Of the countless varieties of English, American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) are the most significant. This is why you can set Macmillan Dictionary’s default setting to either, and switch back and forth throughout.

American English regularly comes under fire from some BrE speakers who perhaps feel a bit possessive or protective about their mother tongue. Corpus data show that the word Americanism is often modified by a disparaging adjective, such as horrible, disgusting, absurd, and vile.

The BBC website recently published an article about AmE and its influence on BrE. Though the writer acknowledges the great flexibility of English, he cannot resist grumbling about particular Americanisms he finds “ugly and pointless”. These are subjective judgements, of course – and several of the facts he cites are wrong, as Language Log shows.

Occasional Macmillan Dictionary guest blogger Dan Clayton wrote an interesting response on his own language blog. He makes the important points that the dividing lines between dialects are far from clear-cut, and that with respect to AmE and BrE, the influence does not operate in one direction only.

Given that languages and dialects undergo constant change, and blend and blur into one another, the purist point of view seems misguided to me. It also encourages unsavoury peeve-fests like the one the BBC subsequently printed.

Catchphrases and idioms (often AmE) spread quickly, and grievances over new coinages and linguistic conventions are often knee-jerk objections that develop over time into pet hates. But some of these neologisms eventually become standard, widely used, and even loved.

Ever since English was brought to America, the two dialects – or rather the two sets of many dialects – have assumed their own forms and standards. AmE has steadily become the centre (aka center) of gravity, but each side affects the other in all sorts of ways. As Dan put it: “While the bigger picture might be of a drift towards more Americanisms, it’s not all one-way traffic and the drift is not uniform.”

I love the Irish English dialects I hear around me, but if I encounter an idiom I like from another dialect – guddle, for instance – I’m liable to adopt it. The history of English is a history of many languages and dialects mixing with one another. It’s what they do. I think linguistic diversity can and should be enjoyed and embraced. Instead of getting wound up about phrases we dislike, we can celebrate not only the great variation that exists but also the fact that so much mutual comprehensibility remains.

The 2010 world tour of regional English stops here but not for long …
We went around the world in 2010 asking the question ‘What’s your English?’ and we got some great answers. Thank you to everyone who contributed, really. All the content from the 2010 tour is archived here for your global English reading pleasure.

And now for something a little bit different
The ‘What’s your English?’ tour continues but along a new course, a ‘contextual’ course. How do we tweak the way we speak in different contexts? What’s your romantic English, your business English, your political, gender, online English? We’ll be asking these questions one at a time and pondering them for a month. February is all about romance and so next week we’ll start with the question: ‘What’s your romantic English?’ Well, what is it?

Finally, we’re going to end the year as we started it: with flow.
Watch Rapconteur Baba Brinkman versus hip hop emcee Professor Elemental in a rap battle ’tween British and Canadian English. The video has been put together by the inimitable Tommy Nagle; you’ll need to do some pausing and rewinding to get the most out of it. Jamie Simmonds was responsible for the instrumentals. Teachers please note, we’ve got some resources coming within the month for you to use with this video in class so keep your eyes on the blog!

Script
Download the script for the video: Baba Brinkman and Professor Elemental in a rap battle

Today we (re)introduce Dawn Nell, the second in a series of guest bloggers who are contributing to this blog over a two-week period. The first of their posts is on the subject of ‘Global English’, and the second will look at the ways that you (users) search Macmillan Dictionary. Dawn, who has written for this blog before, is an historian and blogger who works on the history of publishing. She was born in Cape Town, and these days lives mostly in Oxford and on Twitter.

_________

You know when a blog post begins with something really clichéd and you just have a feeling it’s not going to end well? This isn’t going to be like that at all, so stick with me despite the fact that I’m starting with one of the oldest clichés of language difference around: ‘You say tomato, I say tomato.’ Admittedly it’s kind of difficult to get this to work in text and to make any sense of this line you’ve got to know that it belongs to a song which puts it more like this: ‘You say toMAYto, I say tomAHto’. (You’re getting that feeling now, aren’t you?) The point I’m trying to make is that global English is characterized by diversity. A lot of diversity. In fact, you could even say, diverse diversity. The difference in pronunciation between ‘American’ English –(toMAYto) and ‘British’ English (tomAHto) is just one example.

Okay, let me move on to something else. Aubergines. I had a conversation with a friend recently in which she described making a brinjal curry, and I asked her a ton of questions about the aubergine curry she had made. We were talking about the same thing – just that she’s more used to using the word brinjal, and I’m more used to the word aubergine. And if one of us was American, we’d probably be using the word eggplant. The point is that it didn’t really matter, because we knew we were talking about the same thing and we understood each other perfectly.

