What is/are your native language(s)?

[Desert Snake]

Too many languages to make a poll

True.

 

[Valjean]

Mur'can!

 

[Digital_Monk]

American English. Was raised in the Mountain West, so I have a bit of an accent and use some colloquialisms that many people find odd to hear in normal conversation. For example - a small stream of water is not a "creek", it is a "crick". I do not "wash" my clothes, I "warsh" them. A soft drink, whether Pepsi, Coke, Orange Soda, or whatever, is simply "a soda".

 

[GoodbyeDave]

I'm English English, a bit like this
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b072hm64#play

 

[Sakeenah]

Dutch
Somali

 

[Pastek]

French, arabic

 

[Godobeyer]

Arabic

 

[VioletVortex]

English. I want to learn a different language though, but on my own time, not through a class. Also, my school only offers Romantic languages, no Germanic languages. This surprises people, but English is actually Germanic. It borrows from Latin, but is rooted in German. This explains the cognates between English, German, and Nordic languages. I don't like English (and here I am speaking it) as it represents the way languages can degrade over time. I speak the American dialect of English.

 

[Estro Felino]

Italian

 

[Shadow Wolf]

American English, MidWest, though I made it a point to lose some of the more regional things, like pronouncing things like wash as "warsh," saying "got" when the correct is "have," and enunciating better so a pen is a writing utensil rather than something sharp that holds stuff together. I also started saying "soda" instead of "coke" or "pop," and that is the one that people really notice.

 

[Valjean]

English. I want to learn a different language though, but on my own time, not through a class. Also, my school only offers Romantic languages, no Germanic languages. This surprises people, but English is actually Germanic. It borrows from Latin, but is rooted in German. This explains the cognates between English, German, and Nordic languages. I don't like English (and here I am speaking it) as it represents the way languages can degrade over time. I speak the American dialect of English.

How has American English degraded? American English is the most linguistically conservative -- archaic, if you will -- set of English dialects.

 

[Desert Snake]

Too many languages to make a poll

Btw, the same problem arises with the ''what is your religion'', or what is your religious belief threads/polls

 

[Shadow Wolf]

How has American English degraded? American English is the most linguistically conservative -- archaic, if you will -- set of English dialects.

I would argue that because there really is no "American English," but rather a wide general concept of what is spoken as English in America with lots of regional variance and accents. Indiana, for example, despite being "accent neutral," is not a place where people speak proper grammar. You go down South, and people have their own words that aren't used or known in other parts of America (and I'm sure all regions have such words). And American English is hardly exempt from the linguistic changes of time, such as strong verbs becoming weak verbs, such as "spilled" and "spilt," two conjugated forms that are stuck at an in-between phase where both are acceptable and neither one is incorrect to use.

 

[AsianActivist]

English but I am fluent in 7 languages.

 

[Taylor Seraphim]

Over the few months that I have been on RF I have noticed how some users seem to not speak english as their native language. If this applies to you or even if it doesnt, what is your native language?

I am an English native (South)

American English native.

 

[VioletVortex]

How has American English degraded? American English is the most linguistically conservative -- archaic, if you will -- set of English dialects.

Actually, British English was the original-and thus the most archaic dialect of English.

 

[Valjean]

Actually, British English was the original-and thus the most archaic dialect of English.

Well, in the sense of origins you're right, but in the sense of which has changed more over the centuries, American is the more conservative. England didn't always affect non-rhotic "Rs," grammatical number ("the team are" rather than "the team is"), and you'll no longer hear the past participle "gotten" in England.
Shakespere would probably find American received pronunciation, basic grammar and a lot of traditional vocabulary the more familiar.

“Our ancestors,” said James Russell Lowell, “unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s.” Shakespeare died in 1616; the Pilgrims landed four years later; Jamestown was founded in 1607. As we have seen, the colonists, saving a few superior leaders, were men of small sensitiveness to the refinements of life and speech: soldiers of fortune, amateur theologians, younger sons, neighbouhood “advanced thinkers,” bankrupts, jobless workmen, decayed gentry, and other such fugitives from culture…There were no grammarians in that day; there were no purists that anyone listened to; it was a case of saying your say in the easiest and most satisfying way. In remote parts of the United States there are still direct and almost pure-blooded descendants of those seventeenth century colonists. Go among them, and you will hear more words from the Shakespearean vocabulary, still alive and in common service, than anywhere else in the world, and more of the loose and brilliant syntax of that time, and more of its gipsy phrases.

Mencken, H.L. The American language: An inquiry into the development of English in the United States,

 

[Raahim]

Croatian, and I kinda feel alone with it here.

Question: Why are people using "American" as a language?

 

[Riverwolf]

West Coast/Californian English.

Actually, British English was the original-and thus the most archaic dialect of English.

...kiiiiiiind of...

British Received Pronunciation (i.e., the accent/dialect that most Americans think of as "British English") and General American English are both descendents of an earlier group of accents/dialects, all of which would have sounded quite different to either modern form.

I don't think it's possible to point to a single "most archaic dialect", since English and all its dialects have changed so much, so rapidly, in just 500 years. Perhaps the one that might have once worked is actually Scots, since from what I've seen it retains more from Anglo-Saxon... except that Scots is now considered an entirely separate language.

 

[Draka]

American English, MidWest, though I made it a point to lose some of the more regional things, like pronouncing things like wash as "warsh," saying "got" when the correct is "have," and enunciating better so a pen is a writing utensil rather than something sharp that holds stuff together. I also started saying "soda" instead of "coke" or "pop," and that is the one that people really notice.

I'm American MidWestern as well. Though I have never said "warsh" myself I have heard others say it. It took traveling some for me to pick up using "soda" instead of "pop". Most people here use "pop" and both my husband and I say "soda" and, thus, my kids say "soda" too even though surrounded by others whom say "pop". I'm sure they also pick up other things from us that aren't normal here. Turk being from upstate New York and me having lived in California for a while they get a range of colloquialisms.