British English is more like French French has influenced English in more ways than English speakers would care to admit. American English likes to drop words completely Sometimes there are differences in American English that make no sense to speakers of British English — like when Americans remove entire verbs from a sentence. Share this article. Latest articles from Language learning. How to improve your written English: 7 tips.
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Language Matters Language. What is the future of English in the US? Share using Email. By Bryan Lufkin. Similar to the UK and Australia, US citizens can rely on the luxury of being native English speakers — but in today's changing world, could monolingual Americans be left behind? Those of us who speak English from the cradle forget how easy we have it. Monolingual America? The US has no official language — yet English has always reigned supreme. And yet? Most Americans still only speak English.
Why learn a new language? Adverts for bilingual workers in the US doubled between and Over the last century, the English language has been the currency of global trade and communications. Bridging the empathy gap There is also another imperative to discourage monolingualism in the US — the growing empathy gap.
Around the BBC. How did it come to be so different, and how did it not come to be more different? It starts with the identities of the first American English speakers. Once tobacco caught on, America became more attractive for those with money, but it still needed servants more than owners — servants and eventually slaves.
The earliest American linguistic landscape was strongly influenced by dialects of the sort that even today are not highly esteemed by those with money. But they were still British, at first. Along with pronunciation, word use in the two countries began to differ. Bill Bryson, in Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, lists a number of words the English have left in the dustbin but Americans have kept using, including cabin, bug, hog, deck of cards , junk, jeer, hatchet, slick, molasses, cesspool, trash, chore, and mayhem , American uses of gotten as a past participle of get , fall to mean autumn , mad to mean angry , and sick to mean more generally ill , which came from England but fell out of favour in the native land.
American English changed too. It had influences not present in England: a new landscape, new animals, and new people — not just those who were already there when the Europeans arrived but immigrants from continental Europe, as well as African slaves brought over to work on the plantations.
Spanish gave many words useful in the South West, such as canyon, coyote , mesa, and tornado ; French handed over words such as prairie, bureau, and levee ; Dutch gave words such as bluff, boss, and waffle ; German gave pretzel , sauerkraut , and nix ; the African languages of the slaves gave words such as goober, jambalaya, and the synonyms gumbo and okra.
Later immigrant groups brought still more words. Many words were also taken usually somewhat altered from the indigenous cultures, eg moose, raccoon, caribou, opossum, skunk, hickory, pecan, squash, and toboggan.
A new landscape, new animals and new people influenced American English. Words such as prairie came from French, while pretzel came from German Credit: Thinkstock. English was also altered to suit need. Some things were named using existing words for passably similar things: laurel, beech, walnut, hemlock, robin, blackbird, lark, swallow, hedgehog. Once the Americans had their new government, words were pressed into service for some of its details as well, such as congress, senate, and assembly.
Some things were named with new compounds: rattlesnake, bluegrass, bobcat, bullfrog ; later, as the need arose, sidewalk, skyscraper, and drugstore.
Words for things invented after American independence have often differed on opposite sides of the Atlantic: does your car have a boot and bonnet or a hood and trunk? Early British visitors sometimes wrote of how little the dialect changed from place to place as they travelled through the colonies.
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