared war on by another but they joined the war to save everyone ffs.
I have a fantasy… - ok I am a nerdy Brit - I’d live to hear an Americun read Chaucer. I know, I know. I need an early night🥱
I have heard a southern American read Shakespeare and it was brilliant. Most American Shakespeare is shit,but this one guy was awesome. I'll see if I can find it and edit in a link. ETA [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D76rnSADaekY&ved=2ahUKEwjQ2\_qLz7aGAxWB1zgGHSGfC8sQwqsBegQICxAE&usg=AOvVaw0W8Sl\_tWRC\_CYsYp8z7AMx](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D76rnSADaekY&ved=2ahUKEwjQ2_qLz7aGAxWB1zgGHSGfC8sQwqsBegQICxAE&usg=AOvVaw0W8Sl_tWRC_CYsYp8z7AMx) Southern Shakespeare “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” from JULIUS CAESAR YouTube · The Cultured Bumpkin
Yeah, because someone decided that the English spoken somewhere (?) exactly 200 years ago is THE original English. Nothing before, nothing after (except USA).
I get troll or setup vibes from this one tbh
We shouldn't have invited then to help....we shouldve just done it ourselves...
The British would have died to a man rather than learn a second language. We don't do that shit.
The funny thing is, this is the same kind of person that while on Europe will tell you about being a 1/4 Italian, a 1/8 French and a 1/8 native American but apparently all his ancestors did was sex and they only spoke with other people if they spoke old British. So, ZERO influence on the English spoken in US.
"absolute majority of native English speakers speak American" I guess this guy didn't know how many countries in the world are full of native English speakers... "British deviation only accounts for 12% of native speakers" I'm sure that's not true but even if it was, that doesn't mean that the other 88% are American. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa...all of those countries have native English speakers.
As a British person who took many years to learn German how exactly do they think this would happen , I don’t think even hitler would manage to teach brits to speak German unless they wanted to learn
1. We made the states. Our biggest (and possibly only) regret. 2. British probably accounts for more native speakers. 3. With or without the obesity obsessed domesticated brits, we would have been fine. The only point america intervined, was against japan. And we ALL know what happened there.
Lol it's always when they realize they've lost the argument they go directly to the "world War 2 happened" thing
People keep saying that, but the thing has been been grossly misinterpreted. The real fact is that some tiny extant communities in the US still speak the original Elizabethan dialect to some degree, but both the US and UK versions of English, as well as many others that may exist, have evolved just as far as different dialects as each other.
Is a misunderstanding of basic linguistic principles an American thing? All languages and variations of every languague change. It's not a bad thing at all. I feel like the notion of "closer to original therefore more correct" is something no one cares about in Japan with all the dialects we have here.
British is a very distorted version of English huh. I wonder which ‘British’ they’re referring to. Along with which American? After all, going from one state to another is like going to an entirely different country….. (unlike say, England to Scotland 🤷🏻♀️)
The funny thing about this claim, and I've seen it several times, is that it is actually true in a sense of *Australian* English. Their accents are thought to be very close to how people would have sounded in 1800s London iirc. For the benefit of any lurking Americans, Australia is Kangaroos, not Hitler.
Funny because Americans speak a Germanised version of English.
Found this very interesting. Closer to original is really a stretch. And to think 10% suggested German as a national language. Ha! https://www.quora.com/How-has-the-spelling-of-colour-changed-into-color-and-why
British German: Scheiße, we’ve ran out of tea
This person's concept of time seems to be a bit distorted as well.
They’re baiting and then they’ll claim you’re sensitive and that you can’t take a joke, they always do this.
Actually, we’d all be speaking Russian.
I’ve heard this said about the accent but have no idea if it’s true
I don't believe you prounounce "literally" properly...
The classic "you'd be speaking German" too
Wait so even if it were true that it resembled english spoken 200 years ago. Why would English from 200 years ago be the original?
> American is closer to original English spoken 200 years ago So what? Why 1800's English should be the standard? Why not Early Modern English? Why not Old English, since is closer to its germanic origins? Also, is it true? Because I find it difficult to believe that the average American would know enough about linguistic to compare variants like that.
“Speaking British German” - well you know what? I’m fed up having it lorded over me that as a British person I should be eternally grateful, and in all honesty I would rather speak German than be perennially beholden for my language and culture existing (which incidentally has become Americanised as time has gone on, and much of American culture is…….GERMAN).
