Speaking Swahili, a lady in the Maasai Mara told us “Tunamix Kiswahili na lugha tofauti”. In other words, in many countries, most people speak English socially, for things as casual as describing food, through to conducting business, and formal proceedings.įor example, English is an official language of Kenya, and anyone who has been to school can speak, read and write English.īut in daily Kenyan life people speak either their local language (if with their own people), or Kenyan-flavoured Swahili, which is a mixture of pure Swahili, English and Sheng, an emerging local creole. In a lot of those places, English has either an official or unofficial role as a lingua franca, too. Like this and want more editorial content on language, culture, and immersive learning in your inbox? Sign up to our still fairly exclusive email list.Īpart from England and the former British colonies, many African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries use English as the language of government and formal education. Does English still equal England? Not even this flag thinks so – it’s the flag of the United Kingdom, including millions of people who don’t claim to speak English well. Here’s a further exploration of English and how it is now a global language. They might have an accent, may not know some casual words, and they might use some constructions that have gone out of fashion in other countries, but they still speak English shockingly well. In other countries like China or India, anyone who’s gone to school speaks English well - sometimes to an academic level. If it’s news to the person making the claim, you may want to bear in mind that in Singapore, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, English is both the primary official language and a social lingua franca. This claim is not just myopic and shallow - at best, it’s ignorant, and at worst, racist. He was en route from England to France, where his band was to play.You might have heard people claim that people of a certain country - who speak English as their main language - don’t speak it “well”. There are still conflicting theories on where and why the bandleader’s plane disappeared on December 15, 1944. William Fitzhugh, anthropologist, National Museum of Natural Historyĭoes anyone know where the plane carrying Glenn Miller went down? But it’s still valuable as a focus of modern Scandinavian heritage in the Upper Midwest. Is the Kensington Runestone in Minnesota real or fake?ĭespite recent efforts to “revive” the stone as a monument left by Scandinavian explorers in the 14th century, runic experts, geologists and archaeologists have judged it a 19th-century creation. Peter Marra, ecologist, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, National Zoo Hummingbirds are known to “trap-line,” or to pay regular visits to certain bushes or even flowers for nectar, suggesting at least short-term recall. There’s lots of evidence that birds can recall where they found food previously, but it is unclear whether they remember from day to day or year to year. Are these the same birds returning because they can remember where the food is? Hummingbirds visit my feeders every spring. Mary Linn, linguist, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage Later, as metropolitan centers such as Boston and New York City had more contact with England, they adopted the then-trendy r-less accent of the English upper class. All of these languages influenced American English, as did the English-speaking colonists’ origins in different parts of England, Wales and Scotland. The second is exposure to other languages, and the colonists came into contact with Native American languages, mariners’ Indian English pidgin and other settlers, who spoke Dutch, Swedish, French and Spanish. The first is isolation early colonists had only sporadic contact with the mother country. Over time, the changes went beyond accent to include different words and grammatical structures, adding up to a new dialect. People back in England noted the quirky new ways Americans were speaking English within a generation of the colonists’ arrival. When did the early colonists stop sounding British and start sounding American? The winds blow from west to east in the mid-latitudes, where the United States is located, but in the tropics, they blow east to west.ĭouglas Herman, geographer, National Museum of the American Indian Weather systems in the United States move from west to east, so how is it that Atlantic hurricanes originate off the African coast and move west?
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