The Sunday Telegraph - Sunday

How American jargon infiltrate­d British English – and our politics

The richness of our language is under threat like never before – and an imported culture is to blame, says

- Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) by Emanuel Leutze Tomiwa Owolade

The other week, I was having dinner with a Cambridge academic who was American but had spent more years living in Britain than the land of his birth. At one stage he used the word “entrée” to refer to the main course of our meal. This caused confusion around the table: surely he meant the starter? The phrase “lost in translatio­n” doesn’t only apply to words and phrases between languages; it also applies within them.

American English has, since the American Revolution­ary period of the 18th century, been different from British English in terms of vocabulary, accent and spelling. They say “garbage”, we say “rubbish”. They go on “vacation”, we go on “holiday”. They emphasize, and we emphasise. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (probably apocryphal­ly) described us as “two nations divided by a common language”.

I have yet to see an official British organ or institutio­n come out and explicitly condemn Americanis­ms that creep into British English, but many people in the general public do speak out against it. Last year, someone from the Young Liberals, the youth and student wing of the Liberal Democrats, tweeted: “Bet y’all are wishing Jo Swinson had been the UK’s next prime minister right about now, huh?” – as though the author were a middle-aged person from Kentucky, rather than a young person from Surrey. It was

Invasion: swiftly condemned by almost everyone. One tweet in response captured the feeling: “Please never use the word ‘y’all’ ever again.” Over a decade ago, the broadcaste­r Martha Kearney used the phrase “fess up” in an interview on the The World at One radio programme; this triggered angry responses on the BBC message boards.

Yet the ire was, at one point, directed the other way. The American lexicograp­her and grammarian Noah Webster published his first dictionary in 1806, A Compendiou­s Dictionary of the English Language. (It wasn’t the first American dictionary: that honour belongs to a 1798 volume by Samuel Johnson Jr, no relation to the great essayist.) In Webster’s American English, the British “-our” turns to “-or”, and the “-ence” to “-ense”. Webster once argued, in an essay titled “English Corruption of the American Language”, that “Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard, for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline.”

Oddly, for some, this is still an ongoing issue. In 2018, The New York Times published an essay on the subject of Anglo-creep: the tendency of British words and phrases such as “dodgy” and “gutted” to be adopted by American “coastal creative types”. Lynne Murphy, an American professor of linguistic­s, told the newspaper that “British words, even slang, can make Americans feel or sound more sophistica­ted or cosmopolit­an, because they’re marking themselves as people who see or know the world beyond the US.”

Beyond America’s borders, however, the reverse is more generally true. We watch more American “movies” and TV shows than British kinds; the same is true of music. From “Can I get…” to “reach out”, Americanis­ms have, since the dawn of the

mass-media age, been affecting the way we speak. Murphy pointed out that “the fear of American English taking over the world has been a constant theme in British society since the late 19th century”.

This has great significan­ce, because English is the world’s lingua franca (as it were). It’s an official language of 67 of the world’s 195 countries, as well as the UN, the World Trade Organisati­on, the Internatio­nal Criminal Court, Nato and Eurovision. It’s the internatio­nal language of business, finance, technology and sport – in fact, anyone who needs to be widely understood. Volodymyr Zelensky tweets two versions of every statement he makes: the first in Ukrainian, the second in English. The latter are always shared far more widely. There are more non-native English speakers in the world than native: 20 per cent speak English, but only five per cent as a first language. Above all, an estimated 60 per cent of all internet content is in English. If you are born as a native English speaker, you have won a raffle ticket.

Compare French, once the pre-eminent internatio­nal tongue, the language of diplomacy and educated Europeans, spoken from Moscow to Marseille. These days, it seems under siege. In 1994, France introduced the Toubon Law, which made the use of French mandatory in the media, advertisem­ents, sales of goods and services, and official documents. A report by six members of the Académie Francaise published last year complained about Anglicisms in public bodies and private firms: the popularity of English phrases such as “big data” and “drive-in”. They specifical­ly described tech terms as “Californis­ms”.

French opposition to Americanis­ed English also has a political dimension. Some French politician­s have complained about what they view as divisive theories around race, gender and sexuality that are imported to their country from America. Jean-Michel Blanquer, who was then French minister of education, argued in 2021 that “there’s a battle to wage against an intellectu­al matrix from American universiti­es”. The French President Emmanuel Macron has likewise complained about “certain social-science theories entirely imported from the United States”.

Here in the Anglophone world, some intensely divisive words and concepts first used in America are now used in the UK. The first person to use the term “cisgender” was an American biologist called Dana Leland Defosse, who coined it in an online forum in 1994. Nearly 30 years later, it has become a ubiquitous term to describe people who do not identify as transgende­r. Many people, from Left-wing feminists to conservati­ves to moderates, dislike it, simply because they question the assumption that there is such a thing as a gender identity that supersedes biological sex.

The term “woke”, meanwhile, was initially created by black American people to express their commitment to highlighti­ng injustice. Today, it’s everywhere in the contempora­ry British culture wars, describing – according to your ideologica­l persuasion – either a set of beliefs associated with equality, kindness and inclusivit­y, or an authoritar­ian, divisive and poisonous set of doctrines that undermines the West.

And in the summer of 2020, after the murder of the black American George Floyd, some British activists claimed we should be campaignin­g against the oppression of BIPOC people, meaning “Black, indigenous [and] people of colour”. This makes sense in an American context if you

Last year, one young Lib Dem was condemned for using ‘y’all’ on Twitter

want to highlight the mistreatme­nt of ethnic minority groups – but in a British context, it carries a far-Right resonance as much as a progressiv­e one. Defending the oppressed “indigenous” people of Britain sounds like something from BNP literature.

I consume so much American culture. I love American films, music and novels – this is true of countless other British people. The fact that some American words and phrases have been internalis­ed by us makes perfect sense. But we should be wary of too close a connection. As the British writer Matthew Engel put it in his 2017 book That’s the Way it Crumbles: The American Conquest of English: “The child will have eaten its mother, but only because the mother insisted” – by which he means that by 2120, if we acquiesce to its influence, American English will have consumed the British form. The distinctiv­e richness of British English – which is not a homogenous thing, but a wonderful mosaic of dialects and accents – will flatten under the influence of a globalised language experience­d through mass culture and politics.

Language is how we make sense of ourselves. Lose it, and we risk being utterly estranged from ourselves. The miscommuni­cation between the American professor and me and the other guests was a minor frustratio­n – but it would be nothing, culturally and politicall­y, compared to the absorption of British English into an American one.

‘This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter’ by Tomiwa Owolade is published on June 22 (£18.99, Atlantic)

 ?? ??
 ?? ?? Noah Webster railed against ‘English corruption of the American language’
Noah Webster railed against ‘English corruption of the American language’

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom