Hi everybody, and thank you for reading my latest blog entry. It's been a while since my last entry, but you'll be pleased to know I'm still alive and kicking.
If you live in an English-speaking country that isn't the United States, you don’t have to go far to see negative sentiments expressed towards American English. For more than 200 years, people have been complaining that the Americans are making the English language increasingly ugly.
You yourself might even believe that the influence of American English is ruining other varieties of English, making them impure, corrupted or ugly.
So how exactly is America ruining the English language?
Well, let’s see what Prince Charles thinks. In 1995, he was reported by The Times as complaining to a British Council audience that American English is ‘very corrupting.’ Particularly, he bemoaned the fact that ‘people tend to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs and make words that shouldn’t be.’
I suppose one of the perks of being Prince of Wales is that you can decide which words have a right to be part of the English language and which words are very corrupting.
The Prince concluded: ‘We must act now to insure that English – and that, to my way of thinking, means English English – maintains its position as the world language well into the next century.’
So really, he sees British English as a national institution, just like afternoon tea, queuing and persistent bad weather. The English language belongs to the English, and you’d better believe it.
The Prince of Wales’ attitude hints at a general unease towards change to the English language. In Britain, there is a widespread perception that America is ruining the English language by propagating changes which are ‘distasteful’ or ‘ugly’. The assumption is that anything new is American and, therefore, bad. Look here for some examples submitted by the British public, not all of which are Americanisms, by the way.
A knowledgeable British author complained about the supposedly American pronunciation conTROVersy, and was surprised to hear that the antepenultimate accent is unknown in the States, being a recent British innovation. Americans tend to pronounce the word controVERsy, though both pronunciations are now heard on both sides of the Atlantic.
British language pundits also mistakenly assume that the phenomenon of 'verbing nouns' (creating new verbs from existing nouns without adding a suffix) is a corruption that originated in America. But in fact, even our venerable William Shakespeare sometimes verbed nouns, and it is likely that he wasn't the first person to do so.
Of course it is inevitable that some Americanisms make their way into other varieties of English. Think of all the American films and TV series that non-Americans watch, and the new words that they have introduced to non-Americans.
But it’s not all one-way traffic. What’s less well-known is the fact that there are Britishisms that have made their way into American English.
The use of the word ‘ginger’ to describe a person with red hair has shot up in usage in the United States in the last 15 years. It correlates with the release of the first Harry Potter book, which brought a number of uniquely British words and expressions to its American audience. Also, ‘twee’, ‘chat up’, ‘do the washing up’, ‘keen on’ and ‘one-off’ are British words and expressions that have leapt across the Atlantic.
Yet this will not stop the British public from complaining that Americanisms are flooding our language at an unstoppable rate, making it ugly and barbarous. These complaints have no linguistic justification, however. There are no objective criteria for judging beauty in a language, though there are plenty of journalists, writers and language pundits who would like to tell you otherwise!
The truth is that British and American English both arose from the ancestral 16th century English that is quite different from any modern variety of English. In the excellent book ‘Language Myths’, John Algeo demonstrates in his article some of the ways in which British and American English have diverged from each other over time. American English gained new words when English speakers first set foot on American soil. The colonists found new things that they needed a word for, so they borrowed words from Native American languages, and also other European languages.
Also, the colonists ceased to talk regularly with the people back home. The colonists changed English in their own unique way, but at the same time speakers in England were changing the language too, only in a different way from that of the colonists. As a result, over time the two varieties became increasingly different, not so radically different that they amounted to different languages, but different enough to notice (Algeo, 1998).
The differences between American and British are not due to Americans changing from a British standard. Instead, both American and British evolved in different ways from a common sixteenth-century ancestral standard, which happened to be spoken in Britain. Present-day British is no closer to that earlier form than present-day American is. Indeed, in some ways present-day American is closer to the common original standard than present-day British.
Some examples of American conservation versus British innovation are these: Americans generally retain the r-sound in words like more and mother, whereas the English and Welsh have generally lost it (Scottish and Irish people tend to retain the r-sound too.) The vowel in cat, path, calf, and class is the same for American speakers, whereas people from Southern England have replaced the vowel in path, calf and class with the ‘broad a’ of father.
Americans retain a secondary stress on the second syllable from the end of words like secretary and dictionary, whereas the British have lost both the stress and often the vowel, reducing the words to three syllables, ‘secret’ry’.
Americans retain an old use of the verb 'guess' to mean 'think' or 'suppose', in the same way that Geoffrey Chaucer used it over 600 years ago. Americans have retained the past participle form gotten beside got, whereas the British have lost the former. Gotten is not an American invention; rather, it is returning to Britain, where it had been lost for several centuries.
On the other hand, the British are more conservative than Americans in other ways. We have retained the term fortnight, whereas Americans have lost it. In terms of pronunciation, we continue to distinguish atom (with a t-sound) and Adam (with a d-sound), whereas Americans typically pronounce the two words alike, with a tap that sounds more like /d/ than /t/. This feature is also shared with Canadian, Australian and New Zealand English, so it’s hardly unique to America.
Similarly, in standard British English, callous and Alice do not rhyme, whereas they usually do in standard American, both having a schwa (the neutral vowel.)
In British English, the first vowel in father and bother are different, whereas Americans pronounce those words with the same first vowel. The British have retained an old use of 'reckon' to mean 'think' or 'suppose', whereas that use in America is old-fashioned or rural, a comic marker of 'hick' talk.
On balance, it is hard to say which variety of English, American or British, is the more conservative and which the more innovative. Both Americans and the British innovate in English pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.
British people, however, tend to be more aware of American innovations than Americans are of British ones. I think one of the prime reasons is because the English language is called English, and so us British believe that it belongs to England. Americans are merely borrowing our language, and so they shouldn't be allowed to change it in any way. It's the equivalent of borrowing someone's car and then painting it brown.
We are acutely aware of American influence because our media is saturated with American English, but it is simply false that American English is replacing or overthrowing British English. Both varieties are still very distinct from each other, and I do not expect that they will converge except in innovative vocabulary, e.g. slang and technical words.
You have probably seen in some newspapers an article or a comment in the opinions column lamenting the negative influence that American English is having on our, ‘original’ variety of English. But the English language doesn’t just belong to the British. It belongs to everyone who speaks it. We might not like a particular word or variant pronunciation that’s recently entered our version of the English language, or a new variant pronunciation that has come over from America, but the only languages that don't change are dead languages.
American English isn't ruining the English language. Its influence is far-reaching and has affected every other variety of English, but negative judgements that are so often pronounced on American English have no linguistic basis whatsoever.
References:
Algeo, J. (1998) 'Americans are Ruining English' in L. Bauer & P. Trudgill (eds.) Language Myths, Penguin
