[blenderob]

I read several blogs that use British English, including this OP's blog. Some of my favourite blogs in my RSS reader are British English blogs, or at least they use British English spellings and grammar. I find their use of the English language very charming and funny in a unique way.

It surprises me that anyone would feel entitled to ask a blogger to change the variety of English they use. American English is only one of many forms of English. The world is richer for its many varieties of English, and languages, and that diversity makes it more interesting, not less.

[vitally3643]

Certain cultures teach that diversity is a bad thing to be feared and extinguished. Diversity is only a good thing when your mind has been poisoned by "education" and "experience".

It requires an open mind to see diverse experiences as a good thing, and certain cultures think having citizens with open minds is an unprofitable way to run a society.

[throwaway2037]

    > Certain cultures teach that diversity is a bad thing to be feared and extinguished.

Ok, I take the bait. Which ones?

[hdgvhicv]

Just today

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/mandarin-...

[throwaway2037]

Mainland Chinese gov't claims to have 56 official ethnicities in their country. They are certainly celebrated by official media. In particular, they seem to love the southwest portion of the country (Guangxi and Yunnan) with many mountaineous regions and various ethnic groups, mostly because they do not protest the central gov't. Also, look at the coins and bills of yuan -- many different ethnicities.

[TFNA]

The PCR’s official diversity has been a Potemkin village since the 1970s. Yes, the coinage still shows multiple languages, and the Chinese do love their touristy ethnic villages where people dress up in traditional clothing (though often these are outside actors instead of actual locals). However, there is almost no room for minorities to use their own languages; even in the family circle there has been increasing pressure to switch to putonghua.

Around the turn of the millennium, Muslim Uighur radicals got a lot of attention in the international press. But what most of the world had not followed was that before that, there had been conflict between secular Uighur Communists and the central government because the former saw the space for use of Uighur shrinking. Those Uighurs were silenced or forced into exile abroad, leaving only Islam as a channel for ethnic discontent.

[vitally3643]

The one where I live :(

[throwaway2037]

I'm sorry for that. Where?

[therealdrag0]

More approachable framing: tribalism (generally accepted human tendency) is inherently anti-diversity.

[contagiousflow]

Have you never met a pro ICE person from USA?

[tpoacher]

Is it bait? I'm pretty sure it's a reasonably factual, albeit general claim. Asking chatGPT for country-specific examples for instance gives this:

> Yes—some countries have (at various times, and in some cases still today) adopted policies aimed at making the population more “homogeneous,” through segregation, assimilation pressure, or exclusion/deportation. Concrete examples:

- South Africa (apartheid era, 1948–1990s): An official system of racial classification and enforced separation (“separate development”).

- Germany (Nazi period, 1933–1945): State ideology enforced a racial hierarchy and pursued forced removal and mass murder of those deemed “undesirable.”

- Israel (state policies affecting Palestinian citizens and occupied territory, especially since 1967): Includes laws and administrative practices that many observers describe as producing or enforcing unequal status by group; key issues include citizenship status differences and restrictions tied to national/ethnic identity.

- Myanmar (Rohingya): Policies and law enforcement that stripped/blocked citizenship for Rohingya and enabled persecution, culminating in mass violence and displacement.

- Canada (Indigenous assimilation policy, especially 19th–20th century into 1996): Forced assimilation via residential schools and bans on language/cultural practices; many have characterized this as cultural genocide.

- United States (Jim Crow + earlier immigration/citizenship rules; and internment): Historical legal regimes created segregation and restricted citizenship/naturalization based on race/national origin (e.g., earlier Asian-exclusion immigration restrictions).

You may disagree with some examples on this list, but I'm sure even you would consider that the first two are clear examples of diversity-fearing 'cultures' rather than 'bait'. And this is even before considering the wider definition of the word 'culture', which can be even more exclusionary.

[dhosek]

I would edit the US item to remove “historical” given the current efforts to reinstate everything in parentheses and add new ones.

[throwaway2037]

Fair point. I did not write my response from a historical viewpoint. I was writing from a current persepective. To give credit to their reply, many of their example are correct. With the exception of some very backwards dictatorships, at this point, pretty much most countries value some diversity. Plus, after 2010, all people under 30 have watched thousands of hours of YouTube, so they know the world is big, cool, and very diverse.

