[emodendroket]

> This felt to me like one of the reasons why English became the dominant language for business over time.

I don't think that has much to do with it. I think it has more to do with the dominant political and economic position of the United States. French served a similar role in the past despite having all the features you describe.

[abtinf]

America was an economic backwater until the 1900s.

France was, and to a greatly diminished extent still is, a global power.

French has T-V distinction.

French has arbitrary noun gendering.

The noun gendering alone makes it significantly easier to embarrass yourself speaking French than English.

[freddie_mercury]

> America was an economic backwater until the 1900s.

The US was the largest economy in the world by 1890.

It should be obvious that it wasn't an economic backwater even before that.

By 1850 it bigger than Russia, Italy, Spain, Germany, or France.

The US stopped being an economy backwater sometime in the early 1800s. Well over a century earlier than your claim.

[tzs]

I'd guess that the size of a country's import/export economy is more important than the size of its total economy when it comes to how much a country will influence language in the rest of the world.

Google is refusing to turn up anything useful when I try to find information on when the US became a top importer/exporter.

[freddie_mercury]

The US has always been one of the world's top exporters due to its cotton industry and the cotton boom that started in the 1780s. It is quite likely that the US was a Top 1 or 2 exporter by the time the Constitution was signed in 1789. Remember there were very few manufactured goods yet and not even that much else that was worth importing.

By the 1850s US cotton accounted for 77% of the cotton used in Britain, 90% used in France, 60% used in Germany, and 92% used in Russia.

[tim333]

Prior to the 1900s there was the British empire which spread English around a fair bit.

>At its height in the 19th and early 20th century, it was the largest empire in history and, for a century, was the foremost global power. (wikipedia)

It was said the sun never set on the British empire as it had bits in most time zones which led to a joke from the Indians that it was because God didn't trust the British in the dark.

[scheme271]

Probably the combination of the British empire and subsequent US dominance led to english being established as the language. If you go to places like South Asia, English is pretty well established despite it being no one's native language there. So the British spread it around globally and then the US being a dominant superpower pretty much cemented it's status.

[leereeves]

The dominance of America really started after WWII, but before that the British Empire spread the English language around the world.

If France had won the Seven Years War or the Napoleonic Wars, French would probably still be the global lingua franca, because people didn't choose which language to learn, they learned the language of whichever colonial power controlled their lands.

[nerdponx]

> America was an economic backwater until the 1900s.

That seems like a stretch.

My understanding is that plantation cash crops grown in the South like Cotton were a major export in the early-mid 19th Century.

And then of course Standard Oil was incorporated in 1870.

Maybe the effect of American industrialization didn't have a big effect internationally until the ~1890s and onward, but I'd hardly say the USA was a backwater throughout the industrial revolution.

[chimeracoder]

> Maybe the effect of American industrialization didn't have a big effect internationally until the ~1890s and onward, but I'd hardly say the USA was a backwater throughout the industrial revolution.

The US had a huge effect on industrialized Europe before that. The British textile revolution would never have happened if the US hadn't supplied a large chunk of the cotton (from plantations in the South) and if the British hadn't physically destroyed the the-dominant textile industry in India.

[oldgradstudent]

> The noun gendering alone makes it significantly easier to embarrass yourself speaking French than English.

English has more than enough of ways to easily embarrass yourself without the need for arbitrary noun gendering.

[andruby]

Such as?

I’m genuinely asking for examples. I’ve embarrassed myself quite often in French, yet haven’t much in English.

* neither are my mother tongue

[adhesive_wombat]

The adjective order one is really interesting to explain: the adjectives in "good small old red wooden English book" have to come in that order or it sounds very peculiar.

Other European languages may have this to, but explaining it to people who speak unrelated languages usual results in a wail of "but why?!"

Many English speakers don't themselves realise it - in the UK, at least, we are not carefully taught English piece by piece after a very young age. Most grammatical understanding comes when (if!) you study a foreign language and then you find out that "find out" is a thing called a "phrasal verb".

