1. America is ruining the English
language
By Jessica Soto
John Alejandro Toro
2. Some opinions in favor
Francis Moore: In 1735 Description of the
town of Savannah “It is about a mile and a
quarter in circumference; it stands upon the
flat of a hill, the bank of the river (which they
in barbarous English call Bluff) is steep.”
Earlier English had no name for this sort of
river bank because they hardly existed in
England.
3. • Prince of Wales: In 1995 the Prince was reported by
The Times as complaining to the British Council
audience that American English is “very corrupting“
“people tend to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs
and make words that shouldn’t be” (Bluff)
• Edwin Neman: In 1974 Linguist prophet who sees the
language style for his fellow Americans as deadly. He
vaticinated in a book called Strictly speaking, which
was subtitled Will America be the Death of English? In
it too he objected to the invention of all sorts of
nouns and verbs and words that shouldn’t be.
4. • One way that Americans
are ruining English is by
changing it. Many of us,
like Francis Moore and
Prince Charles, regard what
is foreign to us as
barbarous and corrupt.
The assumption is that
anything new is American
and thus objectionable on
double grounds.
5. • Change in language is, However,
inevitable, just as it is in all other
aspects of reality.
• But a language or anything else
that does not change is dead.
• The idea of thinking that a
language wouldn’t change
is a chimera (an illusion)
6. • Judgments of what is beautiful or ugly,
valuable or useless, barbarous or elegant,
corrupting or improving are highly personal
and idiosyncratic ones.
• Particular changes will be, in the eyes of the
observer or another, improvements or
degenerations.
7. • There are no objective
criteria for judging worth
in language, no linguistic
Tables of the Law.
• No one is required to like
all or any particular
changes.
• Both British English and
American English have
changed and go on
changing today.
8. History of the English Language
So many languages
influenced in the
evolution of the
English language, from
Anglo-Frisian,
Germanic,
Indo-European and
maybe Nostratic or
Proto-World.
9. The language changed or evolved
from:
1. Old English (450-1100 A.D.)
2. Middle English (1100- 1500
A.D.)
3. Early Modern English. (1500-
1800 A.D.)
4. Late Modern English (1800-
Today)
From the evolution of English
itself we can see that no language
is “pure”, all language has had
it’s influence by other
languages creating changes in
it.
10. Why or how did British and American
English get to be so different?
• British and American English started
to become different when English
speakers first set foot on American
soil because the colonists found new
things to talk about and also because
they ceased to talk regularly with the
people back home.
• American and British evolved in
different ways from a common
sixteenth- century ancestral standard.
11. •Retain the r-sound. •Lost the r-sound.
•Retain the ‘flat a’ (cat). •Replaced it with the ‘broad a’.
•Retain a secondary stresson the •British lost the stress and often
second syllable from the end of the vowel, reducing the word to
words (secretary). three syllables (secret’ry).
•Retain the past participle form •Distinguish difference between a
gotten beside got. ‘t- sound’ and a ‘d-sound’ (atom-
adam).
12.
13. British speakers have also been extraordinarily
fertile in expanding the range of use for tag
questions:
1. Informational: ‘You don’t wear glasses, do
you?’
2. Inclusive: ‘It’s a nice day, isn’t it?’
3. Emphasizing: ‘I made a bad mistake, didn’t
I?’
4. Peremptory: ‘Is the tea ready?’ ‘The water
has to boil, doesn’t it?’
5. Antagonistic: ‘I telephoned you this morning
but you didn’t answer’ ‘I was in the bath,
wasn’t I?’
14. Both Americans and the British innovate in English
pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.
British people, however, tend to be more aware of
American innovations than American are of British
ones.
Perhaps Americans do innovate more; after all
there are four to five times as many English speakers
in the U.S.A. as in the United Kingdom.
Americans have been disproportionately active in
certain technological fields.
15. English is destined to be in the next and
succeeding centuries more generally the
language of the world than Latin was in the
last or French is in the present age. The
reason of this is obvious, because the
increasing population in America, and their
universal connection and correspondence
with all nations will, aided by the influence
of England in the world, whether great or
small, force their language into general use.
