The english speaking countries/Reálie anglicky mluvících zemí [antikvár]

This handbook is about Britain and the U.S.A., and alsó, to a lesser extent, about other English-speaking countries. The term English-speaking countries or the English-speaking world is used to denote those countries where the majority of inhabitants speak English as their mother tongue (native language, first language), i. e. Britain, the Republic of Irelandt the United States of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Republic of South Africa is alsó sometimes referred to as an English-speaking country, but that is not quite correct because the mother tongue of more than half the white population is Afrikaans (i. e. a language descended from Dutch) while English is the first language of about 40 per cent of the white population. Besides, the majority of the population is black, and the black Africans speak various Bantu dialects (Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Tswana and many others). It is true, of course, that many Afrikaans-speaking whites (the Afrikaners) as well as many blacks (the Africans) use English as their second language. Four of the six English-speaking countries are members of the Commonwealth (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). But English is used extensively in all the other Commonwealth countries as a second language. Many of the Commonwealth countries use English not only as a means of communication with the outside world, but alsó with other nationalities living in the same country, e. g. in India, Ghana and many other Commonwealth countries where there is no single national language to cover the whole territory. In those countries English is recognized as an official language, but it is not the mother tongue of the native population; native children learn it in schools as a foreign language. Therefore India, Ghana and the other Commonwealth countries where English is used as a second official language are not English-speaking countries even though the English language is used there as a means of communication. The subjects covered in this handbook deal with history, geo-