Use of the American Flag for the English language

[Deleted User 1414]

I got both American English and British English apps. It was a little different when compared.

[lrai]

dochawk:

I would so take a class that taught BE, I work with a teacher from England and sometimes he speaks and I can't be sure what he said and it's "English" but not common to my AE. He also speaks "cockney" which is nearly impossible to understand. We have fun team teaching an advanced class and we love to tease each other about who speaks English correctly and who is butchering the language...to be honest we both mess it up. I like to tell him he sounds like all 4 Beatles combined and he likes to try to sound American, which is really funny. We can laugh about it but I really would sign up for a class in BE if I could find one. Thanks for your post.

[Corinnebelle]

[mention]lrai[/mention] You might find this article about Cockney slang and the references in it interesting. Jennifer Worth has an appendix on Cockney in her book, Call the Midwife.

[lrai]

Corinnebelle:

I've heard of that book...I will check it out, thanks.

[dochawk]

Are you a teacher of English??? Just curious. Yes, it wasn't until I took the time to really learn English grammar that learning a foreign language started to make more sense.

As a graduate student, I thought it was nonsense when a professor told us that you never really understand economics until you've taught Econ 101.

Danged if he wasn't right, I discovered during my first year as a professor . . .

[Der Alte Fritz]

Everyone seems to agree that there are disadvantages to using flags, so why not fix the problem? Use ISO language codes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes). French, = fr, German = de, English = en, etc. They aren't as colorful as flags but you could compensate by using different background colors.

[lrai]

Dear Der Alte Fritz: Nice idea...thanks

[Upbeat 88]

if you live in the county pick their flag if you are the nationally pick the flag

[Steve579062]

You can please some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

Just to add my penny's worth to the argument. I object to Duo requiring me to answer MOM instead of mum and all the other "bastarised" words the yanks use.
I admit I learn as much English reading through the discussions and I do my target language.

[JudieLC]

You can please some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

Just to add my penny's worth to the argument. I object to Duo requiring me to answer MOM instead of mum and all the other "bastarised" words the yanks use.
I admit I learn as much English reading through the discussions and I do my target language.

You might be interested in this article.

Mom and Mommy are old-English words, words that are stilled used in Birmingham and most parts of the West Midlands. It is said that when people from the West Midlands went to America many years ago they took the spelling with them, hence Americans use Mom and Mommy.

I've read other articles along similar lines. The differences in how English is spoken in various parts of the world has to do with a lot of factors, and some Americanisms are actually older English as it used to be spoken in England. These ways of speaking were brought to the American continent by older English settlers and in the meantime the British way of speaking English changed. As language does.

That said, I imagine that the American flag is used for English on Duolingo because the company is American and (I'm guessing) the vast majority of users are also American.

The use of a flag to represent a language is fairly arbitrary, as far as I can tell, as there are a number of languages spoken in more than one country, yet Duolingo has picked one flag to represent those languages.

[Anitarrc]

Which American flag?

There are quite a few in the Americas and most aren't English.
In alphabetical order

[JudieLC]

Which American flag?

There are quite a few in the Americas and most aren't English.
In alphabetical order

True enough. Even Canada is only partly English.

[VincentViz1]

None of this means the US flag is a good choice; it's not. But it's certainly no worse of a choice than the English or British flags.

FWIW, I believe that there are slightly more than 400 million people in the world who claim "English" as their first language and that 259 million of those (or 63%) live in the United States.

This is more than twice as many as live in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom combined.

[gmads]

Which American flag?

The never ending problem of using "American" to mean "from the USA."

• What does "American" actually mean?

[wojcikr]

If one has to use a flag to represent a language, then the US flag is probably best, unless the dialect and spelling practices taught are British. At present, the US variety of literary English is probably the one most commonly used internationally. In part, that has to do with the fact that the Internet backbone was created in the US, and it has become more common to use American spelling and usage in countries that were not formerly part of the British Empire.

English is the world's trade language, and it is fair to say that most people who use the language are not native speakers of English. There are a lot of different language standards and traditions surrounding English in various countries. I don't think that Duolingo specifically teaches the British usage and spelling, although I haven't really looked at their courses.

The origin of the language should not be the most important criterion for using a flag to represent the English language, but one should also know that American pronunciation, at least, is historically more conservative than British dialects.

[Deleted User 5745]

Late to the party but just my two cents. I find the U. S. flag is possibly the most recognised flag world-wide and I'm not from the U. S.

Duo began in the U. S. and has a huge U. S. user base and is/ has been used in U. S. schools.

So if we have to spell things differently, say ma'am or whatever? It's just not a big deal. There's so much to be offended by nowadays, let's finally drop our outrage over Duo's Americanisms!

[gmads]

let's finally drop our outrage over Duo's Americanisms!

Americanisms… US Americanisms, United Statesianisms, Usonianisms

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  ㆍenglish ㆍvocabulary

[rtqs-sandra]

let's finally drop our outrage over Duo's Americanisms!

Americanisms… US Americanisms, United Statesianisms, Usonianisms

---

  ㆍenglish ㆍvocabulary

Though actually not wrong - Spanish and Portuguese courses show the same American continent flavor preference luckily tbh, way more useful