Outline

Introduction...................................................................................................... 3 1. The History of American English ........................................................... 4 2. The Dialects of American English......................................................... 8 3. Differences in American English and British English Vocabulary.... 12 4. Differences in American and English Spelling...................................... 15 Conclusion...................................................................................................... 16 Bibliography

Introduction 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. For historical and economic reasons the English language has spread over vast territories. It is the national language of England proper, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and some provinces of Canada. It is the official language in Wales, Scotland, in Gibraltar and on the island of Malta. The English language was also at different times enforced as an official language on the peoples who fell under British rule or US domination in Asia, Africa and Central and South America. The population of these countries still spoke their mother tongue or had command of both languages. After World War II as a result of the national liberation movement throughout Asia and Africa many former colonies have gained independence and in some of them English as the state language has been or is being replaced by the national language of the people inhabiting these countries (by Hindi in India, Urdu in Pakistan, Burmanese in Burma, etc.) though by tradition it retains there the position of an important means of communication. The role of the English language in these countries is often overrated, apart from other reasons, through not differentiating between the function of the language as a mother tongue and its function as a means of communication between the colonizers and the native population. It is natural that the English language is not used with uniformity in the British Isles and in Australia, in the USA and in New Zealand, in Canada and in India, etc. It is over half a century already that the nature of the two main variants of the English language, British and American has been discussed. Some American linguists, H.L.Mencken for one, speak of two separate languages with a steady flood of linguistic influence first (up to about 1914) from Britain and America, and since then from America to the British English is so powerful that there will come a time when the American standard will be established in Britain. Other linguists regard the language of the USA as a dialect of English.

British is the form of English now used in the country whence all other forms of English have ultimately derived. But present-day British is not the origin of any other variety of the language; rather it and all the other varieties are equally descendant from a form of English spoken in the British Isles in earlier times. In some respects, present-day British is closer to the common ancestral form of the present-day varieties than is American or other varieties; but in other respects the reverse is true, and American, for instance, preserves older uses that became obsolete in British use. To mistake present-day British for the ancestor of all other forms of English is a logical and factual error.

1. The History of American English

The English language was introduced to the Americans through British colonization in the early 17th century and it spread to many parts of the world because of the strength of the British empire. In 1617 a small group of immigrants settled in Jamestown and in 1620 the ship Mayflower carried the Pilgrims from England to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established the first permanent New England colony. It is customary to distinguish three stages in the development of American English. The first, the colonial period (1607-1776), covers the period between the arrival of the first settlers in the North American continent and the end of the War of Independence; the second, the national period (1776-1898), stretches from the end of the War of Independence to the end of the nineteenth century; the third, the international period runs from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. During nearly four hundred years of use in North America, the English language changed in small ways in pronunciation and grammar but extensively in vocabulary and in the attitude of its speakers. English settlements along the Atlantic Coast during the seventeenth century provided the foundation for English as a permanent language in the New World. But the English of the American

colonies was bound to become distinct from that of the motherland. When people do not talk with one another, they begin to talk differently. The Atlantic Ocean served as an effective barrier to oral communication between the colonists and those who stayed in England, ensuring that their speech would evolve in different directions. Americans also came cheek-to-jowl with "Amerindians" of several linguistic stocks, as well as French and Dutch speakers. They had to talk in new ways to communicate with their new neighbors. Moreover, the settlers had come from various districts and social groups of England, so there was a homogenizing effect: those in a given colony came to talk more like one another and less like any particular community in England. All these influences combined to make American English a distinct variety of the language. Despite such changes, the norm of usage in the colonies remained that of the motherland until the American Revolution. Thereafter American English was no longer a colonial variety of the English of London but had entered its national period. Political independence was soon followed by cultural independence, of which a notable Founding Father was Noah Webster. As a schoolmaster, Webster recognized that the new nation needed a sense of linguistic identity. Accordingly he set out to provide dictionaries and textbooks for recording and teaching American English with American models. The need Webster sought to fill was twofold: to help Americans realize they should no longer look to England for a standard of usage and to foster a reasonable degree of uniformity in American English. To those ends, Webster's dictionary, reader, grammar, and blue-backed speller were major forces for institutionalizing what he called Federal English. The divergence of linguistic forms between the English spoken in America and that spoken in Britain, was initiated as a natural result of the language being spoken by the two distant groups of people whose language operated in different social conditions. One of the facts recorded about the American variant of English is the preservation of older linguistic forms that in Britain under the operation of

