LONDON — Harriet Clarke says that during the first of two years she spent in the U.S. , she became inured with the near-daily routine of people telling the then-University of Nottingham student that they loved her accent. But even Clarke, 25, was a bit stunned when a woman in an elevator in Daytona Beach, Florida, not only told Clarke she loved her accent, but whipped out her smartphone and asked if she could videotape Clarke saying hello to one of the woman’s friends.
Clarke politely acquiesced.
Many Americans have long had a love affair with all things British, including the nation’s culture, celebrities and, of course, its version of the shared language. Consider that 29.2 million Americans tuned in to watch the May 19 royal wedding of Prince Harry and American actress Meghan Markle. Or that three years ago, Las Vegas attempted to woo British tourists with ads on London’s subway system that urged them to “visit a place where your accent is an aphrodisiac.”
Lynne Murphy, an American professor of linguistics who teaches at the University of Sussex, has no qualms with the U.S. appreciation of British accents and culture. What’s alarming to her is that too many Americans also say that the Queen’s English is superior to the American form.
That’s also an oft-repeated view in U.K. media, where pundits and politicians regularly decry that good old British English is under attack from Americanisms, and losing the battle. Newspaper columnist Matthew Engel, in a book last year called “That’s the Way it Crumbles: The American Conquest of the English Language,” claimed that American domination of English was a “linguistic impoverishment” and predicted that by 2120 , British English will cease to exist.
To which Murphy says : rubbish. Her newly published book, “The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between British & American English,” debunks a lot of commonly held myths about the two versions and points out that neither one is more correct than the other. It also argues that both versions — like all languages — thrive on change.
“There’s a lot of misconceptions about what’s American and what’s British,” Murphy says, “Also, there’s just a general problem with thinking that getting new words is a pollution of the language. To look at some new words coming in and saying, ‘Our English is ruined,’ is to completely misunderstand what English is.”
Jack Grieve, a professor of linguistics at the University of Birmingham, agrees. “Both versions draw from the same stock and both, over the years, have diverged from it. Neither of them is that pure.”
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Lists of “hated” Americanisms that regularly pop up in British media, Murphy notes, are routinely peppered with words and phrases that weren’t coined in America — and in some cases, were actually invented in Britain. “Sidewalk,” “transportation” and “expiration” fall into that category. And if purity is based on age, then American English will likely have an edge. Many Americanisms date back to the earliest forms of English, but have fallen out of use in Blighty.
Take, for example, the many American verbs that end in “ize,” while the British versions use “ise,” such as in “categorize” and “catergorise.” Both spellings were widely used in Britain until the 1990s. But with the advent of the internet, some British publishers decided to converge on a standardized spelling and picked “ise” because they incorrectly believed the alternative was an American invention. That decision, Murphy says, “emphasizes that British English users are very interested in having a British English and keeping it ‘British.'”
Also confusing matters are words and phrases that Britons happily embrace as their own that actually did come from the States. Among them: “pen-pusher”, “to skive” and “a shambles.”
When the British colonists set up the first permanent American settlement in Jamestown in 1607, they spoke Shakespearean English. By the time of the American Revolution in 1776, English had changed greatly in both countries to the more modern versions used by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. During those 150 years of rapid linguistic evolution, the language also took on different flavors in the U.S. and England — an unsurprising development considering that the two countries were divided by 3,500 miles of ocean.
Murphy says that through much of the 20th century, particularly during and after World War II, Britain was flooded with Americanisms, thanks to the U.S. domination of movies and recordings. But, she notes, Britons occasionally use American words that haven’t superseded more preferred British equivalents. Brits may at times refer to “movies” and “elevators,” for example, but they’re still more likely to say “films” and “lifts.”
In this century, the language flow has become more of a two-way street. “With the internet, it’s easier for words to go in both directions,” Grieve says. Many Americans now consume daily British TV shows, newspapers and magazines and, as a result, have picked up quite a few Britishisms. Such words that have gained currency in the U.S. include “bespoke,” “dodgy,” “gutted” and “one-off.”
Still, he adds, because of the bigger global media footprint of the U.S. , it’s likely “there is still a higher rate” of Americanisms entering Britain than vice versa — a trend he says is fueled by the notion here that American words “sound more trendy or urban.” Nevertheless, Grieve says, “in the scheme of things, they’re still a drop in the ocean.”
Murphy and Grieve both dismiss the idea that American English is demolishing the British version, and say there’s plenty of research showing the contrary. Britain’s lexicon is still chock full of words and phrases that remain as popular as they are uniquely British, including “jobsworth,” “moreish” and “nappies.”
“All those scare stories about ‘All of our children are going to speak American English soon’ — they’re not,” Murphy insists. “They might use some American words, but they’re not speaking American English.”
Nevertheless, Grieve says, for British critics who truly despise Americanisms, “it’s not illogical for them to be alarmed” by the number they see getting picked up here, even if their fears of a takeover are baseless.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S., despite the ongoing flirtation with British English, Murphy says a growing number of Americans, particularly younger ones, no longer buy into the notion that British is superior. Some of their affection for British English, she says, stems from it sounding impenetrable and quaint, “rather than proper.”
In other words, they find it a bit twee.
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A Fourth of July Debate: Which English Is Better — American or British? originally appeared on usnews.com
