Drunken barbecue? You'd fit in great over here!

I don't think most people really care whether you call us English or British. I think for me the terms are pretty interchangeable for nationality. It's sport really where the difference applies.

As for whether the US or UK is better. All those stating as fact if they haven't experienced both cultures are just plain ignorant and might as well be ignored.

There are a lot of similaries and there are also a lot of differences, which works out better overall depend on what you want from society. I need to learn a fair bit more about the US as my fiance is from St Louis and while she's living here at the moment, we're ultimately looking at settling in the US.

One thing in favour of the UK is the most dangerous thing we have is like an Adder (snake) which can hurt when it bites, but that's it. Our weather is also a lot less severe for the most part.

Politics-wise I'd say we're a lot more left wing. I don't think our more right wing parties (barring the idiots that are the BNP etc) are much further to the right than the democrats in the US and we do have the NHS. The freedom thing? Well... those saying America is free-er are plain ignorant. I can't remember the last time the Queen told me what to do and our equality legislation is more mature than the US (i.e. gays have equal rights etc. okay marriage isn't there yet, but thats by 2015 and a Civil Partnership is identical in all but name.)

However the US is far less taxed (we pay approx 60% tax rate when you factor in National Insurance is now just an additional income tax (this comes to 40%) and then 20% sales tax on pretty much everything in the form of VAT and I think the US has a more dynamic economy. Dollar being worth less than the pound is meaningless as the cost of living here is higher and so in real terms a dollar buys not much less in the US than a pound does here and having a lower dollar means your export market is far more competitive than ours is (high pound crippled our exports a few years back). You also have much much nicer fast food places.

At the end of the day, I think you have a case of "grass is greener" going on. Loads of people over here think this country is a craphole and want to emmigrate, and not much less end up returning to the UK when the dream is shattered for whatever reason. I'd definitely suggest trying to spend some time over here if you get the chance to really experience what it's like in the UK, but I don't think you can say either country is better than the other overall, they're just different.

As for language. English English no question :p

TWRoO said: As for N.Ireland, I'm not really sure... I'm sure some of them will refer to themselves as Irish and some will call themselves British (though I think both would normally say "from Northern Ireland")

Yeah this about right, though we might say northern Irish as half way point that both communities can agree upon. as for are accent we can speak properly but some of us slur are words and northern irish sounds more like northearn nirish lol. most of us do it as joke but there a few that genuinely talk like that.

I'm going to ignore the rest of this post because I find it silly.

But it's worth noting that lingusists actually agree that the American accents and their brand of English is closer to traditional english then the current English brand of English.

It's a funny thing to keep in mind the next time you hear an english person talking about how americans are "mangling" their lanaguage.

In reality... it's quite the opposite.

I'm pretty sure England was actually the birthplace of reality TV.  Most of the Reality TV shows that first started in the US were adapted from UK or other Europeon shows.

I imagine they have simialr reality tv stars, and we just don't know them because they're british.

What is "traditional" English? Latin? Celtic? French? Spanish? Italian? Pretty much all European languages are actually weird bastardisations of each other from the constant invasions back in the olden days. I think that's why there are often so many shared words. :D

Do Americans talk more like Shakespeare's writing style? Some would say that's traditional English.

I think it was the Dutch that invented reality TV with Big Brother. But yes, we have our own hell breeds of reality TV celebrities propelled to fame through nothing beyond their appearance on TV.

We've also got much better reality TV now (my fiance hates US reality TV but likes quite a lot of our stuff). Sorry about American Idol etc though, that was our bad.

I dont know those linguists  but for me as a German,  British English sounds like its American English with strange pronounciation. 
Let me specify it.
It sounds like American English spoken by German Saxons with Saxon accent.   So I dont understand how American English is closer to the original English when Brits are actually Saxons and when both sound like Saxons speaking.

I mean Germans say HAUS  Americans say HOUSE  both sounds like the same word (maybe like HAH OOS) its just written differently. 

Saxons say HAEUS  or something like that and so do Brits  they dont say HA OOS  they add like O U E into the word.  HEH OUES  or something like that.

(its hard to explan I hope you know what i mean)


I have ZERO problem understanding British news anchors,  or Brits singing because they try to "speak clean" it sounds like American English   but normal people talking or even normal British movies give me a hard time understanding what they say.
  (of course Americans from Texas with hardcore accent are also a little bit hard to understand but not as hard as british people IMHO)

Funny you should said that. I read something recently about American English being much better for people whom English is a second language. However the article went on to say it'll soon be redundant as Chinese will probably end up becoming the International language.

That's silly.  There are more native Mandarin speakers, but they all live in China and Tawain... meanwhile English is widely represented at pretty much every nation in the world due to it already being the international langauge of buisness.

If any langauge was going to overtake the English Language as an international language it'd probably be Arabic when Muslim immigrants start integrating themselves at higher levels of most of europe.

Really even Spanish seems more likely.

Chinese is way too localized.  I think there are more english speakers in China, then there are chinese speakers everyone else in the world except china (and taiwan)