Along with their attitude toward tipping waiters, variations in language are one of the biggest differences between Americans and Brits. Despite their overwhelming similarities, they still can’t agree on how to spell colour/color – and let’s not even begin to discuss whether the world’s most popular sport is called football or soccer. So, when did this slight linguistic gap emerge?
The US officially became independent on July 4, 1776, when 13 American colonies cut their political ties to Great Britain. A break from British English didn’t emerge with the signing of a document, though.
American English was starting to surface decades before the Declaration of Independence was signed, back when the early American colonies were established in the 17th century and the two populations were separated by an ocean. Linguistic independence, so to speak, perhaps occurred before political independence.
Much like the evolution of a new species, novel accents, dialects, and languages emerge over long periods of time when speakers of the same language become isolated from each other and small, subtle differences accumulate. Eventually, enough contrast builds up that the vernacular can be considered distinct.
As such, there isn’t a black-and-white boundary between the language variation that we can ascribe to a specific year or decade. It’s more like a continuum; neither black nor white, but a series of grey/gray shades from light to dark. Furthermore, in the absence of audio recordings, it’s very hard to pinpoint exactly when American English became “a thing.”
However, there is evidence that English speakers noticed that the language had shifted “across the pond” around the late 17th and early 18th century.
One of the earliest mentions of linguistic differences can be found in a 1699 travel book called A Trip to New-England by English writer Ned Ward. He writes: “Notwithstanding their sanctity, they [the New Englanders] are very profane in their common dialect.”
American English was initially considered to be a sloppy, bastardized version of the original mother tongue, as is often the case with “new” accents and dialects. Along with changes in pronunciation and emphasis on syllables, American English rustled up new words and phrases, which also attracted scorn from “traditional” English speakers.
In 1735, British geographer Francis Moore commented on how speakers of English in the “New World” had started to alter the language. While speaking about a town in Georgia, he observed: “It stands upon the flat of a Hill; the Bank of the River (which they in barbarous English call a bluff) is steep.”
These changes had significantly built up by the time of the Declaration of Independence. One of the Founding Fathers who signed the sacred document, Scottish churchman John Witherspoon, was particularly aware of the language’s reshaping – and he wasn’t a fan.
“I have heard in this country, in the senate, at the bar, and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties, and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain,” Witherspoon wrote in 1781, just five years after the declaration was signed.
The differences became so profound that some thinkers suggested “American” would develop as its only distinct language, totally independent from English. Towards the end of the 18th century, Jonathan Boucher, an English clergyman and philologist living in Maryland, wrote: “Their language will become as independent of England, as they themselves are.”
Clearly, that did not become a reality, and the language did not unfold into an entirely new entity. Nevertheless, the stigma surrounding American English still lingered for centuries to come.
In 1995, Prince Charles (now King Charles) caused a kerfuffle when he made some snooty comments about the “very corrupting” influence of American English. He lamented: “[Americans] invent all sorts of nouns and verbs and make words that shouldn’t be… We must act now to ensure that English –and that, to my way of thinking, means English English – maintains its position as the world language.”
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