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| Well, I would differ here. In Germany the curriculum clearly says British English. | |
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We phrase things differently because I am a teacher and you work in antoher field. I'll try to reword (Ohne Gewähr):
The linguistic skills are the same whatever version of English you learn. I am talking about language systems here, not a particular vocab or chosen place in school books. When students in English as a foreign language write mixed British/American spelling, you correct it because of system adequacy but you don't take points off for communicative skill, grammar skill or capacity to use complex structures accurately. You just write somewhere a reminder about spelling and that's it. Same with vocab.
To "colour" your English, you need to make conscious linguistic choices about a linguistic system. That is a whole new level of metalanguage: not isolated words from mixed origines are put together but a logical discrimination traits within a system are the base of your metalinguistical reasonning. You do that easily as native speaker, it is a requirement in all sociolinguistic fields, but in the foreign language, it takes quite a level of command of the system, not only of isolated features.
For the exact same sentence spoken, you may have two fundamentally different systemic backgrounds. German example would be a word like "schietig". If you are non native and just heard it on TV, you may repeat it in CH where it does not belong. It's actually a mistake. When I say it, I know very well what I am doing, and that is not a mistake anymore, that's conscious choice of linguage flavouring. The Swiss do that all the time in High German. They can perfectly pronounce durch with a ich-Laut, they don't do it, and their ach-Laut is a Swiss High German marker, belonging to that particular language system. And they like it that way, it's conscious at least on a collective level. On an indidual level, they hear the ach-Laut but don't understand why you tell them that it's against the Bühnendeutsch-rules of the language.