Yeah, she was a very smart person, IIRC she was studying aeronautical engineering, literally a rocket scientist. Just one of those weird ways that you don’t think about your bias until it smacks you in the face.
I had the opposite argument with one Indian guy when I was living in the UK.
He was saying what people speak in countries like Mexico, Argentina, etc. cannot be called Spanish because they are not from Spain and instead they speak Mexican, Argentinian...
I told him what they speak in those countries is still Spanish the same way that what they speak in the US is English even when they are not in England. He replied that what they speak in America is not English either but American instead.
Then I realized how stubborn he was in his wrongness and just gave up.
I was expecting something else when I clicked this post. “En España se habla español” is something you would expect to hear from a Spanish Nationalist as a way of attacking Spain’s other languages.
Yes, because there are multiple Romance languages spoken in Spain, and they’re all “Spanish” to people who live there. Castellano is the one spoken in Madrid, so it’s what the rest of the world thinks of as Spanish, kind of like how Mandarin is often referred to as Chinese even though other dialects are equally Chinese.
No, can confirm there are far too many people this ignorant. I work with a good number of them. I’m in North Georgia, and some of these people literally can’t find themselves on a map of the United States and believe the English folks stole English from the Americans…
Maybe the Basque are sorta culturally first nations. The language they speak is not related to any other language spoken in Europe. It’s the only surviving language that descended from pre-indo-European languages of prehistoric Europe.
I’m very passionate about the Sami and very interested in their culture. There’s no doubt they are a historically oppressed people and indigenous to Sapmi.
But let’s be rigorous here. They weren’t in Europe before everyone else like the First Nations in Canada. The Sami arrived in Europe, from the Urals in the 2nd millenium BC. By this time the Indo-Europeans and their languages were already spreading through Europe. The Neolithic farmers who mixed with the Indo-Europeans were there since the 7th millenium BC. The hunter gatherers they mixed with…were there since before the last ice age.
You could make the case that the Basques are our first nations. That would be true of their language and culture. But the fact is, genetically, they are pretty much the same as their neighbors due to millenia of intermixing and contact.
Ok I looked a bit further, the evidence for the first inhabitants of the region being ancestors of the Sami is based on linguistic studies with other Uralic languages. But it’s far from direct evidence. I always assumed it was based on archeological evidence.
I live in Seattle but I hail from the atl metro, I can confirm this is not uncommon, my mother asked me where Canada “ended” yesterday… she thought it was just above nyc
