[lordnacho]

OTOH, English speakers are happy to accept that you speak decent English with a relatively low bar. I can have a conference call with French, German, or Russian accented people, where nobody questions whether those people understand the content of the conversation.

Certain languages are so specific that as soon as someone says one wrong thing, everyone switches to... English. Happens all the time in every other language that I know anything in. Someone shows up who gets a der/die/das wrong, or they can't do a soft Danish D, or they muck up a tone, and everyone else looks at each other and reply in, of all things, foreign accented English.

[theobeers]

Yeah, part of the bargain of making English the international language is a shared understanding that bad English is good enough. It doesn’t fly in any other language that I’ve used.

Sometimes I point this out to mollify friends who complain about English linguistic/cultural hegemony. The flip side is that, e.g., my French colleagues are much more able to insist upon standards in their mother tongue.

[nickkell]

It's a blessing and a curse.

Being able to work almost anywhere in the world whilst speaking your first language is a privilege.

Being replied to in terrible English after addressing somebody in their native language is very frustrating.

[sokoloff]

I’ve gotten the “Please, sir, we do this in English” response most often in Paris, but I don’t get frustrated by it. I tried, but it wasn’t good enough. Fair enough.

[ghaff]

And, even if not bad, relatively simple. If you do what I'll refer to as business writing, even if you don't totally dumb it down and chop it up into short sentences as tools like Grammarly will nag you to, your editor is still not going to want a lot of long sentences, "SAT words," complex tense structures, etc.

[orbital-decay]

This has another side: non-native speakers are expected to understand different accents and flavors of English just like an anglophone would. For example, as a Russian native speaker, I had real trouble comprehending even a slightest French accent, while having zero issues with others. I'd imagine there are a lot of ears "incompatible" with my own accent, so I spent a fair amount of time on getting rid of it.

[lordnacho]

Even accents from Britain itself can be weird. Ever spoken to a Scot, a Liverpudlian, or a Brummie?

Even people who've spoken English daily for decades will do a double take if they're not used to it.

If you listen carefully, the range of vowels is quite wide, for the same word in different accents. The probably throws off a lot of people.

[MandieD]

Even native speakers can have trouble understanding some British accents. Most of my family has lived in Texas for several generations and are monolingual English speakers, but one cousin was born in and has lived his whole life near Liverpool, and sounds a bit like it (omitting long story about immediate aftermath of WW2 and my feckless great uncle). His wife is from Cheshire and has a rather strong accent. I understand her just fine, but went to college on the East Coast, had professors and classmates of varied linguistic backgrounds, and have spent most of my adult life in Germany.

When they visited Texas for a family reunion, several of my cousins who have not spent much time around non-Texans honestly asked about the language she was speaking.

[ghaff]

For that matter, deep South and Cajun accents can be tough for a Northerner. I worked in New Orleans for a few years. A friend of mine from undergrad was also working there. He was from Jacksonville in northern Florida, so less deep South language-wise than other places. I remember telling him once I sometimes really had trouble understanding people. His response was that he did too.

[pipingdog]

Trying to check into a hotel in Glasgow with bad jet lag put me nearly in tears.

[vinay427]

More of a tangent as I agree with your point, but...

I think this diversity, while large, is still less than in many other languages. As one example of many, just within Europe there are accents/dialects of German in Switzerland that are largely mutually unintelligible even to some other Swiss German speakers, and nearly entirely unintelligible to most Germans. This is also true for dialects of Italian, or even Dutch, according to friends from those countries. It's generally even more fragmented outside of European languages.

Unlike English, some of these cases don't even have easily standardized registers. In my experience, people in Birmingham or Glasgow, for instance, can fluidly switch to a more standardized accent and dialect that's natively or "intuitively" understandable to a speaker from North America or South Africa.

[Asraelite]

I think the primary factor that causes this perception is the lack of any proper dialect continuum between English and another language. There are of course a few minor ones like English<->Scots and English<->Jamaican Patois, but nothing significant that any sizeable number of speakers would encounter.

Dialect continuums between languages are basically the norm around the world. You can even connect Sicilian to Portuguese for example.

I would assume the primary reason English isn't part of any major one is because Britain is an island, otherwise English would probably connect to Dutch and join the West Germanic continuum. It would then appear just as fractured as any other language.

[lordnacho]

This is a good point. When I was in Switzerland they had a guy from Muothathal on TV. TV decided to subtitle him. I thought Swiss German was weird, but this fellow seemed to be speaking a completely different language, to my beginner ear.

