And I still got "$" anyway!

[cosmolinguist]

I changed my phone's language from English (US) to English (UK) so that the currency key would give me a pound sign instead of a dollar sign, and so it'd suggest more useful words (though I'm a bit bemused that I'm more likely to want Wycombe now than Wyoming...).

But then I noticed that my phone told me I had a "Torch" instead of a "Flashlight," and this made me so sad I switched it back to English (US). It's funny what matters to us, isn't it?

Comments

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

It is, rather.

I bought my laptop just before I moved back here from the US, so I remain bi-keyboarderous and can touch-type in either layout. Comes in handy sometimes at work, actually, since automated installs of various OSes tend to assume an American keyboard.

(I still tend to talk about flashlights, wrenches and movie theatres; vocabulary sticks for way longer than accent, apparently)

[uglybuffy.livejournal.com]

I actually found the opposite - I've been here 14 years in England and get told I still have a strong Northern Irish accent, but I've lost the vocab. Sob!

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, I find the vocabulary much trickier. Sometimes I can effectively code-switch, sometimes I stubbornly refuse to (sidewalk is just a better word for it than pavement, and I shall brook no denial on this subject), and sometimes I honestly can't remember which word is British and which American any more, or forget which audience I'm trying to tailor my language to. :)

[innerbrat]

It's not the currency key, I call it the pound key - above the 3. On US keyboards it's #, on UK it's £.

But I still don't know why the @ and the " swap around.

[cosmolinguist]

I don't mean on a computer keyboard, I mean my phone. Which does have a dedicated key for pound, dollar, yen, euro, etc. My old phone let me choose which of those I wanted as default, which was fine; my new one says this is determined automatically by the phone's region and language settings, but even when I have both of those set to English (UK), I still get the damn "$".