Confusing Sweden and Switzerland is probably the most common country-related speech error in the English speaking world. Confusing the U.K., Britain, and England is more common but also more of a conceptual issue.
Really? Maybe I'm bad at detecting sarcasm; but if that wasn't supposed to be sarcasm, I thought Slovakia and Slovenia were the hardest to distinguish. Even many Europeans cannot tell those countries apart.
Can you identify these flags? 🇸🇰 🇸🇮
Which of those two countries uses the international vehicle registration code SLO?
Which country uses the ccTLD ".sl"?
What country is depicted on this map?
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I'm sorry! 😁 I'm a huge John Oliver fan. 💁🏼♂️
A large number of native English speakers have never heard of Slovenia and Slovakia, and the ones who have probably discuss those two countries less frequently than Switzerland and Sweden, which have a higher international profile. But yeah, people probably mix those two up a fair amount.
I know the difference of course, I post on the atlas forum! Though I confess I do not know any country's vehicle registration codes, nor ccTLD except the very obvious (.us, .uk, .fr, .ru).
Incidentally, this got me to look up native English speaker stats. I figured Americans would be a majority of native English speakers in the world but I did not realize how big that majority would be--it's over 61%. If you add in Canada, that means that around two-thirds of native English speakers are speakers of North American English. This is interesting because probably a majority of non-native English speakers are aiming for something closer to standard dialects of British English, barring obvious exceptions like the Philippines, Latin America, and Korea (still not enough to outweigh sub-Saharan Africa and the subcontinent!). Will be interesting to see if this changes in the future.
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