L' Eomot Inversé (3/19/2013)

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Toreador (3/19/2013)

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demonfox (3/19/2013)

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only English , when it comes to britain ...

I'm looking forward to Tom's reply to that one 😉

Well, just to keep Toreador happy I'll reply, although completely off topic here.

There are at least four versions of spoken English in Britain: Scottish English, Welsh English, and two English Englishes: that awful baabaa they speak in SE England, and the English of the rest of England. If you want to count phrase like "all mang the cudders akay"(travellers language - maybe Rom) or "bickering brattle" (Scots -lallans/doric) as English - I don't, especially since "bickering" in that phrase means something completely different from what the English word with the same spelling means, but some do - then there are at least another two versions; and if you want to count minor dialectal variations like Geordie English and Brumagen English, ie versions with lots of pronunciation variation but only trivial grammar variation, as well as variants with seriously different grammar and vocabulary (I don't, it would be pointless - as silly as in the USA counting Boston English as different from Cambridge English would be) there are hundreds.

But even though there are at least four versions, those four versions have a lot in common, especially in written form: while one version uses "I am after going" and another uses "I am gone" and yet another uses " I have gone" everyone understands all those variants, so in that sense there is a single British English that is a union of those versions. Unless of course you count things like the two non-English example I gave above as English - if you did that you would have to accept that there are three or more mutually incomprehensible English languages in Britain.

I suspect someone from SE England would take exception to the lower case "b" in demofox's "britain". I'm perfectly happy with lower case for the first letters of country names and language names. I usually use upper case for them when writing English because so many Englsh speakers take exception to lower case and always when writing German because all nouns get initial capitals in German, but usually stick to lower case for them except at the beginning of a sentence when writing in other languages, especially in languages like Spanish, Scots Gaelic, and Irish where capitalising language names is formally incorrect. I even use lower case in english when the capital slips my mind or I'm bent on teasing na sasunnaich.