Reflecting its global spread, English has acquired – and continues to acquire – words and turns of phrase that allow this sort of choice and flexibility. And English is diverse in other ways too. English accommodates different spellings – grey in British English and gray in American English, for example. Even within British English, there are differences – for example, with some British dictionaries preferring ‘z’ to ‘s’ in words such as criticise or characterise.

But if there is such diversity, and we can use all these different words and spellings in English, can we ever be wrong? Is the English language so flexible that we can do whatever we want and simply justify it on the grounds that it’s right somewhere, or even just in our own perception? After all, unlike the French language, there is no organizational equivalent to the Académie Française to make definitive pronouncements on correct language and spelling. The closest we have in English are dictionaries, which have their origins in efforts to record English usage rather than prescribe it. It’s because they’re recording the ever-expanding diversity of language that dictionaries are constantly growing, with new words being added all the time as they appear in common usage. Where the speakers of English lead, the dictionaries follow.

With the huge diversity that characterizes English, we are left to choose what is best according to the context in which we’re communicating. The onus is on us to understand what the norms are for any particular context. For example, I’ll talk about sending a text message from my mobile (phone) when I’m in Britain, and about sending an sms from my cell(phone) when I’m in South Africa. And I try to remember to say freeway instead of motorway and gas instead of petrol when I’m in the United States. It’s not as if I’d be completely unintelligible if I didn’t make these choices, but I understand that these are the words people in South Africa and the US normally use, and I feel it’s about being considerate to the people I’m speaking to.

So does it matter if you say tomato or tomato, or brinjal or aubergine, or freeway or motorway? Probably not, but the more vocabulary we have at our disposal, and the more we understand the distinctions between different forms of usage, the more adaptable and creative and global we can be in communicating.

Right. We’re back, we’re on, we’re in for 2010!

What a great way to end the year with an Edublog award; thanks so much to those who voted for us. As for 2010, we have some great things planned and can’t wait to share them with you. As well as more witty, entertaining, discussion-inducing fare a la 2009, this year we will really be focusing on English as a growing, changing global language. Every month we’ll look at a different country in the world and the English that is spoken there. We’ll be asking the question: what’s your English?

So, we’re going to start close to home: January is British English month. It’s a tough one to cover as there are so many different kinds of English spoken in Britain and, for sure, we won’t get even a fraction of the wonderful diversity in – but we have to start somewhere! To introduce the theme for the year and the kind of thoughts that go with it, here is a local hip hop artist/musician/poet and all-round insightful guy: Dizraeli and a piece he has made and we have recorded about … well… English.

It’s fast and the English might seem ‘foreign’ to some of you, but we’ve added the transcript below the video, and for teachers and students of English language learning we are putting together some worksheets that you can use to pick the poetry apart!

Please check back for more British English posts, and feel free to write your own posts about your brand of British English or your experience of British English (any variation thereof) and if we can, we will post it up here.

Happy 2010! Here’s to a year of celebrating language!

The 21st Century Flux

English. The new disease?
It pours out of television speakers and computer screens
Disregarding Babel with its very cocky fluency
Sticking on its labellings at every opportunity.
Nothing’s safe; it won’t stop when it begins to spread
it dominates the airwaves and reigns/rains on the internet
leaving cultures altered and confused as to what’s what
turns the dialecting of the youths to a hotch-potch
rag-tag scrabble bag; everyone’s affected
the little languages will not survive unprotected.
So hold your own, but get a firm hold of English
and every last one of us shall be a multilinguist:
sing it!
Shampoo juggernaut moolah hullabaloo
ad infinitum, pow-wow, kudos, déjà vu
Won ton, billabong, beef, potato, hobo, dream
Wha gwan with the wigwam boogie
mr Chimpanzee?
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice
And when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice
The professor said, “Pif! What language is this?
Degenerate slang isn’t standard English!
We at the top must establish limits.”
I said “Prof! Language is the people that live it.”
Get loose, give it some vision and foresight
and juice; we can fling the dictionary door wide.
I live in a city where it seems like
every single idiom is intermingling stream-like,
Like streams, that know no barriers
No matter what dams and channels are established –
they are irrelevant. What matters is the message that is put across,
and the passion that’s invested in it. Nothing’s lost
it merely mutates, and lets the people speaking it
tweak it in new ways.
Meaning that meaning is whatever you say
Jilly, Jack, Hussain, in Iraq to the UK …
to all corners; through all twists and bends
Six billion personal versions of events
It’s thrilling when you think of all the tongues on a jostle
to express their puzzle in the best words possible.
The more words we have, the more ways we have
to express the world we have to co-exist in.
And if the English language is the lingua franca of this planet,
never say that it should be a closed system.
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice for the performers
But when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice to the chorus
Cos English isn’t English; it’s an elastic patchwork
A fantastically insane confederation
a very strange tapestry of foreign vernaculars
borrowed from Norse kings, and fettered slavemen
So if language is linked to the land which it springs from
English is linked to the globe in entirety
With fragments of every language you’ll think of
Roots in every type of society:
Welsh, French, Jamaican, Indian, Italian
Dominican, Hispanic, Germanic, Norse, African,
Norman, Dutch, Latin, Greek, Japanese, Yiddish,
Native American, Antipodean and Finnish…
The list could continue till my tongue went blue;
what I’m saying is the owner is you.
It lives as it’s spoken, and it mirrors the truth
And there isn’t any owner but you…
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice
But when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice

