In A Guide to English Language Usage I write:
These differences [between British and American English] exist and they cannot be ignored. Nevertheless, they are small in comparison to the language as a whole and their importance should not be exaggerated. British and American native speakers communicate efficiently and with a minimum of difficulty in understanding. People often have more difficulty in understanding strong regional accents from their own country, whether that is Britain or the USA, than in understanding each other.
I believe that to be true despite George Bernard Shaw’s description of the United States and Great Britain as ‘two countries separated by a common language’ so I am pleased to see this article in the Financial Times. It mentions:
In 1995, Prince Charles called US English “very corrupting”. He said Americans “invent all sorts of nouns and verbs and make words that shouldn’t be”.
but more sensibly points out:
The first permanent settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, was in 1607, when Shakespeare was still alive. Think how much English has changed. Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice that the quality of mercy “droppeth as the gentle rain”. Both British and Americans altered -eth to -s (“drops”) and spent four centuries making their grammatical and linguistic changes together.
It didn’t have to be that way. The 17th century Dutch settlers in South Africa ended up speaking Afrikaans, a substantially different language.
Noah Webster predicted a similar fate for American English, which would one day be “as different from the future language of England, as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German”.
Hat tip to LanguageHat.
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