[samvimes]

> "good small old red wooden English book" have to come in that order or it sounds very peculiar.

Interesting. As a native English speaker (from the US), I'd say that "good small old" felt a little awkward for me to say out loud. Personally, I'd probably say "good old small ...", but to your point, there isn't exactly a "right" answer, just one that sounds right. I'm assuming you're also a native English speaker from the UK, so maybe we've discovered a funky difference between the English in our two countries. It would be a fun study to give native English speakers a list of those adjectives, and the noun "book", and tell them to order them.

[globalise83]

As a native English speaker from England, I'd always keep "good" and "old" together, and probably put them at the beginning of the sentence. I'd also use "little" rather than "small" in such a context: "my good old little red wooden English book." To me that would sound just right.

[jackfoxy]

I would also say good old small.. but the rest of the adjectives flow as I would expect to hear and say.

[FergusArgyll]

Steven Pinker's book on irregular verbs has a great example of this.

little kids often mess up on irregular verbs ("I eated supper") because they (subconsciously?) learn the grammar, they aren't memorizing the past tense of every word

[dazc]

The beauty of English being that everyone understands what the kid meant.

[oblio]

> Other European languages may have this to, but explaining it to people who speak unrelated languages usual results in a wail of "but why?!"

They do, and just like in your other example, they internalize it, they just don't realize they do it automatically because it "sounds good".

> Most grammatical understanding comes when (if!) you study a foreign language and then you find out that "find out" is a thing called a "phrasal verb".

That's super funny, isn't this taught in middle school or something? In Romania you study Romanian grammar from 5th to 8th grade (11/12 to 14/15), and you learn syntax, morphology, etc.

Does the average English speaker really not know about the term "phrasal verb"? :-)

[okeuro49]

> Does the average English speaker really not know about the term "phrasal verb"? :-)

Yes.

Furthermore, I didn't know the English word for it, despite being a native speaker, but do know the German "Verben mit Präpositional-Ergänzung", from having learnt German.

Speakers of English as a foreign language will know more about English grammar than English native speakers.

[vintermann]

There are a ton of language quirks that have their own name, but aren't prominent enough that they're taught - especially not in your native language, if they're peculiar to it. (In a second language, they often have to be taught, because they stick out and make no sense in the context of your first language).

Phrasal verbs are not typically mentioned when Norwegian kids learn English, because not only do we have them, we typically use them in exactly the same way (e.g "eat up" is the same as "spis opp", "find out" is the same as "finne ut"). No reason to explain an obscure and odd concept if kids do the right thing by default anyway.

"Modal particles", small words that subtly indicate the speaker's certainty or degree of concern, likewise is another strange little grammatical quirk that German has, but Norwegian kids generally don't need a name for since Norwegian has them too and they can mostly just be translated directly.

[ajmurmann]

There are lots of tricky things in English language, but the adjective order doesn't nearly carry the potential for embarrassment as gender-related mistakes.

[akkad33]

A couple of examples that come to mind is using the wrong verb form, since English has a lot of irregular verbs, and another is mispronouncing words, since there are many words with the same spelling but different pronunciations. And then you have words like "read", which have both characteristics.

[oldgradstudent]

Tenses, pronounciation that is completely divorced from spelling, idioms, prepositions, word order, articles, and so on.

As a foreigner that observed a lot of other foreigners speaking English: it is not an easy language to master.

[fegu]

To "the" or not to "the" before a name or noun.

[andruby]

I’ve heard lots of people with a Spanish background make mistakes against this. Iirc in Spanish you often should use it in front of a name.

[kevinmchugh]

It's probably the most common class of error for people who learn English as adults. There's lots of strange, hard to explain meaning encoded in which (if any) article a person chooses. "I dropped by the school today" and "I dropped by school today" are both valid and have slightly different implications

[volemo]

Series “Mind your language” is one big example (along with cheesy ‘70s humour).