written by Dizraeli

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

The subject of American English vs. British English is an ornery, troublesome one, and regularly appears in our blog posts. I’m particularly embroiled in this endless debate because I, an Englishman, have an American girlfriend. Now, ladies, please don’t cry. I know what’ll cheer you up: some comparative etymology. Never fails.

Usually we just banter over spelling and hyphens and so forth. But here at Macmillan I’m involved with linking any related British and American words new to the second editions of the online dictionary. Many of these new words haven’t yet made it across the Atlantic, thus being exclusive to one setting or another of the online dictionary, and some of these, I think, are worth the other side’s hearing. They tell us a lot about the respective countries they originate from, and often words that the dictionary would designate as ‘slang’ or ‘informal’ have some form of wit behind them.

And whose corpus of new words and slang is better? Are the British the keepers of the grand old language or should they concede ownership to the Americans? British is braw, but American is bitching. Let battle commence!

UK: argy-bargy (noun): noisy arguments
US: ass backwards (adverb): in an extremely confusing way, especially in a way completely opposite to the correct way, e.g. “Look, you put this together ass backwards.”
US: backgrounder (noun): an informal meeting in which a government official gives reporters extra information about a political situation
UK: barney (noun): a loud argument
US: bedroom community (noun): a place from where many people travel to a town to work
US: big tent (noun): a group or political party that includes people who have a wide range of beliefs or opinions and come from many different backgrounds
UK: blether (verb): to talk continuously about things that are not important
US: bitching (adjective): excellent
US: bodacious (adjective): excellent or impressive
UK: bodge (verb): to do something badly, especially to make or repair something badly because you do not have enough time or the right materials to do it properly
UK: bog standard (adjective): ordinary and not special in any way
UK: braw (adjective): very good, pleasant or attractive
US: bull session (noun): a long friendly discussion, especially among a group of men
UK: chancer (noun): someone who is always willing to take a risk in order to get an advantage, even if it means doing something that other people do not approve of
UK: chatterati (noun): educated middle-class people who like to express their opinions
UK: clanger (noun): an embarrassing mistake, especially while you are talking
UK: cobblers (noun): something that you think is silly or not true
US: coffee klatch (noun): a social occasion where people have conversations about unimportant things
UK: codswallop (noun): something that is silly or not true

Well, today I’ve only got through A-C. But some conclusions can already be drawn. The British are disapproving, wary bodgers and chancers, fearful of embarrassment and loud arguments. The Americans are a friendly, leisurely, enthusiastic, inclusive bunch, sometimes prone to confusion, ruled by devious politicians. Admittedly, this selection may have been warped by my preconceptions of the two countries …

One other thing to note is that American slang is far more likely to be subsequently adopted by the British than the other way around, due to cultural imports, in terms of technology, news and television programmes, and the fact that it’s always been harder to crack America.

‘Can I get some more paper?’
‘Yes, it’s on the table over there – help yourself.’

This would be an unremarkable question and answer pattern but the colleague who was asked this question by several native speakers of British English recently was the invigilator of an exam and certainly did not give that response! The expectation of ‘going and getting’ some more paper cannot have been in the students’ or the invigilator’s mind. So what the students meant was: ‘Can I have some more paper?’ (= I’d like to be given some more paper).

This use of ‘Can I get’ for ‘Can I have’ has become increasingly common in the younger age groups of British English speakers. I first remember noticing it in the late 1990s, when the Friends effect was strong in the UK. Now you will often hear someone asking ‘Can I get a coffee?’ or ‘Can I get an egg sandwich?’ at a takeaway counter. It is, of course, common in American English.

Both the UK and US versions of the Macmillan English Dictionary record the ‘Can I have’ formula for requests, giving it the specific context of polite requests for food and drink. They also both record the ‘go and bring back’ sense of ‘get’. But, in common with the most recently published ELT dictionaries, neither appears to show that ‘get’ is being used in requests for something to be given, in British English as well as American English.