Comment by CrzyLngPwd

5 days ago

It should be just "en", since we invented and it's the one true version:-)

given English evolved from Norman French, it's maybe just a local variation than a true invention? fr-GB feels more correct :)

  • This is more or less completely false. English has an unusually high number of loan words from French (on the order of 10k or so, I think), and this has made the language less Germanic than its historical origins would suggest. But English existed before Norman French arrived in the British Isles, and is still at heart a Germanic language.

That may be true, but in practice, US english has no taken over as the de-facto English. All thanks to the Internet.

I am glad someone is pushing back on this, though, and I want more multi lingual sites on the Internet in general.

  • By your logic, chinese english or indian english are the defacto as they massively outnumber american english

    You just mean that you visit more american sites than other non-US english speaking sites

    • Go to France, or Japan, or Hungary, or somewhere like that. Someone there is visiting a web site that is in English. Now, what English is it most likely to be?

      My guess is US English, not UK English, not Indian English, not Chinese English. Sure, they may visit some of those sites, but I suspect that the most frequent will be US English.

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    • You're confusing number of speakers with convention or standard setting power.

      Look at the places where US english has become the norm or convention; programming, media, apps, business, Internet in general.

      And the US is in unique position - it drives technology forward quite a bit, and it's also actual native English speakers.

      So in other words got more to do with technological and economic influence, not population size.

    • According to wikipedia, there's 128 millions of en-IN speakers, of which only few hundred thousands are native - while there's 248 million native en-US speakers.

      1 reply →

  • No, no I don't think it has. Americans are vastly outnumbered by commonwealth states using and teaching standard English

    • See my other comment, the world follows the US. It's about where the influence is primarily coming from, and that is currently America. And in terms of English it has a distinct advantage in that it is full of native speakers. Many Indians are proficient in English but they're not native speakers.