America is ruining the English language

By Jessica SotoJohn Alejandro Toro

Some opinions in favor

Francis Moore: In 1735 Description of the town of Savannah “It is about a mile and a quarter in circumference; it stands upon the flat of a hill, the bank of the river (which they in barbarous English call Bluff) is steep.” Earlier English had no name for this sort of river bank because they hardly existed in England.

• Prince of Wales: In 1995 the Prince was reported by The Times as complaining to the British Council audience that American English is “very corrupting“ “people tend to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs and make words that shouldn’t be” (Bluff)

• Edwin Neman: In 1974 Linguist prophet who sees the language style for his fellow Americans as deadly. He vaticinated in a book called Strictly speaking, which was subtitled Will America be the Death of English? In it too he objected to the invention of all sorts of nouns and verbs and words that shouldn’t be.

• One way that Americans are ruining English is by

changing it. Many of us, like Francis Moore and Prince

Charles, regard what is foreign to us as barbarous

and corrupt. The assumption is that

anything new is American and thus objectionable on

double grounds.

• Change in language is, However, inevitable, just as it is in all other

aspects of reality.

• But a language or anything else that does not change is dead.

• The idea of thinking that a language wouldn’t change

is a chimera (an illusion)

• Judgments of what is beautiful or ugly, valuable or useless, barbarous or elegant, corrupting or improving are highly personal and idiosyncratic ones.

• Particular changes will be, in the eyes of the observer or another, improvements or degenerations.

• There are no objective criteria for judging worth in language, no linguistic Tables of the Law.

• No one is required to like all

or any particular changes.

• Both British English and American English have changed and go on changing today.

History of the English Language

So many languages influenced in the evolution of the English language, from Anglo-Frisian, Germanic, Indo-European and maybe Nostratic or Proto-World.

The language changed or evolved from:

1. Old English (450-1100 A.D.) 2. Middle English (1100- 1500

A.D.) 3. Early Modern English. (1500-

1800 A.D.)4. Late Modern English (1800-

Today)

From the evolution of English itself we can see that no language

is “pure”, all language has had it’s influence by other languages creating changes in it.

Why or how did British and American English get to be so different?

• British and American English started to become different when English speakers first set foot on American soil because the colonists found new things to talk about and also because they ceased to talk regularly with the people back home.

• American and British evolved in different ways from a common sixteenth- century ancestral standard.

American conservatism VS British

innovation•Retain the r-sound.

•Retain the ‘flat a’ (cat).

•Retain a secondary stresson the second syllable from the end of words (secretary).

•Retain the past participle form gotten beside got.

• Lost the r-sound.

• Replaced it with the ‘broad a’.

• British lost the stress and often the vowel, reducing the word to

three syllables (secret’ry).

• Distinguish difference between a ‘t- sound’ and a ‘d-sound’ (atom-

adam).

Which is more conservative?

Which is more innovative?

Which usage is older?

Tag QuestionsBritish speakers have also been extraordinarily fertile in expanding the range of use for tag questions:1. Informational: ‘You don’t wear glasses, do

you?’2. Inclusive: ‘It’s a nice day, isn’t it?’3. Emphasizing: ‘I made a bad mistake, didn’t

I?’4. Peremptory: ‘Is the tea ready?’ ‘The water

has to boil, doesn’t it?’5. Antagonistic: ‘I telephoned you this morning

but you didn’t answer’ ‘I was in the bath, wasn’t I?’

Both Americans and the British innovate in English pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.

British people, however, tend to be more aware of American innovations than American are of British ones.

Perhaps Americans do innovate more; after all there are four to five times as many English speakers in the U.S.A. as in the United Kingdom.

Americans have been disproportionately active in certain technological fields.

English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age. The reason of this is obvious, because the increasing population in America, and their universal connection and correspondence with all nations will, aided by the influence of England in the world, whether great or small, force their language into general use.

John Adams:

Thanks For Your Kind Attention.