Do Americans speak Canadian English?

I'm trying to work out the point of stating the blindingly obvious.
Still, while there's a thread on the go, most horses have four legs.



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During my one-year stay in Madrid, this has been the only thing that has totally pissed me off. Spaniards think that people that speak Spanish in the US cannot be worthy of being Americans. BUT THEY SPEAK SPANISH! So if they move to the US and have kids there, then those kids will be Mexicans, right?. WTH?

I've heard that from so many Spaniards that I leave very disillusioned on that point.

Nobody even mentioned Cuba, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Peru, Chile, etc., etc.. Just Mexico. That's my beef. My ancestry includes Mexican, Castilian, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, and Italian (Genoa at that time). I am not a Spanish-American, nor a Portuguese-American, nor an anything-else-American. I am an American.

Well there's only a very slight difference between British, Canadian, American, International English in their written form; in the spoken language each country has it's own particular accent/pronunciation. The real difference between all of them, and it's probably solely because of the cultural differences, is the words or phrases they may use.

As a Canadian going to Texas, it was a bit more difficult to understand what was being said because of the strong southern drawl, but the language was English.

What was really difficult and sometimes quite funny was trying to fathom through the different local phrases. For example asking for driving directions. In Texas it can be like this:

"Well ya'll keep straight on this street, go through 3 red lights and turn right at the next red light."

After the initial shock wore off I realized that they used the term red light to mean TRAFFIC SIGNAL, because of course in Canada we stop at a red light, and go through a green light! 

theater/theatre   center/centre   tire/tyre  hood/bonnet   trunk/boot   parking lot/car park    elevator/lift..... somehow we all seem to manage to communicate, that's what language is all about.

Just an interesting bit of trivia for you Ron, while in Québec they do speak Québec French, in our schools we teach the root languages so our schools teach Continental French, I guess that's because we think the language has a certain 'je ne sais quoi."

Cheers,
James     Expat-blog Experts Team