Do you know the following countries?

Can you recognise the flag without reading the country name?

What do we call people from these countries?

Nationality means where someone or something is from.

I am from Australia, I am Australian.

Toyota is from Japan. It is Japanese.

Look below each flag to learn what we call people and things from each country

When we talk about languages spoken it is sometimes the same word as nationality.

For example:

They speak Japanese in Japan. (the language is from Japan, so it is Japanese.)

What about other countries? Do you know what languages the above countries speak?

What language do Brazilians and Mexicans speak?

If you said Spanish you would be half correct.

Spanish is spoken in Mexico, but there are some differences. So people often call it Mexican Spanish.

What about Brazil?

They speak Portuguese.

But wait, what country is Portuguese from?

Do you recognise the flag on the left?

That’s half of the Portuguese flag. It’s from the country Portugal.

What is the main language spoken in Australia, the US and the UK?

Did you say English? I hope you did.

Why is English called English?

Why isn’t it called British?

Why isn’t it called American or Australian?

The language English comes from the country England which is a part of the United Kingdom. British refers to anyone from the four kingdoms of the UK: Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland.

The term English also refers to people and things from England.

For example

The English soccer team.

Why do so many countries around the world have English as their national language?

 

Are you studying any languages? Why are you studying them? How are you learning it?