[tacone]

Such as great classics like:

Let me go take a sheet.

I really like that beach.

[hex4def6]

But those are pronounced differently. Of course, English has its fair share; Their / They're / There, beach / beech, etc etc.

But I don't think English particularly stands out, and I can think of languages that are much worse than it in that regard (especially for an outsider). Mandarin / Cantonese / Japanese / French / Korean are all pretty notorious examples for homophone collisions.

[emodendroket]

There are not that many words distinguished only by gender and I don’t think the number of those where it would really be an embarrassing blunder is that great. All languages offer pitfalls like this anyway.

[tuetuopay]

(French here) It’s not really about words distinguished by gender, but misgendering a word will sound very weird to French people. So much so you’ll be labeled as foreign immediately. As crazy as it may seem, but misgendering objects sounds worse than misgendering people (in a purely linguistic way).

[emodendroket]

I mean, of course, but sounding obviously foreign isn't so bad if your meaning can be understood and you haven't accidentally said something with a wildly different meaning than intended.

[mark38848]

People really overestimate the importance of this. If you go to le or la gare doesn't matter much. But if you don't know "gare" in the first place you could have a harder time. Also "embarrassing yourself" doesn't happen because everybody loves it when n-th (for any n > 1) language speakers attempt to speak their language.

[thaumasiotes]

> The noun gendering alone makes it significantly easier to embarrass yourself speaking French than English.

This... greatly underestimates the number of ways you can make a mistake while speaking a foreign language.

If you're a non-Francophone trying to speak French, you have a 100% of making obvious mistakes while you try, and some of those mistakes will probably relate to noun gendering.

If you're a non-Anglophone trying to speak English, you have the same - 100% - chance of making obvious mistakes while you try to do that. Depending on what languages you do speak, you may or may not make mistakes in noun gendering. (English noun gendering is a huge problem for Chinese speakers, and boy does it make them sound unnatural.)

But that doesn't matter; that's just one way to make a mistake. Your odds of making no mistakes of any kind are zero. Why worry about one particular subclass? You're foreign and everyone who hears you will recognize that.

[refurb]

> America was an economic backwater until the 1900s.

The US was the largest economy in the world in 1890. That would suggest it wasn't a backwater until at least the early 1800's.

[danmaz74]

But the UK was the biggest empire on earth at that time.

[solidsnack9000]

English was a widespread language of trade long before America was a big deal because of British shipping.

[vlz]

Shipping sure, but also simply the fact that a good part of the worlds population were part of the British empire. Wikipedia has 23% of the world population at 1913.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire

[emodendroket]

Yes, but so were other contenders like French and German which have not retained such a prominent role.

[samus]

Germany was not even unified by the time the UK took over India from the East India Company. Germany eventually had colonies, but they altogether didn't have such a long-lasting influence on the global economy as the British Empire had.

The French colonial empire was much larger, but in the 19th century they were not really present in the Americas anymore, and Vietnam was their only major colony in Asia.

[pmontra]

Yes, but the German speaking empire of the last centuries was Austria, not Germany.

Both had limited reach outside Europe. Germany had that colonial push to grab what was left in Africa and in Oceania at the end of the 19th century. Losing WW1 ended it all.

[samus]

The legacy of that empire (it was purely Austria only after 1809) and of Prussia was quite long-lasting though. Because of the medieval Ostsiedlung and rulers granting land and privileges, there once were German-speaking enclaves all over Eastern Europe. A few still exist. Only ethnic cleansing after WWII and Germany enabling them to move away by granting citizenship to them made them disappear.

Some legacy still remains: for economic reasons, German is one of the most frequently learned languages in Eastern Europe.

[solidsnack9000]

Several factors contributed to English's success. I just think it would be a mistake to attribute it all to America.

[herbst]

I wonder why we (central Europe, 90s) all learned British English if they goal would have been to not sound awkward next to Americans?