[pseudalopex]

Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[tpoacher]

I clearly didn't "post generated text" masquerading as human insight in the manner cautioned in that context.

I, the human, demonstrated that even an LLM, which in this context can be viewed as an impartial source, could easily find legit examples.

I could of course have simply stated that this is the case without pasting the LLM text, but in that case I'm fairly sure OP could have simply replied "Nah-uh".

[Redoubts]

Ok sure. The Home Secretary just banned new asylum seeker housing near schools and nurseries, fyi.

[dofm]

Right. As a Brit I am entitled to think we speak the best version (because we do; ISE is a close second) but I am not entitled to believe everyone else's is wrong, because that is ahistorical. They have diverged repeatedly and thus ours is one of the divergences.

Much of British English was standardised long after several waves of the US settlers left our shores, so US english has some traits of pre-standardised English dialects, and ours is different again.

It's equally silly when some Americans claim their English is closer to the "true" English as a result, because, again, there was really no standardised "true" English when they left.

Along with some simplifications and some things reintroduced from german settlers, it has some traits of older English that the British abandoned in our own simplification of the language.

Is ours the best? Of course it bloody is :-) But is it "true" English? No more than anyone else's. That is the enormous power of English.

[gnubison]

What is ISE?

[dofm]

I mean Indian Standard English here.

[chrismorgan]

I have never heard of a thing called “Indian Standard English”, nor (as an Australian who has moved to India) does it sound a very realistic concept. Can’t find any search results for it as a phrase, either.

[dofm]

Sometimes used as a term in linguistics.

Put it in quotes: "Indian Standard English" and you will see plenty of results.

https://www.google.com/?q=%22Indian+Standard+English%22

https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/eww.24...

It doesn't mean a written standard exists.

Maybe it's called Standard Indian English or just Indian English in other contexts; I'm only using a term I've seen used.

[chrismorgan]

For comparison: <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22indian+standard+english%22>, exactly zero results.

[rahimnathwani]

I agree in general, but there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'. This means roughly the opposite in British and US English, and there's often insufficient surrounding context to alert the reader to their error.

(OTOH I don't think you should suppress 'false friends' like biscuits, pants etc.)

[mrob]

>there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'.

Another exception: "moot", as in "moot point". In the UK it means "subject to debate", while in the US it means "inconsequential and therefore not subject to debate".

[lbriner]

I'm British but I always understood it as the second meaning. e.g. "We were going to consider XYZ but now it's a moot point because the project is cancelled."

[mrob]

I've heard it used that way in the UK too, but the first meaning is traditional. Wiktionary has some examples:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot

I expect the US meaning will eventually become standard everywhere.

[dofm]

It sort of means both simultaneously, doesn't it (we could discuss it but it's inconsequential), but we do tend to use it in that formulation most.

[jwatzman]

There are a few others. “Quite” comes to mind — “I am quite hungry” or “that meal was quite good” can mean opposite things, depending on the speaker region and even voice inflexion if spoken.

[MrJohz]

Once you start going in that direction, a lot of things that British people say can require some amount of translation, see e.g. this table: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:640/format:webp/0*0Fs1...

[seszett]

Honestly it's not the first time I read such comments, and... they're not about the British as much as they are about the Americans, I'd say.

I think almost all of the expressions in the left-hand side have direct, almost literal equivalents in French for example, with the same meaning as they have for the British, including being very context-dependent.

Also works for Flemish by the way, although the Dutch are supposed to be more literal so maybe Flemish/Dutch is to be seen the same way as British/American.

[dofm]

Quite, indeed, has no simple meaning in British English. Any non-British attempt to assign one meaning that is different to their regional meaning is doomed to failure :-)

I use it in different senses all the time.

[kurtis_reed]

Imagine someone wrote a blog in some obscure language that few people speak. If you happen to know that language, you'd think wow this is great. If you don't happen to know that language, you'd just think it's a shame. This is the same thing, just to a lesser degree. Some people might be interested in putting in the effort to learn a bunch of foreign cultural references, but not everyone.

[pseudalopex]

They did not say someone asked them to write American English.