English Language: American or British?

A quarrel about how great would the differences between the two kinds of English be in the future caused vehement argument and the following is my point of view

Being the paternal language of the other native Englishes (Canadian English, Australian English, New Zealand English and South African English), British English and American English today are the two main English languages of the English-speaking world. Although too many has already been said over how the scope, the types, and the possible effects of the inconsistency between the two kinds will be in the future, the quarrel on the issue has not come to an end at all.

The cover of the journal Forum XXVII, No 3, July 1989, recalling the topic and provides a research of evidence of the difference between the two kinds of English over the centuries. Noah Webster (in Dissertations on the English Language) claimed that a further incompatibility of the American language from the English necessary and inevitable. He also predicted that “North American English would eventually be as different from British as Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from German or from one another”. Mark Twain (in The Stolen White Elephant) thought American and British English to be different languages and declared that the former, spoken “in its utmost purity”, cannot be understood by an English people at all. This attitude was previously expressed by Captain Thomas Hamilton (in Men and Manners in America). He said that “in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman.”

Authors of the twentieth century hold entirely different attitude toward those of the previous centuries, they tend to have a much more distinctive feeling of sameness between American and British English. Thus, Mitford M. Mathews (from Beginnings of American English) sees the two kinds to be “so overwhelmingly alike.” For Stephen Leacock (from How to Write), “There is not the faintest chance of there ever being an American language as apart from English.” Randolph Quirk (in The New York Times Magazine), believes that, ”even in matters of pronunciation, it is difficult to find many absolute British and American distinctions”; Quirk claimed that even Noah Webster, after fruitless years in trying to create a “linguistic gulf”, “came to realize that in all essentials Britains and Americans spoke the same language”. Albert H. Marckwardt and Randolph Quirk lately expressed their conclusion that they consider British English and American as the same in their book A Common Language: British and American English. It’s Introduction which is an excerpt from the book reads that “The two varieties of English have never been so different as people have imagined, and the dominant tendency, for several decades now, has been that of convergence and even greater similarities.”

The present books argues that this growing view of sameness between American and British English give out the risk of neglecting the existence of some significant differences whose impact in certain domains of life should not be overlooked. But before looking into the problems which arise from the differences between the two Englishes, I will give a background showing the development process of the status of American English in the world, its influence and expansion and analyze it’s causes of growing.

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1. The development and popularity of American English

Long after its introduction into the New World, American English was still considered non-standard English. Mr. Kahane pointed out that according to some people of the 1780s American English was the “underdog” or a peasant’s language that a “gentleman” will not speak. Considered in a bilingual point of view, British English was the dominant language linked to prestige and (linguistic) purism. The belief in the authority or say in the superior of British English, has maintained to the twentieth century, especially in the former British Empire or in the fields of British influence. Thus, it is reported that in China, teachers and school textbooks refer to and recommend Received Pronunciation as the model, as well as standard British syntax

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