When a Briton and an American meet, even though they are far from mutually unintelligible, each is soon aware of differences in the speech of the other. First, the accent is different: pronunciation, tempo, intonation are distinctive. Next, differences in vocabulary, idiom and syntax occur, as they would in a foreign language: individual words are misunderstood or not understood at all, metaphorical expressions sound bizarre, subtle irregularities become apparent in the way words are arranged, or in the position of words in a sentence, or in the addition or omission of words. It is estimated that some 4,000 words and expressions in common use in Britain today either do not exist or are used differently in the US. These differences are reflected in the way British and American English are written, so that variations in spelling and punctuation also emerge. Finally, there are immense cultural divergences, ranging from different trademarks for everyday products to different institutions and forms of government. Little wonder, then, that even in this age of global communications, we are still able to misunderstand each other. Before examining each of these major dissimilarities in detail, it may be useful to consider how they have arisen.
In fact, many of the distinctive phonetic features of modern American English can be traced back to the British Isles. To take a single example, the r at the end of words is pronounced in markedly different ways in the 'standard' varieties of American and British English. In the 'received pronunciation' of GB, it is barely sounded at all, so that words like there and water are pronounced theah and watuh. This pattern is characteristic of the south-eastern part of England, which is where, in the early 17th century, the first British colonists originated. Their peculiar treatment of the final r survives in New England and the South, but it is exceptional in the US as a whole. The distinctive American r, a kind of muffled growl produced near the back of the mouth, is fully sounded. It is very similar to the r still pronounced in parts of the west and north of England, and in Scotland and Ireland, and was almost certainly brought to America by subsequent colonists from those parts. Since most of the British settlement in North America in the 19th century came from the north and west of England and from Ireland, especially from the northern counties of Ulster, rhotic speech, as it is called, eventually spread across the continent. In many other little ways, standard American English is reminiscent of an older period of the language. For example, Americans pronounce either and neither - with the vowel of teeth or beneath, while in England these words have changed their pronunciation since the American colonies were founded and are now pronounced with an initial diphthong, like the words eye and nigh.
It is said that all emigrant languages are linguistically nostalgic, preserving archaic pronunciations and meanings. The word vest provides an interesting example of one of the ways in which the vocabularies of Britain and America were to grow apart. The first recorded use of the word occurs in 1666 (in the diary of Samuel Pepys), referring to 'a sleeveless jacket worn under an outer coat'. The direct descendant of this usage is the modern American vest, meaning waistcoat. In the intervening centuries, however, the meaning of the word has shifted in Britain, so that it now applies to 'a piece of clothing worn on the top half of the body underneath a shirt'. Americans have retained a number of old uses like this or old words which have died out in England. Their use of gotten in place of got as the past participle of get was the usual form in England two centuries ago; in modern British English it survives only in the expression ill-gotten gains. American still use mad as Shakespeare did, in the sense of angry ('Don't get mad, get even.'), and have retained old words like turnpike, meaning a toll road, and fall as the natural word for the season. The American I guess is as old as Chaucer and was still current in English speech in the 17th century. The importance of such divergences was compounded by two parallel processes. Some words which the pilgrims and subsequent settlers brought to the New World did not transplant, but in England they survived: e.g. fortnight, porridge, heath, moor, ironmonger. Far more important, however, was the process by which, under the pressure of a radically different environment, the colonists introduced innovations, coining new words and borrowing from other cultures.
