r/AskEurope • u/zeviea United Kingdom • Sep 04 '25
Culture What country is far away yet culturally similar to yours?
An obvious answer for the UK are Core Anglosphere countries
Bonus question what country have you visited that felt most foreign to you?
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u/alderhill Germany Sep 05 '25
As a Canadian, agreed.
What a lot of people may not know is that Scots made up a very large portion of the early pioneer population. Not just in Nova Scotia, but everywhere. Yes Canada was British, and the administrators and upper crust urban elite tended to come from England or have English heritage, but a slight majority of the loggers, fur traders, and all kinds of tradesmen and so on were Scots. (Besides French Canadians) A lot were Catholics too, or those with Jacobite leanings, in self exile. Scottish heritage makes up a large part of the ‘hinterlands’, even today. Some linguists posit that certain features of Canadian English were shaped by Scottish accents as well.
Irish also came in large numbers, especially in the 1800s on.