In Iceland, most of people speak English. There is a strong influence of the U.S. and Britain (and Denmark, of course). In Korea I never met nobody spoke in English... but of course, I´m sure there are people speak English...In Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgysztan etc et) only few student in University can understand English..
I guess you can find people who speak like that - few that I associate with. I definitely noticed when I went to Melbourne that their accent had a thicker texture. Sydney it's on another level entirely. If you stand someone from Perth besides someone from Sydney in a foreign country, chances are they're going to think he's Australian but you're not. In fact, like 27% of the people I speak to on a daily basis have accents from around the world. So I guess the moral of the story is: if you're planning a holiday, come to Western Australia We have the Kimberley anyway, only the Daintree can compete with that. WA, SA, and the NT - that's what people stereotypically think of Australia as, those central-Western states.
Oh! I don't know north west QLD has some absolutely beautiful places But if you really want to hear Australian spoken like that - try channel 40 on a two way radio - truckies channel
Yeah I grew up in the country for a time - the accents get thicker the less developed the technology. You should hear some of their accents over Morse code.
My suspects [coming from my direct experience: I don't see around me so many Italians able to converse in English!] can be corroborated by this source [UIM: Union of Italians in the World]. http://uimagazine.overblog.com/conoscenza-delle-lingue-straniere-il-confronto-italia-europa Showing our knowledge of foreign languages, the site reports that only the 13,74% of Italians know English, and this sounds realistic to me. [Come to Italy and try and ask, in English, for indications to the Italians you meet along the street ... good luck!].
My personal experience in Italy: Nobody speaks Russian or Czech, and not many people speak English .. however everyone understands or French or Spanish ... I remember a "grandmother" in Bergamo: I tried Russian, Czech and English ... and I could not ... I desperately drew on Spanish and I had no problem. And in Sicily I think everybody understands French or Spanish... I only know Italy like a tourist, but I think both the French and the Spanish languages are more widespread than English in Italy .. or at least most people understand. And people speak german, they speak better than English. For example I knew two italian from Bolzano spoke perfectly in German... I would say it would be impossible to distinguish from an Austrian.Impossible, I think.
In fact that was Austrian land before of the first World War ... No, a part some regions in the North, German here is well rare. About Spanish and French, you're right, I've never studied Spanish, but I can read it, understand the spoken language and they understand me ...
Thanks for the information. I knew that was the Austro-Hungarian Adige, but I didn´t knowe that still speak German (at least in nineties).. It is exactly what an italian girl told me... she was in Spain without learning Spanish and everybody understood her and she understood everybody. I think Italian and Spanish is like Czech and Polish.. if you can speak Czech you can travel to Poland (and Slovakia, of course) without problem about understanding.. However English and German aren´t so related.. I think.
There are -in most all of the european countries - two essential points for your chances to communicate. The first is the age of jour opponent. Aged over 50 the the most poeple know their local dialect als mother language and the the language of thier country as first foreign language. These poeple are very important to keep languages like "Plattdeutsch, Sorbisch, Ladinisch, Rätisch (f.e. in the german laguage room) and dialects like bairisch alive. With this group you wont have to much sucess in speaking english, especially american. A little different it may be in the towns. Aged between 30 and 50 people mostly learned english plus another language (usually french, spain, german or russian) at school. But most of them (like me) did not use that too much and too deeply. They usually are also a little bit freightend to blame themselves. But because of their different learnt languages they try to speak each in their language and with hands and feet and understand one another. Its a fun to listen f.e. such a german-italian dialogue. Aged under 30 in most european countries it counts as a necessary skill to speak english in the quality of a second motherlanguage. Especially the getting together in the EU (formally based on over 20 languages) needs a common language. And so f.e. the german and the italian communicate in fluent english they both have learnt. The second, important point in europe is, that many people understand languages, but wont speak a word because of their proudness. I'm sligtly speaking czech and russian. It often happend to me that I earned harmfull views by mixing a russian word in a czech-led dialoge. I already had the fact that the partner switched to his bad german or english. Especially german language now is accepted in eastern europe, that was not the way 20 years ago (what i completly understand by historical means). Its astonishing how many people understand german. Otherway millions of german, polish, czech, slovakian and ungarian russish-speakers rapidly dislearned russian ... The same problem you may have with english in france and - in some areas with italian in south tirol (alto adige, part of italy) although they know that language. In GB you have problems with every foreign language - they simply do not know one. (ok, that was a little bit mean...) So in Europe its a little more difficult as in US, but sometimes even more interesting ...
That is probably so, but it had nothing to do with the Norman invasion. English, as we understand it today, had not yet evolved, but its precurser Old English, was very close to modern German (which is not surprising, given that the languages share the same roots). During its evolution, modern English borrowed liberally from Norman French, (as it did from practically every other European nation, as well as from the East during the days of empire,) but the Normans were not the major influence in shaping English. It was a language developed by the Anglo-Saxons, with its roots in Old Norse and Althochdeutsch. To this day the English language is often referred to as Low German in linguistic circles. There are roughly 58 Germanic languages extant, one of which is English.
