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Comment by ky3 | Hacker News Reader

> For better or worse, we must agree that English has won the world’s common tongue competition.

I too labor under the yoke of a foreign tongue not sung to me at my cradle.

But something to keep in mind about English is that she gives everyone a hard time. No-one gets a free pass. Absolutely no-one.

In a few months, POTUS Trump will visit the Queen of English. Fo' shizzle they too will have problems with the language. She'll have bigly problems, and he'll have all the rest.

So the thing I do is to have something worthy to say, find people who'll appreciate it, and improvise a shared tongue for that special moment.

People have always gladly met me halfway.

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I know this comment is tongue in cheek, but honestly, it's something I've come to really enjoy about English. It's so pervasive that it changes constantly, and often times you can guess where someone is from by how they construct it. As an American, I only speak English fluently but have a passing knowledge of other languages. I wonder if any other language has similar phenomena, in a single country(excluding regional dialects, which also exist here of course).

Russian demonstrates this to some extent, and German, prominently.

I am currently in Moscow and I can tell anybody from Moscow just by their first sentence based on pronounciation - but almost only that. That is because Russian has a governing body that dictates what "real" russian is. English has no such body.

In English, words mean what people understand by them, not what they are suppose to mean.

French has a governing body (l'Académie française) but, at least in some parts of the world, spoken french is very different from what is prescribed by the Académie. Plus the accents are so diverse, here in Québec we are 7 million people (and not all of them french speakers) and we have as much difference in the way we speak depending on the region as you have in the U.S. for example. Funny thing, when we visit France, the french sometimes answer us in english, because our accent is so thick that they think french is not our native language.

My come from a small country (Portugal), yet there are multiple recognizable differences between not only the pronunciation but also the vocabulary used for the common words (like a cup of coffee) in different regions of the country.

The fact that we were quite poor until not that long ago might have helped to maintain those differences, since most people didn't have TVs nor could afford to move to a city to attend college. Then again, the poverty also led to major emigration from rural areas, which killed a lot of smaller communities.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but this happens in every language :)

A cultured speaker (he doesn't even have to be native) will recognize where other speakers are from based on either their accent or their phrasing, in most languages.

I thought that english is the worlds first language because it's very easy to learn. I would guess almost anyone can get up to basic conversation skills and learn the terms for programming in some months, and that's it. No need for shakespearian level of vocabulary to get things done. Imagine Mandarin in the same place as comparision, with a (beautiful) but very impracticable alphabet to begin with.

I suspect English is the world's first language right now because of the British Empire, and the Pax Americana that followed (and continues still)

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