The UK For Newbies

The most effective way to insult anyone from the UK or Ireland is to accuse them of being from the wrong country. Here's a simple map to help:

Great Britain is the bit on the right: that's England, Scotland and Wales put together.

U.K. is actually an abbreviation of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So that's Great Britain plus Northern Ireland.

Ireland is a completely seperate sovereign country. They have their own parliament and nothing to do with the British Monarchy. They have the Euro, whilst Great Britain has the Pound Sterling.

Northern Ireland is the top-right corner of the island of Ireland that comes under the remit of the UK. I'm not going to go into the history of this.

The Scottish people are rightly proud to be not English and get understandably very upset when people ignorantly refer to them as being English.

The Welsh people are rightly proud to be not English and get understandably very upset when people ignorantly refer to them as being English.

The English people get a bit upset when people ignorantly refer to them as being Scottish or Welsh.

So:

Scottish people, Welsh people, English people and Northern Irelanders are all from the UK.

England is not the UK.
The UK is not England.

All four places speak English, but the accents vary a lot by region. They can be very hard for visitors to understand. A friend of mine who grew up in southern England moved to Scotland and it took him two months to fully understand the local accent. Search for any interview with Sir Alex Ferguson on YouTube if you want an example.

In some parts of Wales, Welsh is the first language. In some parts of Scotland, Gælic is still used.

Icelanders: if you want to understand the effect of getting this wrong, try to imagine how you would feel if someone said "Ah yes, Iceland. That's part of Norway, right?"