Do Americans speak English better?

Is British English "better" than the American English? This is an interesting article by Tom Utley, a British journalist who writes to Daily Mail.

I really do not understand why some people tend to say that "British English" is better than American English. I have studied "American English" and I find American literature as brilliant as the English ones. With the immigrants, alongside with the evolution of society, it is a fact that everything we do, reflects directly into the language we speak. Furthermore, Languages are alive, they change from time to time and it is quite impossible, that a language will remain the same or their structures have to be taught exactly as they were taught 100 years ago!

Just read this article by Tom Utley, very enlightening. Enjoy! 
Sarah

Listen up, folks, this British snob has a confession to make. Americans speak better English than us... it's a no-brainer  

                                                                     Tom Utley, For the Daily Mail                                             

During my childhood in the Fifties and Sixties, I was brought up with an ingrained patriotic belief, widespread among my generation, that the British and all things British were superior to Americans and all things American in every conceivable way.

Americans were brash, vulgar, gullible and philistine. We were subtle, self-effacing, sophisticated and discerning. Their films and TV shows were either bloodthirsty or mawkishly sentimental, or both. Ours were witty, well observed and genuinely moving.

Their diet of hamburgers and Coca-Cola was plain disgusting. Their politicians were dim-witted and corrupt. Their cities were death-traps of gun crime, their cars flashy gas-guzzlers.

As for their language and literature, it went without saying that these were the poor, bastardised relations of the real thing, cultivated in the land of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope and P.G. Wodehouse.

Indeed, to this day I find myself irritated by the Americanisms that have increasingly infected our speech, in what has always seemed a one-way cultural traffic across the Atlantic, from West to East.

I bridle when I ask young people how they are, and they answer ‘I’m good’, instead of ‘I’m well’. I wince when they ask the barman in American-English ‘can I get . . .’, when the British-English expression is ‘could I have . . .’ 

‘Listen up’ . . . ‘no-brainer’ . . . ‘two- time winner’ . . . ‘24/7’ . . . ‘baby- shower’ . . . ‘normalcy’ . . . ‘prom’ (referring to a school dance, rather than a concert at the Albert Hall) . . . all set my teeth on edge. 

So, too, does coffee ‘to go’, instead of ‘to take away’; ‘he walked out the door’, with no ‘of’; ‘the Prime Minister said such-and-such Friday’, with no ‘on’. And don’t get me started on the ‘Feds’, when what is meant is the police.

I’m irrationally annoyed, too, by the trend towards American pronunciations: ‘ice-cream’, ‘lemonade’, ‘research’ (ree-search), all with the stress on the first syllable.

Importing these usages has always seemed to me vaguely unpatriotic, as if to suggest that American culture is somehow preferable to our own — quite the opposite of what I was brought up to believe.

So how satisfying it was to hear, on Wednesday’s Today programme, that the linguistic traffic is by no means entirely one way. For according to Ben Yagoda, professor of English at the University of Delaware, ‘Britishisms’ are becoming increasingly commonplace in the U.S.

He has noticed that the word ‘ginger’, previously seldom used in America to denote hair-colour, is fast taking over from ‘redhead’ — a development he puts down to the popularity across the Atlantic of the Harry Potter books, in which Ron Weasley is always so described.

Elsewhere, sports commentators have taken to using the British-English phrase ‘hard man’ to describe a well-built, aggressive player, where before they would always have said ‘tough guy’. 

‘One-off’ is also catching on, to denote a unique event or person, while the verb ‘to go missing’ — never heard in the U.S. until 12 years ago — is increasingly used in preference to ‘disappear’.

Meanwhile, Americans are adopting our pronunciations, apparently seeing the English accent as a mark of status (although it is said to make many others uncomfortable — hardly surprising, perhaps, since English actors are so often cast as villains in Hollywood films).

From coast to coast, we are told, academics have detected a growing belief among the Americans that our words are more ‘clever’ and ‘novel’ than theirs, while our way of saying them is classier.

When I heard all this, I thought: ‘Aha! At last the Yanks are coming round to the realisation that our version of the language is simply better than theirs. What’s taken them so long?’