various laws were transformed to others, e.g. the retention of the flat a as in fast, grass, pass which became the broad a in the English spoken in the British Isles. Moreover, what reshaped the English language in America were the specific natural conditions. The previously unknown animals, plants, and objects had to be given some names, hence Indian borrowings like: sequoia, pecan, raccoon, woodchuck, moose; Spanish: mustang, tortilla, etc. Many of the coinages and borrowings were for plants, animals, landscapes, living conditions, institutions, and attitudes which were seldom if ever encountered in England, so the English had no words for them. The widespread use of English dialect words was also natural: most of the Puritans came from England's southern and southeastern counties and spoke the East Anglia dialect, most of the Quakers spoke the midland dialect, and after 1720 many new colonists were Scots-Irish, speaking the Ulster dialect. The continuing use of words that had become obsolete in England, and of unusual usage, pronunciation, grammar, and syntax, was also natural for colonists isolated from the niceties of current English speech and English education. Thus, naturally, a hundred years after the Pilgrims landed, English as spoken in America differed from that spoken in England. In 1756, a year after he published his Dictionary of the English Language, "Doctor" Samuel Johnson was the first to refer to an American dialect. In 1780, soon after the American Revolution began, the word American was first used to refer to our language; in 1802 the term the American Language was first recorded, in the U.S. Congress; and in 1806 Noah Webster coined the more precise term American English. By 1735 the English began calling American English "barbarous" and its native words barbarisms. When the anti-American Dr. Johnson used the term American dialect he meant it as an insult. Such English sneering at the language continued unabated for a hundred years after the Revolutionary War. The English found merely colorful or quaint such American terms as ground hog and lightning rod and such borrowings as oppossum, tomahawk, and wampum (from the Indians), boss (Dutch), levee (French), and ranch (Spanish). They

laughed at and condemned as unnecessary or illiterate hundreds of American terms and usages, such as: Examples: allow, guess, and reckon meaning to think, which had all become obsolete in England; bluff, used in the South since 1687, instead of the British river "bank." This has the distinction of being the first word attacked as being a "barbarous" American term; bureau, meaning chest of drawers, which was obsolete in England; card, meaning a person who likes to joke, an American use since 1835; clever, meaning sharp witted, an East Anglia dialect use common to all Americans; fall, obsolete in England where "autumn" was now the preferred word; fork, which the British ate with but which also drive or paddle on, using it since 1645 to mean the branch of a road or river. It wasn't only American words that the English disliked, but American pronunciation and grammar as well. They jeered when Americans said "missionary" instead of "mission'ry," "shew" for "show," and "whare" and "bhar" for "where" and "bear." In 1822 visitor Charles Dickens said that outside of New York and Boston all Americans had a nasal drawl and used "doubtful" grammar. In 1832 Mrs. Trollop said that during her visit in America she seldom heard a correctly pronounced sentence. And in 1839 visitor Captain Frederick Marryat said it was remarkable how debased the English language had become in such a short time in America. On the other hand, during and after the Revolutionary War Americans became proud of American language. It was a badge of independence. In 1778 the Continental Congress recommended that when the French minister visited "all replies or answers" to him should be made "in the language of the United States" (not only as opposed to French but also as opposed to British English). Americans were bound to continue to develop their own brand of English. What the English called barbarisms Americans proudly called American-isms. John Witherspoon

coined this word in 1781, in a series of papers he wrote for the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, and defined it as any word or usage peculiar to English as used in America. Later, of course, Americans were to add more Indian and Spanish words to their language, borrow words and intonations from such immigrant groups as the Germans and Italians, and like the English themselves continue to coin new words and change the meanings of old ones, develop their own dialects and pronunciations, and evolve more of their own grammatical and syntactical uses and misuses. Since World War II, however, best-selling books, movies, TV shows, popular songs, and jet-propelled tourists have spread American English to England and British English to the U.S. Modern politics, pop culture, jet planes, and electronics seem to be bringing the two "languages" closer together again.

