Is American English Going To Take Over British English Completely? (scroll.in)

Paul Baker, writing for The Conversation: Brits can get rather sniffy about the English language -- after all, they originated it. But a Google search of the word "Americanisms" turns up claims that they are swamping, killing and absorbing British English. If the British are not careful, so the argument goes, the homeland will soon be the 51st State as workers tell customers to "have a nice day" while "colour" will be spelt without a "u" and "pavements" will become "sidewalks." My research examined how both varieties of the language have been changing between the 1930s and the 2000s and the extent to which they are growing closer together or further apart. So do Brits have cause for concern? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, most of the easily noticeable features of British language are holding up. Take spelling, for example -- towards the 1960s it looked like the UK was going in the direction of abandoning the "u" in "colour" and writing "centre" as "center." But since then, the British have become more confident in some of their own spellings. In the 2000s, the UK used an American spelling choice about 11% of the time while Americans use a British one about 10% of the time, so it kind of evens out. Automatic spell-checkers which can be set to different national varieties are likely to play a part in keeping the two varieties fairly distinct. [...] But when we start thinking of language more in terms of style than vocabulary or spelling, a different picture emerges. Some of the bigger trends in American English are moving towards a more compact and informal use of language. American sentences are on average one word shorter in 2006 than they were in 1931. Americans also use a lot more apostrophes in their writing than they used to, which has the effect of turning the two words "do not" into the single "don't." They're getting rid of certain possessive structures, too -- so "the hand of the king" becomes the shorter "the king's hand." Another trend is to avoid passive structures such as "a paper was written," instead using the more active form, "I wrote a paper."

Comments

What do they speak in India?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> American English Going To Take Over British English Completely?

Doubt it. Whatever's spoken in India will probably be the winner, and that's a mismash of British education, American use and Indian application (e.g., "do the needful").

Re:What do they speak in India?

[Anubis IV]

That reminds me of a story from my time in grad school. We had these weekly seminars in my research group where we'd present papers from our field in a round robin fashion. One week, the paper being presented had a title that included "Get off of my cloud" (which was apparently a reference to a song none of us had ever heard of).

An Indian student in the group voiced his annoyance at the use of the word "of" in the title, saying it was nonsensical and grammatically incorrect. Our Russian research advisor (who spoke English as well as any native speaker) was aware of the "of" usage, but didn't know if it was grammatically correct or not. Those of us from America all said that the usage was perfectly acceptable, no different than "get off of the bus" or the like, but we acknowledged it was a rather weird quirk of the English language and suggested that Indian English may have simply dropped it.

But the original student was soon joined by the others from India and Bangladesh, all of whom insisted that the usage was patently incorrect, just as much as an American would agree that "get on of the bus" is patently incorrect. Eventually laptops were pulled out and Google was consulted for the answer. As it turned out, "off of" is an Americanism that none of us had been aware of, and in all other Commonwealth and former colonial territories "of" isn't used in that way.

More broadly speaking, however, English is the lingua franca of the day, so it's a moving target. In just checking, it looks like macOS' baked-in localization has defined 135 variants of English, which is up substantially from just a few years ago. I expect, however, that with us increasingly communicating with people from around the world, English as a trend will converge on whatever's easiest, so that'd mean simpler spellings (e.g. "colour" -> "color"), the dropping of extra words (e.g. the aforementioned "of"), and a more widespread acceptance of oddball expressions (e.g. "do the needful") as people choose not to care about whether it's grammatically correct, so long as they can understand it.

Re:What do they speak in India?

[AmiMoJo]

I always find it really jarring when TV shows that are supposed to be set in the UK or at least use British English most of the time suddenly throw in Americanisms. Game of Thrones does it about once an episode, with things like "mad" instead of "angry" or "done" instead of "finished".

Re:What do they speak in India?

[Anubis IV]

An Americanism? Your (the whole group of you) google-fu was poor. "Get Off of My Cloud" is a song written by a British (English) band, The Rolling Stones [...] If it's an Americanism, it made it back to England some time before 1965.

I'm afraid you jumped to a conclusion.

As I recall, we quickly figured out the link to The Rolling Stones in our Googling, but we also recognized that rock stars tend to be well-traveled—and thus poor indicators of regional usage—so we kept Googling to see where the usage was considered acceptable. Again, at that point we (the Americans in the room) were still trying to prove that it was Indian English that had dropped the usage, rather than that it was an Americanism. Nevertheless, the more we dug, the more we found that its acceptance was largely isolated to the US, though historically it may have been more widespread. From what we gathered, some Brits do use the term, but it's discouraged in many British English grammatical texts today and is considered by many to be just as grating as "on of" would be to an American.