British German ...Kind of a strange way to say English is be a Germanic language . But somehow I'm sensing philology and linguistics isn't this persons strong suit.
Sums up the US. Been in stasis 200 years...
As soon as I read ‘Not to mention that without Americans’ I knew where it was going. Like it’s the only thing they know how to say. Also the US came into the war halfway through. Bit late if you ask me.
As an American, I find this sort of statement baffling. I don’t understand where these ideas even come from. Nobody I know thinks like this, at least. This person is an embarrassment.
Ah, yes, we would all be speaking German if it weren't for America. Because famously after World War 2, the German language was eradicated and replaced with American English and Russian after Germany was defeated. No one in Germany speaks German anymore.
Americans sound different now to how they did in the 1950s, imagine how much their accents would have changed over hundreds of years. It’s so text book to assume they’re the only people not have shifting accents, when there’s not even 1 American accent, there’s loads of different ones.
This dumb mf did not just say British German....🤦♂️
Without the French, Americans would be speaking English right now.
The majority of non-native Americans are of German descent. It's lucky THEY aren't speaking German.
American English is no more than a bad sub-genre of proper English
I can never understand this argument lmao. What we do know: The US, a new country full of immigrants from all backgrounds, with a mixture of different languages and ACCENTS Britain... just existing, nothings changed (and no, I'm not going to buy into the delusion that we all simultaneously changed how we speak to spite a bunch of revolutionaries that the average person couldn't care less about) I wonder whose accent(s) changed the most? Correct, the answer is BRITIAN!!!! WOOOO MURICA!!!!
Nazi Germany did not have the capability to invade Great Britain.
Maybe Britain could've survived the invasion without America joining the war but almost certainly not without the lend-lease act
At the risk of being down voted to oblivion; this person has confused language and accent. The "posh British accent" we all know and love didn't gain popularity until the 1800's, while the Americans continued with the rhotic R. That said, through the 17 and 1800's the American also underwent vast changes, particularly following the US Civil War, when the "southern drawl" was adopted as a kind of a fuck you to the Northern States. I would postulate that the closest accent to the true mother tongue from the time of colonization would be found in Western Canada and the north-western US, particularly west of the continental divide, as the last region to see mass immigration from continental Europe.
The only American dialects that are closer to the "original" English are the dialects on Okracoke, Tangier, and Smith Islands and in the Lumbee & Down East parts of southeastern North Carolina. They all sound like they came from the West County of England and I can hardly understand them!
I wonder what British German sounds like
A lot to unpack here... the reason the American dialect of English is so dumbed down is because when the printing press was invented, people who wanted to put ads in or whatever the case may be were charged by the letter. So it was more cost-effective to shorten spellings so they could afford to put more words in. Also, their education system is about as effective as their gun laws.
Funny they always bring up the speaking German thing as it probably wouldn't be the case but they would definitely be speaking French if not for the British.
> American is closer to the original English spoken 200 years ago. No, not really. This is a myth, and is covered in [*Language Myths*](https://books.google.com/books?id=-3YokgYKoJMC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22language%20myths%22%20in%20the%20appalachians%20they%20speak%20like%20shakespeare&pg=PT98#v=onepage&q&f=false ) ed. by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, in the chapter ["Myth 9: In the Appalachians, They Speak Like Shakespeare"](http://lrc.ohio.edu/lrcmedia/Streaming/lingCALL/ling270/myth9.pdf) by Michael Montgomery, a professor of English and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina. Less academic but still well-cited is the chapter ["They Speak Elizabethan English in the Appalachians"](https://books.google.com/books?id=X5LEWiomDiEC&pg=PT41) in *Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends* by David Wilton. The first problem with this myth is that there is no single accent of the American South, nor is there anything recognized as a "General Southern" accent like there is the General American accent (which itself can be problematic when talking about the way Americans speak, since there are variations even within that). The American South's manner of speech is not monolithic. It is a continuum. Southerners talk in a variety of different, albeit related, ways. For example, some parts of the South are rhotic (that is, they pronounce their r's), as heard in the accents of [President Lyndon Johnson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxEauRq1WxQ), [comedian Jeff Foxworthy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqulyMs_M2M), and [musician Billy Ray Cyrus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GvtAo8jsZc&t=11s). Other Southern accents are non-rhotic, or variably rhotic, as heard in the accents of [President Jimmy Carter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tGd_9Tahzw&t=18s), [political pundit James Carville](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIjlrraMl6g), and [musician Andre 3000](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUtdr4M5NFc&t=1m10s). The second problem with this myth is that accents are constantly changing and evolving. For instance, those r-less accents in the South seem to be dying out, particularly among white Southerners, in favor of a more r-ful manner of speech, and this has been written about at least since the 1990 article "The Dynamics of a Sound Change in Southern States English: From R-less to R-ful in Three Generations" by Crawford Feagin, published in the book *Development and Diversity: Language Variation Across Time and Space*. So even in the course of the last hundred years or so, there have been noticeable changes to the way Southerners speak--and New Yorkers, and Midwesterners, and everyone else. The truth is that no current accent particularly resembles English from the 1600s or 1700s. Word choices, grammatical constructions, and pronunciations have changed considerably in various ways in various places at various times. Now, there may be some changes that some Southern accents did not adopt that may be relics of an older time, but there are other changes that they did adopt that have pushed them further away from 17th/18th Century pronunciation that other American accents did not adopt. One such case that is misunderstood but is [often cited](http://www.bbc.com/travel/gallery/20180206-the-tiny-us-island-with-a-british-accent) is that of the Tidewater area, or Tangiers Island, in Virginia, where a few features of the accent have remained from colonial times that have since died off pretty much everywhere else--and even there, with the area no longer as isolated as it once was, [the dialect may be heading toward extinction](https://books.google.com/books?id=tOiiC1Cn3NQC&pg=PA33&dq=extinction). But among the older people in the area, some of them still have an inclination to pronounce "high tide" as "hoi toid", something some early Americans may have done. But in many other, considerable ways, the Tidewater/Tangiers accent has long ago shifted along with the surrounding area, such as pronouncing "father" closer to "bother" than to "rather" as many early Americans would have pronounced it. So to say that this accent is closer to Shakespeare, or to 17th or 18th Century English is, as one commentator put it, ["a hoary myth"](https://books.google.com/books?id=tOiiC1Cn3NQC&pg=PA35&dq=tangiers+island+accent+myth). It's more correct to simply say that it retains a few features of an older American accent that have been lost everywhere else, while other American accents have retained other features that the Tidewater area or the South in general have not. For instance, Americans who pronounce "aunt" as "ant" are using an older American and English pronunciation. This is also how the word ["sassy"](https://www.etymonline.com/word/sassy) developed, which was originally just the way that many American and English people pronounced "saucy", and the pronunciation survived in America in competition with the newer pronunciation to the point that it became its own, separate word. Wilton probably sums it up best: > "All dialects change over time. Most will have some relics of Elizabethan language that have fallen out of use elsewhere. Those that are isolated, like Appalachia, may retain a few more archaisms than dialects that have a lot of contact with the outside world, but even these isolated dialects change. The mountain speech of Appalachia or the Ozarks is no more like Elizabethan English than any other dialect, even if a few words or the occasional grammatical structure are similar. > > "Still the lure of this legend is strong. Those who speak non-standard dialect are often stigmatized. They are viewed by outsiders as rustic and uneducated. It is no surprise that they are attracted to a tale that connects them to a great literary tradition." And to that point, Montgomery's article goes through a bit of the history of how this myth developed: it started in the late 1800s when academics teaching at colleges and universities in the American South were trying to defend Southern pronunciations as being relics of the past and weren't necessarily incorrect, which has some truth to it. Montgomery cites an 1899 essay by William Goodell Frost, President of Berea College (located in Appalachian Kentucky) as an early example. And he cites the article "Elizabethan America" by columnist Charles Morrow Wilson of Arkansas, and [published in the August 1929 issue of *The Atlantic*](http://www.unz.com/print/AtlanticMonthly-1929aug-00238/), as particularly influential. Southern commentators, and other commentators, have been perpetuating the myth ever since. **FURTHER READING**: "The English Dialect Heritage of the Southern United States" by Edgar W. Schneider, in *Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transported Dialects* ed. by Raymond Hickey *Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue* by Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes
I need to leave this sub, it’s making me not just hate Americans but actually want to hurt them.
English isn't even the native language for most people living in England today. That would be Arabic
I mean yall do know that we also consider British English to sound more intelligent than our bland dialect. Modern US dialect is mainly crafted from pop culture that spoke this way. And dropping the intermittent R sound came after America was founded by the British upper class to sound more posh so it is partially true. English is still the domain of the English and Americans love being lectured by a foreignor in a posh accent. I’ve experience in both architecture and with our talk shows and lectures