{"id":20553,"date":"2013-06-05T12:53:52","date_gmt":"2013-06-05T17:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20553"},"modified":"2013-06-05T12:54:28","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T17:54:28","slug":"the-threat-of-american-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/06\/05\/the-threat-of-american-english\/","title":{"rendered":"The “threat” of American English"},"content":{"rendered":"

Things must be pretty quiet over in Britain, if some of the concerns being aired are about the baleful influence of American English<\/a> on the language used in the Mother Country:<\/p>\n

Does this actually matter? No. On the contrary, we should welcome American English, as it bequeaths to British English more synonyms. English is such a brilliant language for the very reason it has so many different words for similar things, a result of its dual Germanic\/Latinate parentage. In the language of Shakespeare, Dickens and Hollywood you can describe someone as hungry or famished, fast or rapid, good or benevolent, bad or malevolent. It\u2019s no coincidence that the first modern thesaurus was in English — Roget\u2019s, in 1805.<\/p>\n

In any case, many alleged \u2018Americanisms\u2019 are merely old English words that fell into disuse, notably \u2018fall\u2019 for autumn, \u2018diaper\u2019, \u2018faucet\u2019, \u2018candy\u2019 and \u2018gotten\u2019. The latter is especially useful, as in British English \u2018got\u2019 has to double up as a present tense verb for \u2018possess\u2019 and a past participle for \u2018attain\u2019 and \u2018become\u2019. The prohibition on \u2018gotten\u2019 is both chauvinistic and illogical when you consider the uncontroversial \u2018forgotten\u2019. Instead of complaining about American English, it would be more interesting to explore why Americans speak the way they do. For instance, New England was settled by people from south-east England, which is why Bostonians also don\u2019t pronounce the \u2018r\u2019 in \u2018car\u2019 (think Cliff from Cheers<\/em> propping up the baa). Much of the rest of America was settled by Irish and Scots, which is why they also articulate a strong \u2018r\u2019 in \u2018Iron Maiden\u2019. And Americans say \u2018I\u2019m good\u2019, not to boast of their moral worth but to indicate their state of being, because Germans — another emigrant people — use gut<\/em> as an adverb as well as an adjective.<\/p>\n

Everyone in the world — except Dutch and Scandinavian footballers — learns American English because it is today\u2019s lingua franca<\/em>. It\u2019s the principal means for disseminating ideas and getting work, as Latin used to be. As Luc Ferry of Le Figaro<\/em>, writing approvingly of the new French legislation, noted last week: \u2018Si Descartes n\u2019avait pas \u00e9crit en latin, come le feront encore apr\u00e8s lui Leibniz ou Spinoza, il n\u2019aurait jamais \u00e9t\u00e9 lu dans le monde entier<\/em>.\u2019 People stopped using French when that country went into decline and lost influence in the nineteenth century, and it was the same story for British English in the twentieth. But neither language has disappeared, and neither is \u2018threatened\u2019 by American English. It\u2019s also worth remembering that as America declines, so will its influence and the importance of its language. No empire lasts for ever.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If any English-speaking country has to be concerned about the invasive nature of Americanisms, it’d be Canada. So far, thank goodness, nobody outside Quebec seems to feel that we need to get the government involved in defining what is and isn’t proper in Canadian English (and Quebec’s linguistic worry-warts don’t give a rat’s ass about English anyway, except where it starts filtering into their version of French…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Things must be pretty quiet over in Britain, if some of the concerns being aired are about the baleful influence of American English on the language used in the Mother Country: Does this actually matter? No. On the contrary, we should welcome American English, as it bequeaths to British English more synonyms. English is such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,28,13],"tags":[400],"class_list":["post-20553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","category-media","category-usa","tag-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5lv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20553"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20555,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20553\/revisions\/20555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}