Why do people think britain=england?

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hallawayii

For Americans, I would say it's because we were taught "England" throughout our history classes in school. Ask yourself what you call the Queen - the "Queen of England" or the "Queen of Great Britain" or the "Queen of the United Kingdom"?

For other areas of the world, I would say people generally say "England" because the language is "English". The British Union Jack flag is used to signal "English is spoken here" at businesses in Europe and elsewhere, and thus it promotes a confusion in the British flag = England instead of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I would also note that the Welsh flag is not represented on the British Union Jack, so even within Britain, there is exclusion and a dominance (mistakenly, I'm sure) in that some countries are less important than others.

Plus, there is the number factor - 60 million English, 5 million Scottish, 3 million Welsh, less than 2 million Northern Irish...

Lem

For the same reason that people think America = the United States.

Namely: for many people in the world, the distinction is unimportant to them.

But don't worry. Now that there's the EU, you'll be glad that they even make the distinction between GB and "Europe" in a decade or two.

tylynn

mostly ignorance of culture and a lot of people think british and english are the same thing and forget about the rest of the UK

Pugboy

If we are talking about Americans, the answer is simply education. For being the World's largest Superpower, we rank number 50 in education. Pretty pathetic if you ask me, and I am an American. I would bet that most Americans could not even identify England on the map, let alone know the difference between the UK, England the country, etc. Most our children don't even know we fought the Revolutionary War against the British - nothing against the Brits, as that was well over 200 years ago. So, one word "education", or the lack there of.

greenorlagh

Great Britain = England, Scotland and Wales. Britain is often used to refer to the UK as a whole though this is quite wrong. You will find that those people born in Northern Ireland - whilst not from Great Britain - have the option of being British or Irish. All others in the UK whilst being Scottish, English or Welsh may only have a passport with nationality written as British.

david f

For largely the same reason that people think America=the U.S.A. But you don't make that mistake, do you?

xmusicxloverx

it might be b/c in elementary school, we never went into great detail about it.i didn't fully understand it until i took world geography this past school year.

with SOLs & all teachers have to follow a lesson plan & rarely take the time to teach anything extra or spend a lot of time on something.teachers are all about SOLs now & thats practically all i hear about all year from every teacher.

so basically if its not going to be on an SOL test most teachers dont go over it so most ppl won't learn it.

Radeon

Lots of people are uneducated unfortunately.

...

i think it's because england is the main country of those groups, and a lot of people don't realize that wales and scotland are separate... and in news reports and such they often will generally report as "from the UK" or "from britain" so people associate england with the UK and britain.

in fact, i almost never mixed up england= UK but have done england=britain...... goes to show it's a lack of knowledge, but thank you for informing me of that (that britain= england AND scotland and wales). i always had wondered why, and new that it probably involed some of the other nearby countries but hadn't been sure.

sarch_uk

Basically because it is of no importance to them, and what is also intensely annoying is when people criticize others but do not know when to use capital letters when writing proper nouns....it would seem that it is of no importance to them either.

Jack S. Buy more ammo!

England is the heart of the group of countries. If you remember your history, England ruled over the others at one time or another. As for why do people use one as the other, it's just that it doesn't matter to most of the world. It's just not important to us.

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