The "Anglosphere"

[lauradi7dw]

I have misplaced the social media post, so I can't tell you the author. I like being a native speaker of English, but I don't consciously think of myself as part of the "Anglosphere." I'm not sure what that means - wouldn't anywhere colonized by England be that? The context was that the UK has had its measles elimination status removed, Canada had that last year, and the US probably will in April. The person posting blamed "misinformation in the Anglosphere" IIRC the exact wording. Surely the Anglosphere would include Australia, which continues to have high vaccination rates. Its caseload was way up last year compared to previous years but at 162 cases in 2025 it is still not about to lose its status.

Comments

[poliphilo]

Yeah, Australia is in the Anglosphere- which includes any group of people for whom English is the primary language.

[sabotabby]

I thought it was any place colonized by England in such a way that they're now part of the Global North (as opposed to places colonized by England but just used for straight-up resource extraction rather than settlement).

[bitterlawngnome]

I think one needs to speak plainly about misinformation originating in America. "Anglosphere" here seems like a roundabout way of not saying that.

[lauradi7dw]

The measles vaccination misinformation originated in the UK. Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 paper (faked data etc) about a link between the MMR vaccine and autism was originally published in the Lancet, for crying out loud, although they eventually did a retraction in 2010. About as Anglo as one could get, although some people in the US hate the idea of having autistic children as much as the Brits do/did. And we had weirdness, like celebrity Jim Carrey, who followed then-partner Jenny McCarthy in making a big deal of supposed vaccine damage. He was originally Canadian but was a US citizen by the time he took up with Jenny.

[bitterlawngnome]

To put it differently, I think possibly they are using Anglosphere so that it could be interpreted to mean the US, but leaves them the plausibile deniability? Also possibly I don't get it at all.