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 a literary normalized form called Standard American, whereas a dialect has no literary form. Neither is it a separate language, as some American authors, like H. L. Mencken, claimed, because it has neither grammar nor vocabulary of its own.
An americanism - a word (set expression) peculiar to the English language as spoken in the USA. E.g. cookie 'a biscuit'; frame house 'a house consisting of a skeleton of timber, with broad or shingles laid on''; frame-up 'a staged or preconcerted law case'; guess 'think'; store 'shop'.
A general Aand comprehensive description of the American variant is given in Prof. A.D. 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.
The historic causes of the deviations. 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 Britain, or changed their meaning may have survived in the USA. Thus, I guess was used by Chaucer for / think. For more than three centuries the American vocabulary developed more or less independently of the British stock and was influenced by the new surroundings. The early Americans had to coin words for the unfamiliar fauna and flora. Hence there appeared bull-frog 'a large frog', moose (the American elk), oppossum, raccoon - (an American animal related to bears), for animals; and corn, hickory, etc. for plants. The settlers also had to find names for the new conditions of economic life: back-country 'districts not yet thickly populated', back-settlement, backwoods 'the forest beyond the cleared country', backwoodsman 'a dweller in the backwoods'.
The opposition of any two lexical systems among the variants described is of great linguistic and heuristic value because it furnishes ample date 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.
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 [a:] in ask, dance, path, etc., or [e] for [ei] in made, » day and some others.
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.
British spellingAmerican spelling
cosy cozy
offence offense
practice practise
jewellery jewelry
travelling traveling
thralldom thraldom
encase incase
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 briticisms come to be widely used in American speech. It was, for instance, customary to contrast the English word autumn with the American fall In reality both words are used in both countries, only autumn is somewhat more elevated, while in England the word fall is now rare in literary use, though found in some dialects and surviving in set expressions: spring and fall, the fall of the year are still in fairly common use.
Cinema and TV are probably the most important channels for the passage of americanisms into the language of Britain and other languages as well: the Germans adopted the word teenager and the French speak of à automatization. The British term wireless is replaced by the americanism radio. The jargon of American film-advertising makes its way into British usage; i.e. of all time (in «the greatest film of all time»). The phrase is now firmly established as standard vocabulary and is applied to subjects other than films.
The personal visits of writers and scholars to the USA and all forms of other personal contacts bring back americanisms.
The existing cases of difference between the two variants are conveniently classified into:
1) Cases where there are no equivalent in British English - drive-in
'a cinema where you can see the film without getting out of your car' or 'a shop where motorist can 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 England 'the footway at the side of the road1. The Americans use the noun sidewalk for this, while pavement with them
means 'roadway'.
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) The same word is used in American English with some difference in emotional and stylistic colouring. Nasty, for example, is a much milder expres sion of disapproval in England than in the States, where it was even considered obscene in the 19th century. Politician in England means 'someone in polities', and is derogatory in the USA.
6) 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: -åå (draftee 'a young man about to be enlisted),- ettte (tambourmajorette 'one of the girl drummers in front of a procession1), -dom and -ster, as in roadster 'motor-car for long journeys by road' or gangster dom.
American slang uses alongside the traditional ones also a few specific models, such as verb stem + -er + adverb stem + -er: e.g. opener-upper 'the first item on the programme' and winder-upper 'the last item1, respectively. It also possesses some specific affixes and semi-affixes not used in literary col-
loquial: -î, -eroot ~aroo, -sie/sy, as in coppo 'policeman', fatso ëà 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 introduced: in advertisements, in the press, in everyday conversatiori; 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 B. 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.’ s B.F.»
«Ìay be Ãò a D.F. not to know, but would you 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 boyfriend. I thought everybody knew that.»
Particularly common in American English; are verbs with the hanging postpositive. They say that in Hollywood you never meet a man:, you meet up with him, you do not study a subject but study up on it. In British English similar constructions serve to add a new meaning.
The lexical peculiarities of American English are an easy target for ironical outbursts on the part of some writers, John Updike is mildly humorous. His short poem «Philological» runs as follows:
The British puss demurely mews;
His transatlantic kin meow,
The kine in Minnesota moo;
Not so the gentle Devon cows:
They low,
As every schoolchild ought to know.
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.
The American English, apart from British English, is not the only existing variant. There are several other variants -where difference from the British standard is normalized. They are Australian English, Canadian English, New Zealand English. Each of them
has developed a literature of its own, and is characterized by peculiarities in phonetics, spelling, grammar and vocabulary.
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 notions 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 words is used to denote words borrowed from one language into several others simultaneously or at short intervals one after another.