Which is not a difficult phenomenon to understand.
The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English, but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't DNA.
The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English, but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't DNA.
2012: 50.7 million Americans identified as German. 2022: 41 million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans
Many (most?) countries exist because pre-existing ethnolinguistic groups got their own country. For example, Bengalis have existed for long enough that you can easily identify them as a tightly clustered, distinct group in genetic profiles,[1] but never had their own country until 1971.
[1] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/07/09/the-main-interesti...
Language isn't DNA
All of northwestern europe, of course, had quite a bit of DNA mixing over the centuries, so to what extent some DNA is particularly "German" or "English" largely depends on the time period.
Amusingly the Franks after whom French is named were also Germanic but they adopted the Vulgar Latin derived Old French then spoken in Northern France and which the Norse who invaded Northern France adopted before invading England.
https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/324w60/how_...
It’s best described as a creole language.
I guess I explained so much so that you could tell I wasn't trolling, and looking for a legitimate answer (or your educated opinion). I appreciate whatever you respond with!
> On the other hand English has copied enough from French to make it noticeably easier to pick up at the beginning than German. Some of that is simply being a more recent exchange with less time for linguistic drift, but these kinds of classifications are ultimately based on arbitrary criteria.
I think the difficulty with learning German is the complex grammar which is quite different from English. I suspect Dutch or Norwegian would be easier as their structure is more similar. And while there are more shared words in French, Spanish is normally considered easier to learn as it is more regular.
Perhaps a better way to say it is the overlap between Modern English and Old English is nearly useless when looking at an old text without prior training because of everything experienced linguistic drift.
Meanwhile more recent exchanges in either direction just pop out. The pop up here has buttons labeled “Accepter et continuer” which looks like accept and continue, and “S’abonner” which looks enough like Abandon to suggest what clicking on them does even if that’s the first exposure an English speaker has to French. https://www.lemonde.fr/
So IMO when looking at how closely related things are it’s worth remembering not just where something comes from but how much of that shared history is still around.
I don't think American-English is likely to become a creole language through mixture with Spanish because modern media is such a huge standardizing force. As a Brit I've never had trouble understanding anyone in the US while in the UK there are regional dialects I struggle to understand.
On the other hand English has copied enough from French to make it noticeably easier to pick up at the beginning than German. Some of that is simply being a more recent exchange with less time for linguistic drift, but these kinds of classifications are ultimately based on arbitrary criteria.
When you say fancy it’s not just allure or autocrat, but also words like age, air, alarm, aunt, chair, money, beef, dance, etc
Languages constantly borrow words, but there's a deeper foundation to the language (grammar, phonology, basic vocabulary) that remains.
e.g. it’s not like Japan didn’t have a “native population” that spoke a different language(s). The colonization just happened a few thousand years earlier than in the Americas.
Which are spoken by billions of people around the world. That's a huge exception.
And nobody in Britain has just Brittonic ancestry, or Frankish ancestry in France. For the most part the populations in Europe have been stable since a time that predates the expansions of the Celtic and Germanic linguistic groups.
https://peopleofthebritishisles.web.ox.ac.uk/population-gene...
The person you responded to explains that the most common ancestry in the US is German, but English is the dominant language.
You seem to be making the point that the most common ancestry in England is from England, but the Germanic language of English is dominant, rather than the Celtic one it replaced.
It's the same phenomenon, not a correction. That languages spread even when genes don't.
>The most common ancestry in the US is German, not English, but English is still the dominant language. Language isn't DNA.
Their specific point is that "language isn't DNA". To support that argument they note that Continental German immigrants to America now speak English.
My specific point is that English originates not only within the language family of German speaking peoples, but that it originated with the DNA pools that comprise Northern Germany.
Therefore, I don't see how "the Germans are speaking English" makes the point that language isn't DNA.
I'm not saying that it is, at all. Its very obviously not. But the example being argued didn't make that point.
Your objection is that English is a Germanic language. That's interesting, but irrelevant here. German and English are two different languages that are mutually unintelligible, and the fact that immigrants went from speaking one to speaking the other within a few generations illustrates my point that language does not have to (and often doesn't) follow genetics.
It's not only German immigrants to the US who now speak English. Pretty much all immigrants to the US speak English after 1-2 generations, regardless of what language they originally spoke.
Because German isn't English. Speaking one doesn't let you understand the other in conversation, not even a little bit. They're not like e.g. Spanish and Portuguese.
The fact that English is Germanic is a historical fact about where it came from, what it evolved from a millennium ago. But only a small percentage of Germanic influence remains in modern-day English vocabulary. It doesn't have anything to do with Germans in the US learning English.
But as you say, the relationship between English and German doesn't have anything to do with what we're discussing. English and German are two different languages. Immigrants who spoke German gave birth to children who learned English, and after a few generations, their descendants didn't speak German any more. And that didn't just happen with German immigrants. It happened with every non-English-speaking immigrant group.