Do you / would you ever use the term 'Anglo-Saxon' to describe English-speaking Brits?

[Chocchops72]

I've lived in France for 15 years, and I'm still flummoxed by the widespread use of 'Anglo-Saxon' to describe what - as far as I can tell - are English-speaking British (or maybe just English) people.

I have colleagues from the US who find the term offensive, due to the connection with WASP / white supremacy / racism. I myself am Scottish, and don't feel any connection with the term whatsoever - it makes me think of horned helmets and the pillaging of villages. it's not a term I ever heard used in the UK

Yet when I try to explain this to my French colleagues they are genuinely unconvinced that either irrelevant or inappropriate. Unfortunately my boss (very English, expat, married into a French family and lived here for a long time) and the British Ambassador to France both use it 🙄.

I would use it if trying to define genetics. Like Anglo-British vs Celtic-British. If discussing American white peoples being majority Anglo. Or Eurocentric beauty standards being Anglo/Nordic centric.

That's about it. Probably makes more sense to the French when England is called Angleterre (land of the angles).

It’s dumb but you’re never going to get the French to agree to stop using it in France.
You might be able to tell them they need to use ´English Speaking nations’ or just name the actual countries when writing/speaking in English because ´anglo-saxons’ is not used in the same way in English and they really do risk offending people.

I don't suppose it's any different to the British referring to Americans as Yanks, which is equally inaccurate.

Well I know Anglais just means "The Angles" who are obviously part of that Anglo/Saxon mix.

Is it just weirdly flipping the French description back to English via french 😂 🤷🏻‍♀️

I'm Gallois because I come from Pays De Galle's (land of the galls) I have never known a French person call me a Anglo/Saxon but I do sound very Welsh even when speaking English 😂

That's what England means too though...

Angleterre
Ang = Eng and terre = land

No. The Saxons are comeupdens.
Picts, Celts and Angles welcome .
Everyone else can feck off.
Hth

it makes me think of horned helmets and the pillaging of villages

Why would the Saxons pillage their own villages? Bit short sighted of them...

I'd never use it because where I am, we never had any Angles and very few Saxons. Our area's heritage is mostly Norse, and when I was young, there were still a lot of Norse words in use.

I am strangely pedantic about pointing this out, despite the fact I'm actually of immigrant/refugee stock and am not remotely of Norse ancestry myself.

But somehow it's the principle of the thing that I have to defend. You just can't go around calling people Anglo Saxons when they aren't.

Thanks for posting this link. The modern-day meaning of the word in France that the writer describes fits with how I’ve understood it to be used in Brazil and also Italy (particularly in the summing up as “an amorphous sense of difference between France and the English-speaking world”), but it was interesting to read about the ‘why’, historic meaning and how use has peaked at different times.

Yeah a bit outdated I think I would probably prefer British or if applicable English/Scottish/Welsh

It's used here in Italy to talk about various linguistic norms. (possessive S) is known as the Saxon Genitive etc.
I've only ever heard it used in those terms, as a synonym for "Old English" which gave rise to the English we use today.

I saw this yesterday on the Instagram account of a French photographer I follow posting a funny meme about the difference between his London and Paris friends. Definitely no racist intent from him, as he is black and so are his English friends, so I guess it's so widespread in France that people use it unthinkingly.

My MIL is French and used the term about my children’s behaviour at the lunch table (not unreasonable behaviour but they struggle to sit at a dinner table for as long as she would like) She used it in what I would say was a derogatory way, calling their dining habits ‘Anglo Saxon culture’. OH said they use the term all the time and can’t understand why I find it offensive in any way. To me, her using the term in that way seems to recall some sort of base behaviour from times past before manners were invented. It is a term to separate French culture from English/American/Australian culture, with a measure of superiority complex thrown in.