It was only when I stopped to consider the matter that I realised what a stupid thought this was. After all, why should anyone think ‘hard man’ is a better expression than ‘tough guy’? And what has ‘ginger’ got that ‘redhead’ hasn’t?

As for the Britishism ‘he walked out of the door’, why on earth do we put that stupid little ‘of’ in there, when the Americans realise there is no need for it? And why do we insist on the construction ‘the Prime Minister said on Friday’, when the ‘on’ is grammatically superfluous? Come to think of it, this is as silly as saying: ‘The Prime Minister said on yesterday.’

Indeed, in many ways U.S. English is a purer version of the tongue than that spoken and written in the country that invented it — perhaps because the original colonists sailed for America in the 17th century, taking with them a language in its golden age of Shakespeare, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Then, of course, there has been a huge amount of cross-fertilisation between the UK and U.S. versions of the language ever since. 

My own quintessentially English hero,  P.G. Wodehouse, peppered his books with Americanisms (OK, he practically was American by the end of his life).

As for my unthinking conviction that British literature is superior, I’ll go to my grave singing the praises of the sublime Jane Austen. But would it be disgracefully disloyal of me to suggest that her novels, exquisite though they are, seem a little narrow and psychologically limited beside those of Henry James, Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald? (Speaking of whom, and of cross-fertilisation, may I point out that the Great Gatsby himself addresses his fellow characters as ‘old sport’ — hardly a home-grown American expression).

No, the more I think about it, the more I realise that my conviction that the English are culturally superior is based on nothing more respectable than prejudice.

I suppose I inherited this cultural anti-Americanism from my parents’ generation, whose experience of real-life Americans, in the days before Virgin Atlantic, was confined mostly to the GIs who came to Britain in the war — ‘oversexed,  overpaid and over here.

Not only were the Yanks much richer than our lads, but they seemed to take more than their fair share of the credit for winning World War I, and appeared intent on doing the same in World War II.

What made this especially galling was that there was clearly more than a grain of truth in these upstarts’ theory that their late arrival in both conflicts tipped the balance in our favour. So my parents’ generation took their revenge in the ungrateful way the British do best: by looking down their noses at their saviours from the other side of the Pond, and laughing at them.

I vividly remember my very English aunt returning from a trip to America in the Fifties, and telling us that when she had told someone in New York that she came from London, he had asked: ‘You mean London, England?’

‘No,’ she’d snapped back. ‘I mean London, the whole bloody world.’

At the time, I thought this a hilarious, Oscar Wildean put-down, and I still think of it every time I hear an American refer to ‘Paris, France’ or ‘Rome, Italy’. Only now, when I record it in print, do I realise how chippy it must have sounded to the American, a bristling expression of wounded pride from the daughter of an empire in decline.

This was the attitude I grew up with — and it is one that I hereby resolve to put behind me for all time.

So let me declare to my American friends that their books, films and TV dramas are magnificent (whisper it softly, but I’m longing for more of Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire, which make our home-grown costume dramas look downright insipid by comparison). And when we gave you our language, we entrusted it to excellent hands.

 mawk·ish

ˈmôkiSH/

adjective

1. sentimental in a feeble or sickly way.

   
   

   "a mawkish poem"

   
   

   synonyms:

   sentimental, oversentimental, maudlin, cloying, sickly, saccharine, sugary, oversweet, syrupy, nauseating; More

   • archaicdialect

     having a faint sickly flavor.

     
     

     "the mawkish smell of warm beer"

   
   

   en·trust

   
   

   ənˈtrəst/

   verb

   past tense: entrusted; past participle: entrusted

   1. assign the responsibility for doing something to (someone).

      
      

      "I've been entrusted with the task of getting him safely back"

      
      

      synonyms:

      charge, invest, endow; More

      • put (something) into someone's care or protection.

        
        

        "you persuade people to entrust their savings to you"

        
        

        synonyms:

        hand over, give custody of, turn over, commit, consign, deliver; formalcommend "she entrusted them to the hospital"

   
   

con·ceiv·a·ble

kənˈsēvəb(ə)l/

adjective

1. capable of being imagined or grasped mentally.

   
   

   "a mass uprising was entirely conceivable"

   
   

   
   
2. no-brain·er

   noun
   

   informal

   1. something that requires or involves little or no mental effort.