The thing is though, you can ask people to speak High German instead of mundart, eg at meetings. They admit it's different enough to warrant explicit statement.

You can't be telling your Liverpudlian or Brummie to speak the Queen's English, that would be rude.

[7952]

A few years ago I visited an office in Birmingham which is less than 100 miles. Someone was trying to tell me a password and I had to get them to write it down after several failed attempts. The basic sound of some of the letters was just completely different. I also have a strong accent which can be much harder to understand than a none native speaker.

[brandmeyer]

NATO phonetics (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc) helps with this. The words were chosen specifically to be resistant to accent differences.

[oAlbe]

What did you do to get rid of your accent?

[fader]

I'm not the person you asked but I am someone who worked to change my accent (successfully enough that I have gone from a thick, easily identifiable accent to not having anyone guess that I was not local to where I live now in the last 15 years or so).

There's no real trick to it other than paying attention. Record yourself speaking, listen closely to how the sounds you use differ from the accent you want to have. Then practice saying those sounds over and over until they become natural. Keep at this for several years.

It's painful to do (though I find it less so if you focus mostly on specific sounds rather than listening to your full speech -- it's easier to separate the sound from the revulsion of hearing your own voice that way) but it works.

[tartoran]

It’s also because English is currently the bridge language, also known as Lingua franca.

I find that the main thesis of this post is in agreement with my experience, been using English for 20 years and haven’t explored all the galleries and tunnels inside the language.

[gerdesj]

"also known as Lingua franca."

... which is Latin for: language of the Franks - French!

[JPLeRouzic]

Wikipedia says [0] "However, the terms "Franks" and "Frankish" were actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Period."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca#Hi...

[gerdesj]

You might as well call me English too (I live in Wessex after all)!

What WP seems to have forgotten to mention is who actually used those terms. I'm prepared to be shot down but I doubt there was a properly defined concept of "Western European" between say 300 to 1500 in the right hand side bit of what we now call Europe.

What you are on about is the left and right Roman Empires (my terms) and how they talked about each other.

The left lot is now nominally modern Germany and France and much besides, what was called the Holy Roman Empire. The right lot is the Byzantine Empire.

Now, your Franks were part of the left lot. The Franks were a tribal identity, cf Saxon, Angle, etc. The Franks is where la belle France gets its name (cf Frankreich, and Französisch - German names for France and French.)

I am English (by assertion and routine) but my family name says I am descended from Germans on the male line (Brits being patrilineal.) As it turns out 300 odd years ago from a Hanoverian merchant seaman and (very) loosely on my matrilineal line 500 odd years ago I have a ancestor from Padstow in Cornwall. I also have inroads from all of the home nations (England, Ireland (both), Scotland and Wales). There are also quite a few other inputs to my blood line from much further abroad.

One of my uncles is quite fastidious in his research and has many thousands of people in the DB.

[funnybeam]

By the Byzantines

[dopidopHN]

Correct. Our time will come back. And this time we will make sure y’all barbarian get the metric system.

[gerdesj]

We use kg most of the time for weight unless lbs and oz work better.

The m is very handy and we spell it correctly hereabouts - metre (unlike your mates in the US) but when subdivided, the cm is 2.54 too small (1 inch is 2.54 cm)

Need I go on ... 8)

[blackshaw]

Ironically, while they gave their name to the French language, the Franks themselves spoke a Germanic language, not French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankish_language

[gerdesj]

The Holy Roman Empire was a right old mish mash, just like the Pretannic Isles or Brythonic Isles or whatever.

Nowadays people are so wrapped up in modern boundaries and notions of nationalism and fail to notice that history is rather messy.

My family history has been rather well researched by my uncle who has a no nonsense approach to his findings. We have at least one mass murderer in the bloodline. An innkeeper of a pub and hostelry on Salisbury Plain at a crossroads was not a nice person. There was a chair that dumped people into the cellar where they were butchered. The whole thing has been hyped somewhat but it was 200 odd years ago. During WW1 an ancestor may have run away during a Zeppelin raid on Kent. We know he was signed up to join the army and had done basic training and was sent to a camp in Kent before despatch to France. He would have had a pass to visit relatives within reason. Anyway it gets complicated.

My point is that a simple comment like "the Franks themselves spoke a Germanic language" is a bit trite (no offense meant). We classify the Frankish language as Germanic, but then we also classify modern English as such. My name is also quite literally testament to how daft it gets.