2. The Dialects of American English The main dialect areas of the US can be traced to the four main migrations of English speaking people to America from the British Isles during the colonial period (1607-1775): 1. From 1629-1640 Puritan religious dissenters fleeing oppression from Charles I fled East Anglia and brought their distinctive twang (a sort of "flat sounding" nasal lengthening of vowels) to Massachusetts. The extreme

conservatism and nostalgia for England helped maintain this dialect while the language of East Anglia changed (speech similar to New England can still be found in East Anglia. Today the 16 million or so descendants of the Puritans and many of their neighbors speak some form of this East Anglia derived speech. Influence on General American The New England dialect eventually influenced speech in many areas of the Northeast, from Main to Wisconsin, especially in the Chicago area. A large number of New England town, city and county names derive from East Anglia.

 Due to the influence of the Puritan Religion, Old testament first names are found in New England far more than anywhere else in the American colonies (Nathanial, Nehemiah, Joshua, etc.); New England also has a large share of Hebrew town names (Salem, Concord) It gave us the word cuss from curse, originally a high class, [r]-less pronunciation; such words as conniption fit, scrimp, pesky, snicker. It gave English such idioms as: sharp as a meat ax, big as all outdoors, cool as a cucumber. Since everyone was expected to know how to make Boston baked beans, today we also have the idiom to not know beans about. Also: Wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole (rivermen used 10-foot poles to guide their ships). Many idioms associated with sailing derive from the New England dialect, as one might expect: to lower the boom on someone, three sheets to the wind (meaning "drunk"), take the wind out of one's sails, and even cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. Unlike many other American regional dialects, New England speech was not affected significantly by any non-English language. New York English, as a special variety of general New England speech, developed after the British took possession of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1664, leading to the rapid conversion of Dutch speakers to English. Dutch left a strong phonetic substrate, however, which sets Brooklyn speech apart from other northern dialects. 2. From 1642-1675 the Royalists, also called Cavaliers, fled from the south and southwest England with their indentured servants and settled in Virginia when the English Civil War against Charles I began. They brought with them their south England drawl (a drawing out of the vowels); they also brought such phrases as aksed (instead of asked), and ain't (instead of isn't). Royalists later settled the Carolinas as well. Southern English speech laid the foundation for the development of American Tidewater speech, or Coastal Southern English.

Southern English has contributed and continues to contribute to General English a variety of highly colorful idioms: Mad as a rooster in an empty henhouse, Don't get crosslegged (Don't get mad), tearing up the peapatch (on a rampage), kneewalkin' drunk, He's three bricks shy of a load (dumb). The upper class southern dialects and the dialects of the coastal southern areas (where few native Americans remained) were influenced by the English spoken by West Africans. Most linguists today believe these features derive from the influence of the speech patterns of the Africans brought to the 13 colonies as slaves between 1619 and 1808, when the slave trade was prohibited. This would include the southern drawl. Let's take a look at the ethnic dialect that has come to be known as Black English. Black English developed in the Southern states when speakers of dozens of West African languages were abruptly forced to abandon their native tongues and learn English. Slaves from different tribes couldn't communicate with one another-in fact, masters deliberately tried to separate slaves who could speak the same language. Since the Africans had to communicate with one another, as well as with the whites, a kind of compromise language evolved on the basis of English and a mixture of the original West African languages. Such a makeshift, compromise language, used as a second language by adults, is known as a pidgin. When a pidgin becomes the native language of the next generation, it becomes a Creole a full-fledged language. The African-English Creole in the American colonies evolved into today's Black English. 3. From 1675-1725 the Quakers, or Society of Friends, migrated from the north midlands of England and Wales to the Delaware valley. Their speech ways mixed with those of later German and Swedish immigrants gave rise to the distinctive band of dialects spoken in parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Its contribution to American English is great number of euphemisms. Speakers tried to avoid saying male or female names for animals that might have sexual connotations (bull, cock, etc.), and also avoided names of parts of the body:

used rock instead of stone (Old Eng. for testicle'); chicken breast/leg =white meat, dark meat. 4. From 1718-1775 English speakers left North Britain and Northern