      
      

      "the enormous popularity of his TV show makes the book a no-brainer for him"

      
      

      synonyms:

      easy decision, easy task;

Why isn't "American" a language?

What would be the "most correct" English, or the most used in travel, business and everyday conversations? Over the years, the vernacular, as well as the society, undergo political, socio-economic and socio-historical changes. All this change reflects in the way that individuals communicate and use the language in question. Its use simply depends on which context you are inserted into. We must reflect on all the possibilities of using the language and work its tools according to the needs of the current world scenario. - Teacher Sarah

Britain and the US share a common language – but English is spoken and spelled very differently on each side of the Atlantic. James Harbeck finds out why.

• By James Harbeck

15 July 2015

Why does American English take such liberties with our common tongue?

On the other hand, why has it not taken more liberties? English speakers first started colonising America more than 400 years ago. Since then, American English has been evolving, influenced by other languages, culture and technology. As the linguist Max Weinreich said, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy; the US has been an independent country for more than two centuries – and boasts the world’s most powerful examples of both. So why is American not a separate language? Or should we view it as one? 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. Four hundred years ago, the colonies were particularly attractive to people who were strongly opposed to the Church of England or couldn’t make a living there – they were not the cream of society. 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.

"The accent has changed more in British English than in much of American".

Then British English started changing in ways American didn’t. The  ‘proper’ English of the early 1600s would sound to us like a cross between the English spoken in Cornwall and Dallas; the accent has changed more in British English than in much of American. Even at the time of the American Revolution, educated speech in England fully pronounced “r” in all places, and King George III probably said after, ask, dance, glass, and path the same as George Washington did: with the same a as in hat and fat. The ‘ah’ pronunciation was considered low-class in England until after the Revolution.

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.

Brave new world

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.

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?

Tongue twisters

Early British visitors sometimes wrote of how little the dialect changed from place to place as they travelled through the colonies. America was also settled by people from all over Britain, not just one region, and they were quite mobile, which had a further homogenising effect. But the USA is a large country, and groups of immigrants from different countries have given distinct flavours to different regions. Once people settled in place, their speech started localising.

Regional variations in accent also came – and are still coming, even today – from the same kinds of phonological shifts that, in England, had turned person into parson and more recently have given us the Sloany “fraffly” (frightfully). Sometimes regional pronunciations of words made their way back into the standard version of English as different words: varmint from vermin, cuss from curse, thrash from thresh, chaw from chew, tetchy from touchy, and gal from girl. Turns of phrase have developed differently in different parts of the country, too: depending on where you are in the US, “I might could do that,” “Anymore, we do it this way,” and “So don’t I” may or may not be perfectly normal speech.

Americans felt most free – even obliged – to take linguistic liberties once they had taken their political liberty. As Noah Webster wrote in his 1791 Dissertations on the English Language, “As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” Not that all Americans felt the same. When, in 1800, Caleb Alexander came out with his Columbian Dictionary of the English Language, one reviewer wrote: “This work, a disgrace to letters, is a disgusting collection of every vicious word or phrase, chosen by the absurd misapprehension, or coined by the boors of each local jurisdiction in the United States. It is a record of our imbecility.”

Throughout the19th Century there was a great dictionary competition: between Webster’s deliberately American approach (his first full dictionary came out in 1818) and the much more British-orientated approach of Nathaniel Worcester (whose first dictionary was published in 1830). Both were very popular, and such esteemed authors as Longfellow, Hawthorne, and even Noah Webster’s distant relation Daniel Webster preferred Worcester’s conservative spellings. Which won out in the end? Well, we know, don’t we? No one today has heard of Worcester’s dictionaries. The Americans opted for a distinctiveness to mark their independence. The British, seeing this rebellion by those rough Yanks, pulled in the opposite direction.

Dollars and sense

The most cosmetically salient differences are, of course, the spellings. Webster promulgated many spelling reforms. Some did not catch on, and were reversed in his later dictionaries: no one spells bread as bred, give as giv, mean as meen, speak asspeke, character as karacter, ache as ake, or tongue as tung.Others stuck. A few were inconsistently used in America and England before Webster, and his endorsement helped them to be standard in America and, consequently, rejected in England – notably the shift of words such as colour to color and of words such as naturalise to naturalize. Others for which Webster’s dictionaries were the prime vector include changing centre to center, defence to defense, connexion to connection, and chequer and masque to checker and mask. His removal of the k in words such as magick, musick, and logick even came to be the standard in England.

