Preface
Every language allows different kinds of variations: geographical or territorial, perhaps the most obvious, stylistic, the difference between the written and the spoken form of the standard national language and others. It is the national language of
Standard English – the official language of
The differences between the English language as spoken in
AMERICAN ENGLISH
The variety of English spoken in the
An Americanism may be defined as a word or a set expression peculiar to the English language as spoken in the
A general and comprehensive description of the American variant is given in Professor Shweitzer's monograph. An important aspect of his treatment is the distinction made between americanisms belonging to the literary norm and those existing in low colloquial and slang. The difference between the American and British literary norm is not systematic.
The American variant of the English language differs from British English in pronunciation, some minor features of grammar, but chiefly in vocabulary, and this paragraph will deal with the latter.1 Our treatment will be mainly diachronic.
Speaking about the historic causes of these deviations it is necessary to mention that American English is based on the language imported to the new continent at the time of the first settlements, that is on the English of the 17th century. The first colonies were founded in 1607, so that the first colonizers were contemporaries of Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. Words which have died out in
The opposition of any two lexical systems among the variants described is of great linguistic and heuristic value because it furnishes ample data for observing the influence of extra-linguistic factors upon the vocabulary. American political vocabulary shows this point very definitely: absentee voting 'voting by mail', dark horse 'a candidate nominated unexpectedly and not known to his voters', to gerrymander 'to arrange and falsify the electoral process to produce a favorable result in the interests of a particular party or candidate', all-outer 'an adept of decisive measures'.
Many of the foreign elements borrowed into American English from the Indian dialects or from Spanish penetrated very soon not only into British English but also into several other languages, Russian not excluded, and so became international. They are: canoe, moccasin, squaw, tomahawk, wigwam, etc. and translation loans: pipe of peace, pale-face and the. like, taken from Indian languages. The Spanish borrowings like cafeteria, mustang, ranch, sombrero, etc. are very familiar to the speakers of many European languages. It is only by force of habit that linguists still include these words among the specific features of American English.
As to the toponyms, for instance, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Utah (all names of Indian tribes), or other names of towns, rivers and states named by Indian words, it must be borne in mind that in all countries of the world towns, rivers and the like show in their names traces of the earlier inhabitants of the land in question.
Another big group of peculiarities as compared with the English of Great Britain is caused by some specific features of pronunciation, stress or spelling standards, such as [ae] for in ask, dance, path, etc., or Ie] for [ei] in made, day and some other.
The American spelling is in some respects simpler than its British counterpart, in other respects just different. The suffix -our is spelled -or, so that armor and humor are the American variants of armour and humour. Altho stands for although and thru for through. The table below illustrates some of the other differences but it is by no means exhaustive. For a more complete treatment the reader is referred to the monograph by A. D. Schweitzer:
British spelling American spelling
offence offense
cosy cozy
practice practise
thralldom thralldom
jewellery jewelery
traveling traveling
In the course of time with the development of the modern means of communication the lexical differences between the two variants show a tendency to decrease. Americanisms penetrate into Standard English and Britishisms come to be widely used in American speech. Americanisms mentioned as specific in manuals issued a few decades ago are now used on both sides of the
Cinema and TV are probably the most important channels for the passage of Americanisms into the language of
The personal visits of writers and scholars to the
The existing cases of difference between the two variants, are conveniently classified into:
1) Cases where there are no equivalents in British English: drive-in a cinema where you can see the film without getting out of your car' or 'a shop where motorists buy things staying in the car'; dude ranch 'a sham ranch used as a summer residence for holiday-makers from the cities'. The noun dude was originally a contemptuous nickname given by the inhabitants of the Western states to those of the Eastern states. Now there is no contempt intended in the word dude. It simply means 'a person who pays his way on a far ranch or camp'.
2) Cases where different words are used for the same denotatum, such as can, candy, mailbox, movies, suspenders, truck in the USA and tin, sweets, pillar-box (or letter-box), pictures or flicks, braces and lorry in England.
3) Cases where the semantic structure of a partially equivalent word is different. The word pavement, for example, means in the first place 'covering of the street or the floor and the like made of asphalt, stones or some other material'. The derived meaning is in
4) Cases where otherwise equivalent words are different in distribution. The verb ride in Standard English is mostly combined with such nouns as a horse, a bicycle, more seldom they say to ride on a bus. In American English combinations like a ride on the train to ride in a boat are .quite usual.
5) It sometimes happens that the same word is used in American English with some difference in emotional and stylistic colouring. Nasty, for example, is a much milder expression of disapproval in
6) Last but not least, there may be a marked difference in frequency characteristics. Thus, time-table which occurs in American English very rarely, yielded its place to schedule.
This question of different frequency distribution is also of paramount importance if we wish to investigate the morphological peculiarities of the American variant. Practically speaking the same patterns and means of word-formation are used in coining neologisms in both variants. Only the frequency observed in both cases may be different. Some of the suffixes more frequently used in American English are: -ее
(draftee n 'a young man about to be enlisted'), -ette - tambourmajorette 'one of the girl drummers in front of a procession'), -dom and -ster, as in roadster 'motor-car for long journeys by road' or gangsterdom.