Re:English...

[fibonacci8]

Right, like there isn't "French", "Spanish", "Portuguese", or "Italian", etc. There is Latin, and incorrect, bastardized versions of Latin.

American English IS the Original British English

[Anonymous Coward]

American English is the same English that was spoken in England in the 1700s. Modern UK English is the English that changed. They need to get over it and get back to their roots. ;)

https://www.becomeenglishteachers.com/what-english-is-the-original-english-british-or-american/

It's getting harder...

[Tomahawk]

With the amount of US TV programmes aired on this side of the Atlantic, it's getting harder and harder to differentiate between the too, mainly because of the amount of American English that has crept in to daily use. And, of course, the ubiquitous use of the Internet, where everything blends.

I sometimes find myself debating with myself what the correct term is for various items. I'm probably one of the few that doesn't talk about 'cupcakes' (preferring Queen cake), or who might only use 'cupcakes' for the variation that has more icing that cake. I find myself using 'throttle' instead of 'accelerator', although I never use 'gas pedal'. By others, 'Sidewalk' (over pavement or path) is become more and more used, and I'd suggest that Kelly Clarkson has something to do with this (Because of You).

Spelling gets harder too. Some words, like colour and centre (and the other -our and -re words), are fine, probably because we are more aware of these being 'wrong' on your side of the Atlantic. :P But words ending in -ize or -ise can start to get confusing. Spelling-wise, these would be the spellings I debate with myself more. Spell checkers don't always help unless you can be assured that you have the correct version of English installed -- some apps don't have British English, opting for only American English. So when you see something underlined in red, you tend to stop and think to yourself "I'm I wrong or is the computer?", and more often than it should be, it's the computer.

And looking up words online generally means finding the US English version of the word.

So, yeah, they are blending a lot, and there isn't much can be done about it. Thankfully kids here still say "zed" at the end of the alphabet, but I fear that'll change in the near future. "Trick or Treat" has also become prevalent here with kids going door to door for Hallowe'en - that's only in the last 20 years or so.

Depends - will the US and UK be open or closed?

[ErichTheRed]

Globally, English in general is dominant because of previous colonial activities by the British Empire and the prevalence of American entertainment and Internet properties. Having most of the Internet Anglo-centric is a big driver...most online discussions are in English unless it's very region-specific. Software development is a kind-of-English activity for the most part...even if someone isn't a native speaker, they're usually communicating with colleagues in English.

What remains to be seen is whether the US will continue dominating global politics, culture and the Internet. China and India have over a billion people. I do think that as these societies mature, they present a pretty big challenge to English as the dominant language. India has an official language of English but that doesn't mean most of the population speaks it natively or is even bilingual. I think that a combination of the US and UK becoming more insular and the rise of China as a world power will shift the balance...not right away but slowly. One thing China has that the US/UK doesn't, for better or worse, is a semi-authoritarian government. They can basically make whatever they need to happen, happen -- look at how much money they threw into infrastructure to blunt the force of the 2008 financial crisis. Their current plan seems to be reaching out to developing countries in sort of a soft colonialism, doing infrastructure projects and other activities to gain influence. If these activities bring the language along with them, then I could definitely see the balance tipping away from English somewhat.

The English to watch

[QuietLagoon]

is Business English. Business English is the international language of commerce. It is used in offices around the world for business transactions. When I visited Europe for business, when I was in offices, the language spoken was business English, rgardless of the native tongue of the people in the office.

.
So perhaps the question should be - is Business English taking over American English and British English? With the corollary - is Business English closer to British English or American English?

Re:The English to watch

[Crackerjack]

... and as a close relative, Technical English or Scientific English. Whether it's engineering documents, computer software, or publications in scientific journals, these closely-related dialects are what people turn to when trying to share their work with the world.

Meanwhile American English is ....

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Meanwhile the American English is being taken over by Indian English. Soon Indians who came years back will do the needful to discuss about small small things wrong in their language. Soon Americans "will go out of station" and prepone their vacation. Do one thing, please look it up and kindly revert.

But the more educated of the Indian immigrants were brought up on a steady diet of Wren and Martin, which even the Brits will recoil in horror when the see it.

Suppose if these Wren and Martin crowd gets going, English willl go back to 1900s.