Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Farrant
it is a good language but some of the colonies have distorted it over the years
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I admit I'm from one of the former colonies so I might be biased in this but I would have thought there were quite enough versions of "English" spoken within the United Kingdoms to make comprehension a challenge.
People from Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Yorkshire, Cornwall, Kent, Oxford/Cambridge, Cockney, and other regions, dialects and slangs not to mention imigrants from all over with their own unique flavours of English.
You don't need Texans, New Yorkers, Quebecois, Newfies and Australians to have confusion.
More seriously, I am constantly amazed by the high quality of English spoken by the Europeans I deal with while arranging aircraft handling. For most of them there isn't any need for them to learn English as a third or seventh language except to deal with us foreigners - and then they apologize for not speaking English better than they do when I can't speak one word of their language (except perhaps beer/bière/bier/birrë/biero/beior/bjór/bir/bia/biir which seems to work in many languages).