American slang uses alongside the traditional ones also a few specific models, such as verb stem-1- -er+adverb stem +--er: e.g. opener-upper 'the first item on the programme' and winder-upper 'the last item', respectively. It also possesses some specific affixes and semi-affixes not used in literary Colloquial: -o, -eroo, -aroo, -sie/sy, as in coppo 'policeman', fatso 'a fat man', bossaroo 'boss', chapsie 'fellow'.
The trend to shorten words and to use initial abbreviations is even more pronounced than in the British variant. New coinages are incessantly introduced in advertisements, in the press, in everyday conversation; soon they fade out and are replaced by the newest creations. Ring Lardner, very popular in the 30's, makes one of his characters, a hospital nurse, repeatedly use two enigmatic abbreviations: G.F. and P. F.; at last the patient asks her to clear the mystery.
"What about Roy Stewart?" asked the man in bed.
"Oh, he's the fella I was telling you about," said Miss Lyons. "He's my G. F B. F"
"Maybe I'm a D.F. not to know, but would yoa tell me what a B.F. and G.F. are?"
"Well, you are dumb, aren't you?" said Miss Lyons. "A G.F., that's a girl friend, and a B.F. is a boy friend. I thought everybody knew that"
The phrases boy friend and girl friend, now widely used everywhere, originated in the
With words possessing several structural variants it may happen that some are more frequent in one country and the others in another. Thus, amid and toward, for example, are more often used in the States and amidst and towards in
A well-known humourist G. Mikes goes as far as to say: "It was decided almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in the
There is some confusion about the word flat. A flat in
This is of course an exaggeration, but a very significant one. It confirms the fact that there is a difference between the two variants to be reckoned with. Although not sufficiently great to warrant American English the status of an independent language, it is considerable enough to make a mixture of variants sound unnatural, so that students of English should be warned against this danger.
Local Dialects in the
The English language in the
The differences in pronunciation between American dialects are most apparent, but they seldom interfere with understanding. Distinctions in grammar are scarce. The differences in vocabulary are rather numerous, but they are easy to pick up.
Cf., e.g.,
).
The American linguist F. Emerson maintains that American English had not had time to break up into widely diverse dialects and he believes that in the course of time the American dialects might finally become nearly as distinct as the dialects in
Comparison of the dialect differences in the
CANADIAN, AUSTRALIAN AND INDIAN VARIANTS
It should of course be noted that the American English is not the only existing variant. There are several other variants where difference from the British standard is normalized. Besides the Irish and Scottish variants that have been mentioned in the preceding paragraph, there are Australian English, Canadian English, Indian English. Each of these has developed a literature of its own, and is characterized by peculiarities in phonetics, spelling, grammar and vocabulary. Canadian English is influenced both by British and American English but it also has some specific features of its own. Specifically Canadian words are called Canadianisms. They are not very frequent outside
The vocabulary of all the variants is characterized by a high percentage of borrowings from the language of the people who inhabited the land before the English colonizers came. Many of them denote some specific realia of the new country: local animals, plants or weather conditions, new social relations, new trades and conditions of labour. The local words for new not ions penetrate into the English language and later on may become international, if they are of sufficient interest and importance for people speaking other languages. The term international w о г d s is used to denote words borrowed from one language into several others simultaneously or at short intervals one after another. International words coming through the English of India are for instance: bungalow n, jute n, khaki adj, mango n, nabob n, pyjamas, sahib, sari.
Similar examples, though perhaps fewer in number, such as boomerang, dingo, kangaroo are all adopted into the English language through its Australian variant. They denote the new phenomena found by English immigrants on the new continent. A high percentage of words borrowed from the native inhabitants of
Otherwise an ample use was made of English lexical material. An intense development of cattle breeding in new conditions necessitated the creation of an adequate terminology. It is natural therefore that nouns like stock, bullock or land find a new life on Australian soil: stockman 'herdsman', stockyard, stock-keeper 'the owner of the cattle'; bullock v means 'to work hard', bullocky dray is a dray driven by bullocks; an inlander is a stock-keeper driving his stock from one pasture to another, overland v is 'to drive cattle over long distances'; to punch a cow 'to conduct a team of oxen'; a puncher 'the man who conducts a team of oxen'; tucker-bag 'the bag with provision'.
The differences described in the present chapter do not undermine our understanding of the English vocabulary as a balanced system. It has been noticed by a number of linguists that the British attitude to this phenomenon is somewhat peculiar. When anyone other than an Englishman uses English, the natives of
Conclusion
I. English is the national language of
II. British English, American English and Australian English are variants of the same language, because they serve all spheres of verbal communication. Their structural pecularities, especially morphology, syntax and word-formation, as well as their word-stock and phonetic system are essentially the same. American and Australian standards are slight modifications of the norms accepted in the
III. The main lexical differences between the variants are caused by the lack of equivalent lexical units in one of them, divergences in the semantic structures of polysemantic words and peculiarities of usage of some words on different territories.
IV. The British local dialects can be traced back to Old English dialects. Numerous and distinct, they are characterized by phonemic and structural peculiarities. The local dialects are being gradually replaced by regional variants of the literary language, i. e. by a literary standard with a proportion of local dialect features.
V. The so-called local dialects in the
VI. Local variations in the