Whybdo I get the feeling an American wrote this 馃ぃ
No hate to my American friends, the post is clearly morrocan but I've experienced some very patronising praise of my ability to speak English over the years 馃ぃ
@Pretzel "Hey Hunny, make sure the girl knows we need to go up to the 4th floor" *holds out 4 fingers to my face* "4th floor" *points to the ground* "floor!"
In the mid 70s I visited Amsterdam and was very impressed by the standard of English spoken by pretty much everyone I spoke to. It was so easy to find our way around just by stopping a random person and asking for directions, the responses were invariably clear and grammatically correct. Anyone patronising you about your English should reflect on their ability to speak any other language!
Americans may be arrogant, but even ignoring the fact that the sign says British Workshop, that sign really sounds like smug British superiority. (No hate to the British folks)
The US may have risen to world superpower status, but we speak the language because jolly old England had been exporting "English" around the world forever.
@ViciDraco yes both groups (as with most other nationalities i've met) have sub-groups which are really infuriating. I think the British arrogance comes from a sense of superiority while the American tends to come from a general obliviousness that there is a developed world outside of 50 states :D in that sense i'm much happier talking with someone from the US with childlike wonder than an English gentleman with a superiority complex.
Judging by it saying casa blanca at the bottom of the sign and the area code of the phone number i'm guessing it's a morrocan origin though.
As another poster pointed out, the sign literally says "British," not American.
Why the English language? It's the most widely-spoken language in the world with over 1.4 billion speakers.
Where is French on the list? Fifth place, with 280 million speakers. French is way behind English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish, It's just above Arabic, and will probably be surpassed by Arabic within the next five years. Even in Morocco, French is spoken by only 1/3 of the population.
French is a perfectly fine language. Beware marketing materials that say it's more useful worldwide than English is.
Stick to the facts. Feelings will get you only so far, and basing decisions on hurt feelings will get you nowhere.
Unfortunately, if that is so one also has to acknowledge why that is (British colonialism and "empire-building"; overrunning several existing countries and forcing the indigenous people to speak English). Hardly something to be proud of, considering how afraid the UK is of immigrants [b]now[/b].
Speaking French [b]does[/b] allow one to get by in Vietnam, some African countries, the Caribbean and part of Canada.
@bijouxbroussard i'm not entirely understanding your point here but can agree that anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK is getting out of control and the impacts of colonisation are still being felt around the world.
@Soph03 Just observing that while it is true that English is a primary language spoken throughout the world (after Mandarin and Spanish), there鈥檚 [b]reasons[/b] for this that people like to ignore.
@BLP11520 I am always embarrassed about my lack of fluency in other languages. I have tried to learn others, but, just never really had the knack for it. I remember once, walking in Rome, looking for a certain restaurant. We were lost and I stopped a woman and used my best guidebook Italian, she had no idea what i was asking, she said Spanish, I knew medical Spanish(needed to take care of Spanish speaking children), but that didn't help, she said French, and I took 3 years of French in High School and a year in college, so tried my best, she then said English, and I blushed but asked in English, to which she said, 鈽猴笍you speak very good English, you must have studied it a long time!
Just my experience. As an American going to France and trying speak their language I was was met with a dumbfounded look. When I asked later if they English after I heard them speak perfect English in front of me they said no. I legitimately tried to speak French and was met with disgrace
@BearDownChicago that's just to French :( even when my boyfriend and I go there (he speaks French) they act so confused when someone makes a simple grammar mistake
It literally says [i]British[/i] on the sign, and in this context French is presumably only listed as relic of Morocco's colonial past.
Nevertheless, there is some truth to it. English is the de facto language of all air traffic control towers around the world, it's very common among software developers around the world (and I've never seen a programming language that was not based on English), it's a lingua franca among continental Europeans, it has a simpler writing system than Mandarin (or other Asian languages), and the Anglophone portion of the post-colonial world is sizable. Even among continental European languages, Spanish would have more applicability around the world than French (or Dutch), with Latin America being a sizable landmass, the majority of which is Spanish-speaking.
Moreover, a single planet having more than one human language is not culture preservation, it is a problematic and pointless communication barrier persisted by irrational emotional attachments (the kind of thing that also leads to tribalism, sectarianism, ethnonationalism, fascism, etc.), not by logic or common sense. If Earth is ever visited by, oh, say, Klingons, which language will be the "Earth" language? Klingons surely won't give a damn about all of our arbitrary "nations".
@samueltyler2 so when you meet someone and they ask where you from do you say america or united States of America because no American I have met has said that 馃
@Dacrowman I never say America, I may say east coast US and then if they ask further, I say NJ. I am super sensitive because I have family in Canada and they do take offense to the use of the term. It may be pure semantic vs, but, I feel it is important. In my field i also always correct people when they say EKG when in the US rather than ECG.