Ireland and settled in the Appalachian backcountry. These people are called the "Scots-Irish." These were mostly Anglo-Saxons refugees of the Norman Conquest who had settled within the Celtic fringe of Britain. The true Scottish and Irish people were Celts who spoke Scots-Gaelic or its close relative Irish-Gaelic and most did not adopt English until the 18th or 19th century. The immigration of true Irish and Scottish peoples, beginning in the mid-1800's, had little permanent effect on American dialect formation. One island of early Scotch-Irish English speech was left behind and preserved during the push west. This special, archaic variety of English is known as Appalachian English. It preserves many archaic features that date back to earlier stages in the development of English in Britain. Forms thought to be substandard today are actually the outmoded standard of yesterday. A good example is the use of double negatives such as 'not nobody.' Linguists have dubbed this variety of English as "American Old English" or "American Anglo Saxon". Other mountainous, relatively isolated areas of the American East show a similar preservation of archaic speech. Mario Pei, a popular writer on linguistics, said that "The speech of the Ozarks comes closer to Elizabethan English in many ways than the speech of modern London." Influence on General American: Highly expressive idioms: He can lick his weight in wildcats. Faster 'n greased lightning, can't hold a candle to, sharp as a tack, madder 'n a wet hen, tuckered out. Some words widely assumed to be of Appalachian origin are not: the word moonshine was coined in England; 'hooch' is of Native American origin. Words like redneck, cracker, hoosier were coined in Northern England and brought over; originally, they were not necessarily insults.

Dialects based primarily on geography are called areal dialects. One of the main researchers of areal dialects of the United States was Hans Kurath, author of the Dialect Atlas of America He found that there are four main dialect areas in the Eastern us: New England (including New York), Middle Atlantic, Backwoods, and Southern Tidewater; The three main dialectal divisions can further be subdivided into at least 27 subdialects. The original eastern dialects tended to become more leveled and to merge farther west. General American. After the Civil War the rapid and extensive move West of settlers from all dialect areas of the eastern US led to a leveling of eastern dialectal features and the creation of a more General American, or Middle American dialect. People who are said to speak "without an accent" are actually speaking with this leveled-out form of speech that developed from the mid-Atlantic stretching westward through the Ohio valley. Most features of Standard American developed from a levelled mixture of dialects mostly from the poorer classes along the middle Atlantic seaboard who immigrated west after the American Revolution to find a better life.

3. Differences in American English and British English Vocabulary

It's easy to point out the differences between the American and the English vocabulary: the differences seem quaint and there are comparatively so few that Americans can easily spot them. Many of the differences are merely a matter of preference: Americans prefer railroad and store while the English prefer the synonyms railway and shop, but all four words are used in both England and America. In addition, Americans know or can easily guess what braces, fishmonger's, or pram means, just as the English know or can figure out what innerspring mattress, jump rope, and ice water mean. The following list gives some of the most interesting and typical differences between the American and English vocabulary, differences that may especially interest tourists and those who enjoy both American and English books and movies.

