America and Americans (and Brits)

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Wednesday, February 20, 2002 10:57 am -0500 Fraser Sutherland
<frasers at THE-WIRE.COM> wrote:

> 2.  British typically lump Canada and the United States together when they
> speak of "America" and "Americans."  They're probably using verbal
> shorthand for "North   America",  or perhaps the land-mass just  blurs in
> their minds.

I tend to experience a lot of British people being very careful about
American/Canadian/North American, but this may just be because they're
aware that Canadians don't like to be mistaken for their southern
neighbo(u)rs--and people tend to assume or at least question whether I'm
Canadian.  (Since I've got some Briticised pronunciations, and also because
I've got Canadian raising and 'eh'.)  So they'll either say "So you're
North American...." in a leading way, or we'll go through:
--so where are you from?
--America (or "New York State", or "the US")
--I thought so, but I didn't want to say that in case you were Canadian."

(The "where do you come from" question always gets me when I travel around
the country, since I always have to ask "today or originally"?  Half the
time the question means one thing, and the rest of the time it's the
other--but if I just make an assumption and say "Brighton" or "New York
State", I always seem to have made the wrong assumption!)

Lynne


Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320