For that matter, while many Brits are quick to denounce Americanisms where they see them (even ones that, as we have seen, came from England first), quite a few words of American invention have been adopted into British English, including belittle, caucus, prairie, cloudburst, blizzard, cafeteria, cocktail, talented, reliable, and influential.

The commerce of words, as of goods and culture, has continued apace across the Atlantic. Traffic between the colonies and in particular, London, has always helped keep American from diverging more. London remained the centre of English culture as the American colonies developed, and Americans with money and connections regularly crossed the Atlantic. The areas of the US where more distinctive dialects of English are spoken are well away from the halls of power, and their speech is typically stigmatised in the general culture. New York and other money cities – and the great universities – have maintained versions of English not so different from the educated British standard.

And that is an important reason American English is still American English. Money talks, and the US has not seen it as worthwhile to declare a distinct language, since American English, like the American dollar, is the current dominant force globally, like it or not.

Basic English Mutiple Choice Test

1.       Choose the correct answer:

1.How are you?

a)       I’m fine, thanks.

b)      I am old

c)       Good bye.

2.       What’s your name?

a)       My name is _____

b)      The sky is blue.

c)       Her name is_____.

3.       Nice to meet you. Nice to______ ________, ______.

a)       His name is…

b)      …meet you, too!

c)       It’s an umbrella.

4.       What’s his name?

a)       Her name is Paula.

b)      My name is George.

c)       His name is Michael.

5.       What’s her name?

a)       Her name is Deborah.

b)      Your name is John.

c)       His name is André.

6.       How do you spell your first name?

a)       It’s SILVA.

b)      It’s CARVALHO

c)       It’s ANA.

7.       What’s your phone number?

a)       It’s nativeenglish@gmail.com

b)      302, Paulista Avenue

c)       It’s 976868126

8.       What’s your e-mail address?

a)       It’s 976543922

b)      My name is Camilla.

c)       It’s nativeenglish@gmail.com

9.       Are you happy today?

a)       Yes, I am.

b)      She is not.

c)       They are beautiful.

10.   What’s this?

a)       The book is yellow.

b)      It’s a wastebasket.

c)       How are you?

11.   What are these?

a)       They are/These are wallets.

b)      My name is Pedro.

c)       Let me see.

12.   How’s it going?

a)       Pretty good, thanks.

b)      My favorite sport is football.

c)       See you tomorrow!

13.   Hi, is this your briefcase?

a)       No, it is not.

b)      I love strawberry.

c)       No, they aren’t.

14.   Are these your keys?

a)       It’s a key.

b)      Yes, you  are.

c)       No, they are not.

15.   Is She your classmate?

a)       No, they aren’t.

b)      They’re friends.

c)       Yes, she is.

16.   Are they lawyers in New York?

a)       No, we aren’t.

b)      Yes, they work in New York.

c)       Yes, I am.

17.   Is the school open?

a)       Yes, it is.

b)      No, it is.

c)       How are you?

18.   How are _____________?

a)       Going

b)      You doing?

c)       Nice to meet you?

19.   See you_________________, Mr. Garcia!

a)       Yesterday

b)      Tomorrow

c)       Last year.

20.   Where are my sunglasses?

a)       It is on the desk.

b)      You are on the desk.

c)       They are on the desk.

2. Choose the correct plural ending:

a)       Tables

b)      Table

c)       Tablets

a)       Wastesbasket

b)      Wastebaskets

c)       Wasstebaskets

a)       Briefcases

b)      Briefcasses

c)       Brifscases

a)       Watchs

b)      Watches

c)       Wattchess

Hope you guys have enjoyed! Thank you and "Viva o inglês!"

Teacher Sarah



Answers


Exercise 1

1. a
2. a
3. b
4. c
5. a
6. c
7. c
8. c
9.a
10. b
11. a
12. a
13. a
14. c
15. c
16. b
17. a
18. b
19. b
20. c

Exercise 2  (a,b,a,b).