Thanks for your story, Torsten. Americans actually don't speak
English the same way the British people speak it. The Brits speak
British English unless of course they live in Ireland whereby they
speak Irish, a derivitive of Celtic. Americans speak American
English unless they live in New England and speak Bostonian.

Gerry

> Your reaction excellently illustrates the point of the joke.
> It is this:
> Fact: Everybody thinks in his first language.
> Examples:
> English people think in English
> French people think in French
> and (surprise!):
> Swedish people think in Swedish (which is a language, yes).
>
> I know this might be a shock to you.
> I suppose the confusion comes from the habit in American English of
> calling Americans of Swedish descent Swedes etc. I had people tell

me

> in the USA that they were Danish, but they spoke no Danish. That,

in

> my definition, is not a Dane. It is an American of Danish (and
> probably much else) descent.
> The English I know I learned in school. If I hadn't I wouldn't know
> any English now.
> In my language (and probably any language other than American
> English) people make a distinction between "I speak language X" (of
> their first language) and "I can speak language Y" (of languages
> learned later at school etc). With that use, a citizen of the USA
> might say "I speak English" and "I can speak Spanish". But they
> don't. It's all: "I speak <such and such a language>. Which if a
> person from abroad in the US says: "I can speak English", meaning

he

> learned five words of it twenty years ago, an American understands

it

> as: "He speaks English" and proceeds on that faulty assumption.
>
> As for the use of English in Scandinavia, almost everyone "can

speak"

> English, but everyone "speaks" his national language (Swedish,
> Danish, Norwegian). No one here speaks English unless forced to by
> circustances (eg a non-Danish-speaking, but English-speaking person
> in the audience), and then out of courtesy. Or they might borrow an
> expression on occasion from English, but that doesn't make them
> English-speaking any more than you saying eg. "mi casa, su casa"
> would make you Spanish-speaking.
>
> And, yes, I think in Danish, unless of course as now when I'm

writing

> something in English.
>
> Torsten