These changes are only applicable to users in the EEA. For those outside the region, Windows will continue to function as it is!
The changes to Windows for DMA-compliance include:
- You can now uninstall Edge and Bing web search using the built-in settings. Earlier, the option was greyed out.
- Third-party web search application developers can now utilize the Windows search box in the taskbar using the instructions provided by Microsoft and choose any web browser to show results from the web.
- Microsoft will no longer sign-in users to Edge, Bing, and Microsoft Start services during the initial Windows setup experience.
- Data collected about the functioning of non-Microsoft apps, primarily bug detection and its effects on the OS, from Windows PCs will not be used for competitive purposes.
- Microsoft, from now on, will need explicit user consent before combining data from the OS and other sources. It will also deliver new consent screens where required.
Is you regional settings set to a European country?
(by the way, life pro tip, setting your region to a European country solves a ton of issues people have with Windows, most complaints I see I never had a problem with even though I live in Canada, my settings are set to UK)
Interesting that setting your location to the UK gets you EU protections. Do the EU protections apply in the UK? They Brexited didn’t they?
IIUC when they separated they basically ended up with a snapshot of EU regulations. So most of GDPR applies. But IDK if the DMA will apply as it was created after they split.
Yeah you better set it to Ireland or Malta to get full EU conformity.
Genuinely curious: Does that actually work? Don’t you have to have your credit card registered to an Irish bank to make payments in that PC’s Windows Store?
I never, ever, linked any payment means to Windows or Microsoft, and yes it absolutely works. I’ve got my VPN set to Europe as well most of the time though (Sweden actually), and for the language settings I’m indeed using Ireland, and can confirm in that configuration it works.
On iOS in the UK you’re not able to sideload on the new update so probably not
I don’t think that would be possible in an Apple phone. In an Apple phone, Apple can check where you are by checking your GPS coordinates.
Are there any downsides to setting your region to some place other than where you actually are?
No, it just uses that to know which signs and types of spelling to use.
Useful fact: Both Ireland and Malta have English as official languages so you’re guaranteed availability of those locales (unlike say en-DE, which exists, (at least according to ICU), while en-FR doesn’t).
Fun fact: Both don’t have it as sole official language, though, and each EU member only gets to nominate one of their official languages as an official language of the EU, which means that with Brexit English ceased to be an official EU language. The commission manoeuvred around that though and still kept it as working language. With the Brits out of the picture though they’re not writing passive-aggressive memos regarding language use any more and the Irish certainly will not stoop down to that level, Euro-English can finally evolve freely and within ten years we’ll start telling Anglophones that it’s incorrect to say “there were five people at the party” (you attended), it’s “we were five people at the party”. Deal with it.
I’ve read about Euro-English and discussed it back on reddit quite some time ago, and I have to say I’m very skeptical whether such a thing exists or ever could exist. Fundamentally it’s a mis-learned standard English, and the mis-learning is to a large degree determined by the speaker’s native language - which varies extremely across Europe. Slavic speakers will have issues with articles, Germans much less so, etc. Consequently there’s hardly any definite characteristic of Euro-English (the examples in the article are too vaguely described, and I’m sure many European ESLs would find them grammatically unacceptable too). Perhaps one could speak of a variety of English used by EU politicians and institutions, but those people are hardly a linguistic model for the vast majority of other speakers.
Define standard English?
Both the USA and UK don’t agree on what it is.
You’d think it’s the language spoken in England
The sort of English you’ll see in literature, newspapers, any remotely formal communication, in grammars (which learning materials are based on as well). The stuff learners will aim to learn.
Differences between US and UK English, and the dialectal variety within each of them, are not all that relevant here. Where I live, students are taught British English, but no professor ever chastised us for using American pronunciation or vocabulary. Both are within the range of what natives will find acceptable.
I wouldn’t ever drop the s for he/she/it but the rest is perfectly cromulent. Remember these aren’t high school mistakes they’re stuff that C2 speakers use, practically native-level “mistakes”, just as you’ll see American generals writing reports using “less” instead of “fewer”, or “good” instead of “well”, or “who” instead of “whom” (shudder). “was” instead of “were”. That’s language evolution, plain and simple, things change as they always have and the language does different things in different places.
“Competences”, “planification”, “to hop over” (=to refrain from)? Sorry, that stuff is downright grotesque.
I can’t remember that because the WP article didn’t claim that. In fact, if you make these mistakes, you’re not C2, by definition.
Except that this is language change from within the native community, in their native language, aimed from native speakers at other natives who will understand or (if they don’t understand them or use a different variety) correct them. Some of that stuff (who-whom, was-were) is well-established in already existing usage and dialects, it’s not an innovation at all.
I’ll repeat myself: no, this isn’t ordinary language change, as this “Euro English” is simply a local characteristic of this or that speaker who failed to learn English as it is used by native speakers. ‘Euro English’ is not a real unit, as it has no defining characteristics. Imagine a European using some calque from his native language while talking to a European who has a different native language and who can’t understand the calque - this is not what happens in a normal speech community, these people will fail to understand each other, and their English is not a stable or reliably identifiable linguistic variety. You can see that especially in the table with “Euro English vocabulary”, where words are clearly marked by their origin, and they won’t be understood or will be found absurd by many other Europeans.
So, I have heard, is Indians using “doing the needful”. Native English speakers using that phrase, mind you. People also get their underwear in a twist over “aks” which, as a variant, goes back to at least Old English. It may go back further but we don’t have written evidence for Proto-West-Germanic so it’s impossible to tell.
To call the one evolution and the other mistake you need to do better than “one group learned the language at an earlier age”, as a linguist making that claim you’d have to demonstrate that both sets of changes follow fundamentally different laws, or one side follows laws, the other doesn’t.