Although English is a Germanic language it was heavily influenced by Norman French, so it's not just another Germanic tongue like Dutch or Flemish. The point I was making was really about something else though. I would have had a hard time understanding "English" even up to the 16th Century.
Yes, of course the language was heavily influenced by Norman French, how could it not be? But its roots lie in Germanic languages not the Romance languages. And I take your point. Even at the time of Shakespeare, the pronunciation of many words was markedly different., despite being after the great vowel shift. But go have a chat with a Geordie if you want to have a hard time understanding modern English.
i think you just figure out, in first place, what "hold a conversation" means for author of the article. In the big cities i think 40% of people is able to give basic street indications.
Ok. Well, that's not exactly "holding a conversation" ... overall if you keep in mind that, in case of we Italians, we help ourselves a lot "talking using the hands" [as foreigners usually note ...]
We have hundreds of thousands of academic texts translated into English from German to prove this. I'm busy with one now, and I'm ready to set it on fire.
Well, If you speak Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French or Romanian... you can understand the others languages.. If you speak Czech, Polish, Slovakian or Serbo-Croatian, also you can understand the other languages... however if you speak english or german you can´t undertand the other language... so easy. Regards
I took a couple of Latin courses in college, and can kind of creep my way through the 'Romance' languages, French being a little easier than Spanish for me. Back in ancient times when I went to grade school, we had to spend lots of time learning Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes to the point where one could get the gist of what a word meant that we had never seen before just on that learning experience. I don't know how they teach anything these days, but I would bet they no longer teach such basics, at least in any detail or by drill anymore, from what I've seen here and there. I tried both German and Russian as well, but got nowhere; I didn't really have the time necessary to study them well. I may take up Latin again, as there are many medieval and religious texts I would like to read in the original writings someday. I never had the luxury of a lot of free time for most of my life, so I may make some soon.
Yes, in the old days everybody studied Latin, I also studied prefixes and suffixes and Latin and Greek declensions... it is nice to know the meaning of words and the basis of the languages...English and German also are "latin language": in fact 60% of words in English came from Latin, either directly or through French (Anglo-French, Anglo-Norman etc).. In German there are many words from Latin: Kaiser, Familie, Schule, Fenster etc etc the german words with the suffixes -anz/enz, -ian or -tion, which came from Latin words ending in -antia, -ianus, or -tio. about romance languages are more related than English and German..For example: Latin Gratiam, Portuguese Graça, Spanish Gracia, French grâce (and from the French, Grace in English), Italian Grazia, Romanien Gratie etc etc. Spanish is an easy language I think, what happens is that´s phonetically from the Romance languages is the least "latinized" ​​because Its phonetic does not come from Latin, but from basque) (an ancient and uncertain origin language spoken in northern Spain) and also from basque (Vascuence) came few words: barro, aquelarre, chaparro, urraca, cencerro, pizarra etc etc so the spanish word for left is Izquierda came from basque Ezkerra.. Plese don´t confuse Vascuence (Basque, an old language almos lost nowadays) with Vasco (Basque, a Koiné, a "prefabricated" basque in the sixties (1960-1970) for gathering the countless and profoundly unequal basque dialects).. the historical language is Vascuence (more than 30 dialects). the prefabricated language is Batua (an artificial language, also named Vasco). The same happens between serbian and croatian (the same language) or between czech and slovakian or between portuguese and galician, in fact portuguese is galician. Regards
The Italian number seems about right, as I spent 5 weeks there once. And I was outside of the tourist areas quite a bit.
In Rome, Florence and some other touristy areas, the English speakers were far more numerous than the numbers would indicate. But when off the beaten path, less so. My wife speaks Italian, and she would speak to Italians, and often the Italians would answer in English, to either show that they could speak English, or to practice. I was on the Roman subway and gave my seat up for a priest who had come onto the train, and he spoke no English at all, and all I knew was a few phrases and the Godfather movies dialogue. A woman stepped into translate our conversation, saving me from mangling a beautiful language.
Now, we can develop further the discussion, making a difference between social English and cultural English [at this point, I begin to think that this is the reason for the differences among statistics about how many Italians speak English in Italy]. The same reasoning can be valid also for an other foreign language: French. What I mean [and what I guess it's the factor of diversity in the statistics] is that Italians speak English and French at social level [these are the languages we study at school from the lowest levels and these are the languages we actually use at social level, just because Italy, during the nice seasons, is full of English and French speaking tourists]. But cultural English is a different matter. I personally be member of an international history forum and I can debate about history in English [for example, despite I have lived at Paris, I would have some difficulties in taking part to a history forum in French], because I do know English in the wider sense of the sentence. But only a fraction of the Italians who are able to speak "social English" would be able to do the same.