Many living things, for example, were peculiar to their new environment, and terms were required to describe them: mud hen, garter snake, bullfrog, potato bug, groundhog. Other words illustrate things associated with the new mode of life: back country, backwoodsman, squatter, clapboard, corncrib, bobsled. This kind of inventiveness, dictated by necessity, has of course continued to the present day, but many of the most distinctive Americanisms were in fact formed early: sidewalk, lightning rod, spelling bee. low-down, to have an ax to grind, to sit on the fence, to saw wood, and so on. At the same time, other words were being assimilated ready-made into the language from the different cultures the settlers came into contact with. Borrowings from the Indians include pecan, squash, chipmunk, raccoon, skunk, and moccasin', from the French, gopher, pumpkin, prairie, rapids, shanty, dime, apache, brave and depot; from the Spanish, alfalfa, marijuana, cockroach, coyote, lasso, taco, patio, cafeteria and desperado; from the Dutch, cookie, waffle, boss, yankee, dumb (meaning stupid), and spook. Massive immigration in the 19th century brought new words from German (delicatessen, pretzel, hamburger, lager, check, bummer, docent, nix], from Italian [pizza, spaghetti, espresso, parmesan, zucchini] and from other languages. Jews from Central Europe introduced many Yiddish expressions with a wide currency in modern America: chutzpah, kibitz, klutz, schlep, schmaltz, schlock, schnoz, and tush. Likewise, many Africanisms were introduced by the enforced immigration of black slaves: gumbo, jazz, okra, chigger. Even supposedly modern expressions like with-it, do your thing, and bad-mouth are word-for-word translations of phrases used in West African languages. Eventually many of these enrichments would cross the Atlantic back to England, but by no means all of them. Those that did not cross back form the basis of the differentiation that has taken place between the American and the British vocabulary.
A further important change was to take place, in the domain of spelling. In the years immediately following the American Revolution, many Americans sought to declare their linguistic as they had their political independence. In 1780, John Adams, a future president of the United States, proposed the founding of an 'American Academy for refining, improving, and ascertaining the English Language'. The plan came to nothing but it is significant as an indication of the importance Americans were beginning to attach to their language. The more ardent patriots were demanding the creation of a distinctly American civilization, free of the influence of the mother country. Defence of this attitude was the life-work of Noah Webster (1758 - 1843), author of The American Spelling Book, first published in 1783 and destined to sell an estimated 80,000,000 copies over the next hundred years. This work, from which countless immigrants learnt their English, introduced such typical spellings as honor, color, traveler, defense, offense, center, theater, ax, plow, and jail. The influence of Webster's American Spelling Book and of his later American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) was enormous. It is true to say that the majority of distinctively American spellings are due to his advocacy of the principles underlying them. Moreover, some of the characteristics of American pronunciation must also be attributed to Webster, especially its relative homogeneity across so vast a continent and its tendency to give fuller value to the unaccented syllables of words.
As regards the basic grammar and structure of the language, there are surprisingly few major differences. On the whole, however, Americans, as though impelled by an urgent need to express themselves, appear less constrained by the rules of grammatical form. For instance, they tend to bulldoze their way across distinctions between the various parts of speech. New nouns are compounded from verbs and prepositions: fallout, blowout, workout, cookout, the runaround, a stop-over, a try-out. Nouns are used as verbs - to author, to fund, to host, to alibi (an early example of the practice was to scalp] - and verbs are used just as casually as nouns: an assist, a morph. Any number of new verbs can be created by adding the suffix -ize to a noun or to the root of an adjective: standardize, fetishize, sanitize, prioritize, diabolize. If the exuberance of American English is reminiscent of anything, it is of the linguistic energy of the Elizabethans. In the early part of the 20th century, H.L. Mencken was already making the point. American English, he said, 'still shows all the characteristics that marked the common tongue in the days of Elizabeth I, and it continues to resist stoutly the policing that ironed out Standard English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries'.
The present geopolitical, technological, financial and commercial supremacy of the United States unquestionably underlies the expansiveness and spread of its language, nowhere more so than on the level of colloquial or popular speech. Occasionally words in British English become fashionable enough to cross the Atlantic, but the vast majority of words - like the vast majority of films, television programmes, best sellers, news magazines, and pop music lyrics which convey them - no longer travel westwards, but eastwards. This situation is not without irony. In the 1780s, some patriots were proposing that English be scrapped altogether as the national language and replaced by another: French, Hebrew and Greek were candidates. The last of these was rejected on the grounds that 'it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it was, and make the English speak Greek'. Two hundred and some years later, it seems fairly obvious that the Americans will keep and develop their variety of English just as they please, and the British will have to adapt as best they can. It is a process that is already well under way, with thousands of words and expressions that were exclusively American a few years ago now part of the written and spoken language in both its varieties. But there is no reason to deplore this fact. It is simply a sign that the language is doing what it has always done: it is changing and revitalizing itself.
By Glenn Darragh in "A to Zed, A to Zee - A Guide to the Differences Between British and Amaerican English", Editorial Stanley,Spain, 2000, excerpts pp. V-VIII. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.