E Unibus Plurum

We bookmarked an article that appeared in the Guardian a couple of months ago, about Americanisms popping up in British English, particularly in journalism. It wasn't so much the article that interested us: articles of this kind are a standard item in British newspapers and all of the quality dailies seem to run a piece with a similar theme a couple of times a year. What interested us was the comments that followed the article.

It's refreshing to see that an air of moderation informs most readers' opinions and feelings, though it's not difficult to pick up on the pique that pervades some  observations about the intrusion of American English into the mother tongue.  This is a curiously one-way phenomenon: you would be hard-pressed to find any American with similar resentment about the Briticisms that creep into American English with increasing frequency and success. To the extent that Americans even notice these, they probably think of them as charming, quaint, and diverting: much the way that they think of Britain as a whole. This speaks to the point of what many such observations of dialect influence are about. They're often not about language at all, but rather a vehicle for venting emotion about something larger: the people, the culture, or the government on the other side of the pond.

Taking potshots at American English and its innovations is a time-honored tradition in the UK. As H. L. Mencken noted in The American Language, "After the adoption of the [US] Constitution nearly all the British reviews began to maintain an eager watchfulness for these abhorrent inventions, and to denounce them, when found, with vast acerbity." In the volatile period that followed the American Revolution, language could hardly escape the mouth or pen of an American without being decried as inferior on the other side of the ocean. A Monthly Mirror article from 1808 noted "the corruptions and barbarities which are hourly obtaining in the speech of our trans-atlantic colonies" — suggesting that some Britons were devoting all their time to intercepting and denouncing these infelicities (while perhaps failing to notice that the "colonies" had already jumped ship). Two hundred years later, the obstreperousness of American English is still a bruise that some Brits cannot stop pressing, as a prelude to crying out in pain.

The factor that is missing from such expressions is an acceptance of language change and the operation of a Darwinian "survival-of-the-fittest" principle in dialect evolution. When Britain began to create an empire on which the sun never set hundreds of years ago, the question of what would happen to English doesn't seem to have been much on anyone's mind, but in fact much has happened to English: now it exists in many dialects around the world, all of them dominated by the dueling titans, British and American. The observation that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" (commonly attributed to Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich) handily sums up how English got to where it is today. Britain's army and navy (commercial branches included) successfully spread the language around the globe; America's economic and military might, along with its massive population and popular culture hegemony, have enabled its dialect to become the "dominant world variety" (in the words of David Graddol, a Briton who wrote a 1997 tract called The Future of English).

The many other major dialects of English in the world today are barred from exerting any but a token influence on the language as a whole for want of a winning combination of factors that would enable them to do so: military, economic, or cultural domination, or sheer numbers of speakers. A few figures (all from 2008) may be instructive:

A sober and agenda-free interpretation of these figures will easily lead one to the conclusion that there is no stopping the robust spread of American English. Yank native speakers outnumber Brits by 5 to 1, and mothers in Albion do not produce native speakers of their dialect at the rate that US mothers do. Greater absolute and relative immigration insure even higher numbers of native American English speakers for the future. Completing the curse, British sprog, when grown, are unlikely to wield the economic clout of their American cousins.

The figures above might also explain why Britons generally are not bothered by the other major dialects of English: they pose no threat. Britons may also see it to the credit of the smaller main dialects that they have assumed a respectful and deferential relationship to British English from the get-go — fostered by a subservient political relationship to the Crown in some cases — while Americans wasted no time in first throwing off the mantle of government, and then dispensing with the notion that British English somehow constituted a standard for the language. Twentieth-century US writer Rupert Hughes put it best: "Why should we permit the survival of the curious notion that our language is a mere loan from England, like a copper kettle that we must keep scoured and return without a dent?"

The other point that emerges from perusing readers' comments on the Guardian article is the extent to which everyone regards his or her dialect as a unitary thing: inviolate and separate from others. This is a common native-speaker view of any English dialect, but for most people in the world today who use English — people for whom it is a second, learned language — the niceties of dialect variation are merely academic questions. These speakers and writers are mainly interested in the kind of English that you can use anywhere, and they're not very much concerned about brand names. We think this attitude is a healthy one for all speakers of English. The language has become many out of one, but its unparalleled success, along with globalization, mean that in another sense it is becoming one out of many. All varieties of English today contribute to its richness: why not borrow freely from any of them as you need to, without concern about what constitutes an "ism"?