Why do americans call english people british?

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irishchick!

i dont know.... but isnt it so annoying when you go on holidays and the very moment you open ur mouth and speak people automatically think your British......

It really gets on my nerves when this happens as i am proud of being irish and jus coz i speak english dont mean that i am!

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pimienta

Same reason they call themselves americans! Americans are all people who live in America, including mexicans, peruvians, costaricans, brazilians, etc. Yet, they call themselves americans.

kryptronyx

you know what annoys me...broad speculation of americans...

john g

It's just as bad as the natives of Spain calling all British people 'English'. (Usually when complaining about the behaviour of lager louts.)

theunknownstuntman

Because we are british. Look very closely at your passport.
Plus your talking about a country that could swallow the UK hole and not have to loosen it's belt

philip s

Because English people are British. The same as a californian's are American

Zannie

Not all of us do that. Maybe the fact that my mother was born in England helped a bit.

Kellie

I don't. Why generalize?

aloha welly boots

Because we have so many regional accents. Why don't you like people calling you British?

grapelady911

I guess I use the term British because I was taught that England is also called GREAT BRITON.

It's not just Americans that say that, my best friend is from Holland and she said the lady at the camp ground we went to had a "Bristish accent" and when her dad came to visit, he agreed that he had more of a "British accent" when he spoke english.

frostyg02uk

Hmm its true. Briton is really all of the nations and there isnt a such thing as a british accent. In a way it comes from ignorance, even though people born in england (who i know) call themselves english and the people born in scotland call themselves scotish to outsiders we are all just british. But i dont think its so bad its just a lack of knowledge of our history and to be fair they dont have to know about it and if we are honest people like Blair call us great brition and act like we are soooo united so. Like someone else said the amount of times ive heard someone say "...that chinese guy/girl" without them knowing if they were vietnamese or korean or what is unbelievable.
What usually annoys me though is how americans think we all speak like the queen haha. When i used to use the xbox live id be called german, african, irish, scotish,autralian, all sorts BUT english. When i said i was from england people would ask and a few seconds...why do you have a weird accent?

imicola

Because English people are British...

I understand what you are getting at with the accent, but they basically can't differentiate well between regional accents, so they just say its a British accent.

dorkus maximus

Because they are from Britain.

Yeah yeah yeah

Poor loves don't know any different

oldhombre

It seems there are both teachers and students who dont understand the differences. It really is quite simple.
You have the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So UK = GB + NI. But then GB comprises Scotland, Wales and England (to put them in order of importance). So GB = S + W + E. Then you have the little "british" idiosyncrasies like the Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Falklands Islands so it is a gross simplification to stick with GB = S + W + E when strictly speaking GB = S + W + E + CI + IoM + GIB + + + + and therefore UK = S + W + E + NI + CI + IoM + GIB + f(W) where f(W) equals all the bits of the world making up the rest of the UK. The UK is of course a member state of Europe along with its 26 "neighbours" and it is quite odd that so many brits regard Europe as "across the channel". We could equally question the abbreviation of american. There is North and South America with the USA being just a part of North America and then there is the Central American belt which it less well defined but still exists. We tend to mean citizens of the USA when we talk about americans so nobody is perfect, not even us.
When it comes to languages it is even more complex as Scottish is not equal to English and neither is Welsh, Gibraltarians speak their own mix of Spanglish, Shetlanders speak their own dialect of Scottish which is actually very close to Norwegian but that is all explained by the Vikings roaming the North Sea long ago. Clearly there is no such language as British.
So I guess the simple answer to the original question on why do (some) americans refer to us brits as British is that dont know any better. But then judging by some of the replies to this question, some brits dont know either.
Here endeth this lesson.

Richard

All the English folks I have known - and there have been many - identified themselves as Brits, so why should I call them anything different? Since the nation calls itself Great Britain, it seems like a natural choice anyway.

Jock

Ignorance, but to be fair, it's not just the Americans.

True_Brit

I am English, British, European and I come from the UK and Great Britain. Whilst English people are English, bear in mind that we are still British. People from the USA are generally more big headed about their nationality than us, which is quite a feat, so they will naturally find it easier to lump us into one big group when we already do it to ourselves. Don't blame then for it, we do the same.

Sarah Marie

I guess it's because Americans refer to what they speak as English and if someone from Britain is speaking with an accent they say they are speaking in a British accent (cause their from Britten, get it?). It would kind of be like referring to someone who speaks in an American accent as speaking American.

PS: by the way, I usually don't have a problem distinguishing Scottish, Welsh, Irish, cockney, or whatever accents that come from the vicinity of great Britten. I actually like watching foreign films and shows and seeing if I can guess exactly where that person came from based on their accent. I guess my appreciation come from having a foreign mother or something . . . .

bigdonut72

the same reason we say someone is russian or chinese . We lump much of east asia as chinese, and much of eastern europe as russian, because we dont take the time to distinguish between smaller states. But give me a break, i'm sure you have notice africans in england right? well guess what? they come from many countries in africa? you probably didnt waste your time to figurre out which country they were from. instead, you lumped them together as africans.

Savalatte

I'm an American and yes, sometimes I call English, Scottish, and Welsh people "British". (I was never 100% about Northern Irish because some say they are British while others say Irish) Last time I checked I was 100% correct on all this- these people ARE British technically speaking whether or not they LIKE it or not is another matter. Now calling a Scottish person English (or vice versa) is genuine ignorance but this shouldn't be confused for preferences.

Surely you can't expect Americans (or any other outsider) to know what kind of specific accent you have? How arrogant is that? I mean unlike some I can usually tell Australian from English and Scottish from Irish but I'm sorry about not always distinguishing between Northern English (esp. Cumbria) and Scottish- therefore "British" will just have to do and it's a little on the safe side anyway.

It could be worse, I'm a Southerner and I get tired of people thinking all Americans are a bunch of Yankees as if we didn't exist. I'm sorry but I eat grits, not cream of wheat. We have a whole different culture that is far more different from Yanks than Scotland is from England and yet we are forced to acknowledge every two bit spot on a European map. Look at how HUGE we are compared to little old y'all. England is about the size of Alabama and the whole of Britain is the equivalent of Oregon.

For that matter how many Britons (or the people formally known as Britons) are able to distinguish between ALL Yankees and Canadians? Even many Yanks/Canucks along the border say there is little to no difference in some places. I'm sure many Canadians get tired of being confused with Americans so why don't you ever consider the feelings of others for a change?

I guess we Americans will just have to start calling it an ANNOYING accent so that we'll be careful not to offend your delicate nationalistic sensibilities. At least it's not "WRONG".

Eller_z

Well my American history teacher says that England and Britain are the same country. I blame the history books =D but to be honest, am I bovvered =]

Crazy J

It is because when we refer to foreign individuals, we refer to them by there country of Origin, not necessarily the ethnic group or vicinity of the country they belong to. For example, I am American to a foreigner, but in America, since I live in California, I am a Californian. Another example, in Iraq, there are different ethnic groups, the Kurds, Sunni, and Shite, etc... However, we all refer to them as Iraqi.

podge

Because it takes longer to say United Kingdomish.

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