And, FWIW, I have lost count how often people assumed I’m a native English speaker. Even Brits managed to pin my accent to their east coast, which isn’t terribly wrong but still on the wrong side of the North Sea. And I didn’t even start to learn the language that early, only starting at age 10 or so nowadays kids are starting at 6.
Oh. That’s a nice one. Find me a European language where “flea market” doesn’t translate properly. Also Euro English doesn’t always use calques, e.g. Spitzenkandidat didn’t get turned into point candidate but even if it did it’d be perfectly cromulent as it matches English “to take point”. The translation “lead candidate”, I think, comes from Anglophones. It’s not terribly precise, semantically speaking. They’re not leaders as-such, they’re spear tips thrust by their party.
European languages have been in intense contact with each other for time immemorial there’s plenty of common structure underneath the differences, even among those that aren’t descendants of PIE. Flea market, for example, works in Hungarian and Finnish. As said: Find me a language where it isn’t understood.
English elsewhere is losing “whom” because monolingual native speakers by and large seem to be incapable of understanding the difference even if you point out to them that they’re using “he” vs. “him” all the time. If your native language is a romance one you might be in a similar boat, if it’s Slavic or Germanic, most of which retain a lot more case structure than English, it’s dead obvious and not using “whom” sounds plain wrong. The evolutionary inertia thus has a different direction, doesn’t mean that it’s not following proper evolutionary laws, that it’s a mistake to bat an eye on the overuse of “who”.
You’re mixing up different topics here. Indians are native speakers, if I’m not mistaken, they’ve learned that phrase from other Indian English speakers and they use it among themselves with no problem. Same as “aks”. These are definitely legitimate varieties, acceptable within those communities, regardless of what outsiders may say.
Where is the community of speakers that finds all these “Euro English” forms acceptable? I’m evidently not a part of that community, because I don’t talk as that article describes.
Well that’s very much the point, exactly, Euro English doesn’t follow any laws in particular. To reduce the problem to the age of learning is bordering on deliberate misunderstanding. Native English speakers learn to not use “whom” from their parents and their surroundings, they get by without using it, and the linguistic phenomenon is self-sustaining. Non-natives in Europe learn English from their teachers, who (should) have a close-to-native grasp of language, and from native speaker content that they’re exposed to regularly (especially the younger generations, who can spend hours communicating with natives directly through voice chat). Deviations from the models (teachers and natives) are not created through communication with other European non-natives. With the people from your own country, you speak in your native language, and you use English for the rest of the world, regardless of whether the speaker on the other end is European, Asian, African, or anything else, and their influence won’t be systematic. Deviations from the native model are always a result of the native language (again, we’re talking about dozens of native languages, resulting in completely unrelated sorts of deviations), and they are not nearly as hard-coded as the native language; the speaker, if made aware of his mistakes, will try to correct them, at least when it comes to grammar (pronunciation being especially difficult to master).
I would definitely expect a linguist describing a language variety to, to express it more visually, draw a Venn diagram with the characteristics of that variety that the speakers use, and to figure out some common ground, some defining and typical characteristics. If there is no common ground, and I firmly believe there none for the supposed Euro English, then we might at best talk about multipe varieties, and not one single meaningful unit. Like, do you and me count as speakers of Euro English? Do Russians and French count, including those I’ve heard speaking English so bad I had to ask them to switch to their native language so I could understand them? Does my sister count, who chats with Americans, Europeans and Asians on the regular through Discord? Do the European politicians, with their awkward pronunciation and annoying jargon? These are some very different Englishes, with nothing in common with regards to pronunciation, and, I believe, also nothing with regards to grammar. The WP explicitly narrows it down to “EU staff, expatriates and migrants from EU countries, young international travellers (such as exchange students in the EU’s Erasmus programme) and European diplomats with a lower proficiency in the language”, which is somewhat acceptable, maybe, except I doubt these groups have actually been studied systematically and compared within themselves and against other Europeans’ Englishes.
This is the crux of the issue, basically. To speak of something, you need a definition of it. There’s no differentia specifica here, these people do not seem to form a community, and their language has no distinct characteristics or rules (stuff that tells you “me likes to eating cake” is not proper English - to describe a linguistic variety/dialect/language, it is necessary to be able to describe correct and incorrect sentences in it).
You mean as a calque? Without digging around much: my native Croatian (buvljak), and Russian (baraholka). In Croatian the word actually is etymologically related to the word for ‘flea’, but I didn’t even notice that it’s connected until you asked this, as it underwent a sound change that’s rare in Croatian (buha > buva). It also lacks the “market” element. The calque would sound very different and would be incomprehensible. The Russian word can be etymologically explained as “the place for selling old/worthless objects”.
An occasional term that’s been translated across several languages is hardly an element of common structure. The languages are varied enough not to be conductive to creating a remotely uniform Euro English.
My native language is Slavic and I absolutely do not find the who-whom>who-who an issue, as I learned English from native speaker material (texts, mainly) and decent enough teachers who themselves follow native speakers, rather than applying the Slavic case structure to English. Perhaps I’m more inclined to using ‘whom’ than the average native, but even then I don’t use it systematically (maybe I barely use it at all, really, it’s hard to tell).
That is most definitely not a fun fact. It’s bad enough having the Yanks telling us how to speak our own language!
Are you telling me to deal with it, or something else?
Timezone stuff might act a little weird, same with fuzzy location
No issues with that for me as it’s separate settings 🤷
Linux solves the rest.
Wrong conversation
You’re right. I either fumbled it or found a bug in my client.
This is the life hack I never knew i needed. Thanks!!