AMERICAN airplane apartment appetizer appointment book art gallery attorney bathrobe billion blackberry blueberry braid call (on the phone) can checkers chips cookie co-worker counterclockwise cross walk diaper do the dishes downtown drugstore duplex eggplant elevator eraser faucet glue gasoline hungry jello aeroplane

BRITISH flat entre, starter diary art museum lawyer, solicitor dressing gown trillion brambleberry bilberry plait ring tin draughts crisps biscuit colleague anticlockwise zebra crossing, pedestrian crossing napkin, nappy wash up city/town centre chemist semi-detached house aubergine lift rubber tap gum petrol peckish jelly

jelly line living room mail movie movie theater oven pants raincoat Santa Claus shopping cart sidewalk sneakers sweater trunk (car) umbrella vacation wallet (womans) windshield yard

jam queue lounge post film cinema cooker trousers mackintosh Father Christmas trolley pavement trainers pullover, jumper lorry brolly holiday purse windscreen garden

4. Differences in American and English Spelling When the colonists came to America, spelling was not a problem if a man could write at all he was lucky. English spelling was not yet rule-ridden: i and y, as well as u and v, were often used interchangeably. Not until 135 years after the Pilgrims landed did English spelling have a guide in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language. This monumental work froze much of English spelling and, among other things, decreed that such words as critick, loglck, musick, and publick end in a final k and such words as colour, honour, etc., end in -our. England, including its colonies, began to follow Johnson's spelling; but, in 1758, three years after Johnson's dictionary was published, Noah Webster was born, in Hartford, Connecticut, and 21 years after Johnson's dictionary the American Revolution began two events that were to help separate British English and American English. After graduating in law from Yale, Webster couldn't make a living doing legal work, so he became a teacher. He then found English schoolbooks hard to obtain, and unsatisfactory, so he compiled his own threepart Grammatical Institute of the English Language, including an elementary spelling book (in 1783), a grammar (in 1784) and a reader (in 1785). Part I became the fantastically successful The American Spelling Book, which went through edition after edition and sold 80 million copies in its first hundred years, 17831883. It was one of the most influential books ever published in America: from the time America became a nation, past the Civil War, and almost into the Gay 90s, generations of Americans learned to spell and pronounce from it, spelling and pronouncing each syllable in every word over and over again under stern teachers. It was known to millions as Webster's Speller, the Blue-Backed Spelling Book (1853) and the Blue-Backed Speller.

Americans are more scrupulous about clearly articulating certain unaccented syllables, especially -ary, -ery, and -ory, and certain ds, gs, hs, ps, rs (following vowels) and t's than the English. Thus the English say melanchy, monastery, necessary, preparatory, secretary, etc, when Americans fully articulate the final syllables. Also, except in parts of New England and the South, Americans articulate the first l in fulfill, the h in forehead, the r in lord and there, and the final t in trait, rather than pronounce them as the English do: fu'fill, for 'rid, laud, theh, and trai. The English are also more conservative in using fewer abbreviations and more capital letters and commas than Americans do. They capitalize such words as the Bar, the Church, the Government, the Press, and Society. By doing away with such capital letters, Americans are closer to the fashion of the 18th century, when the months, the days of the week, and the names of religions were often not capitalized. Written forms of American English are fairly well standardized across the United States. An unofficial standard for spoken American English has developed because of mass media and of geographic and social mobility. This standard is generally called a General American or Standard Midwestern accent and dialect, and it can typically be heard from network newscasters, although local newscasters tend toward more provincial forms of speech. Despite this unofficial standard, regional variations of American English have not only persisted, but have actually intensified, according to William Labov.

Conclusion The variety of English spoken in the USA has received the name of American English. The term variant or variety appears most appropriate for several reasons. American English cannot be called a dialect although it is a regional variety, because it has no literary form. Neither it is a separate language because it has neither grammatical nor vocabulary of its own, but only some differences. So we consider American English to be a variant of the English language.

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 colonisers were contemporaries of W. Shakespeare, E. Spenser and J. Milton. Variation in word stress between British and American English is often observed in words of Latin and French origin. The slightest differences are noticeable in the spelling of some words. The American spelling is in some respects simpler than its British counterpart, in other respects just different. The main divergences are seen in the vocabulary and in the semantic structure of words and their usage in particular. American vocabulary is rich in borrowings. There are groups of specifically American borrowings which reflect the historical contacts of the Americans with other nations on the American continent.

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