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Is British English the best English?
Orin Hargraves
Is British English superior to other versions of the lan-guage? How should we judge between diff erent versions of a language? Who owns English anyway?
Suppose you had the chance to record a sample of human language for aliens to listen to. What language would you choose? You don’t have to make that choice, because someone has already done it:
when the Voyager space probes were launched in 1977, they carried recordings of short greetings in fi fy-fi ve human languages—includ-ing English—for the benefi t of other-worldly belanguages—includ-ings. But what sort of English did they record?
You may be thinking, surely English today is one language: we all understand the written form of it and we do reasonably well with spoken varieties of it other than our own. English is written with a single alphabet and the core of its grammar and vocabulary are commonly understood. But like any language, English comes
in a number of fl avors, and a couple of fl avors dominate the rest:
American and British. Th ese two titans of English vie, in a very refi ned and civilized way, for world domination, and the coming decades will be crucial in determining which of the dialects is going to come out on top.
In a sense, American English already has the upper hand. How has it happened that the American dialect of English—one of the many off spring of British English—should grow up to compete with, if not overwhelm, the island version of the mother tongue?
Th e truth of the matter is that American English has gotten (yes:
gotten) the upper hand by might, rather than by right. Great Britain gets the credit for successfully spreading English around the world during the glorious days of its empire. But the cultural and economic empire of the U.S. has pushed its dialect to the forefront. We read of people lining up on the docks in nineteenth-century New York to read the latest installments in the serialized novels of Charles Dickens. Today the situation is reversed: Americans who happen to be on the other side of the Atlantic will see a line (or rather, a queue) of people waiting for the premiere of the latest Hollywood blockbuster in London’s Leicester Square.
American English has pretty much won the numbers game, but Britons are inclined to think that their strain of the language is the purer one: in other words, the New World may have won on quantity, but the Old Country still holds all the aces on quality. Is there anything to this argument? Th e British have been arguing for the superiority of their dialect since before the ink was dry on America’s Declaration of Independence, but Americans have been just as vehement in insisting that their variety of the language is as worthy as any dialect to be the standard-bearer of world English.
Let’s look at the canon: the British do have things that Americans can never take away from them: the King James Bible, Shakespeare, the romantic and metaphysical poets, the great tradition of nine-teenth-century novelists. But despite British English’s impressive credentials, Americans have never shown any sign of subservience
Is british english the best english? 81
to it. American English has gone its own way from the beginning.
As one twentieth-century American writer observed, ‘Why should we permit the survival of the curious notion that our language is a mere loan from England, like a copper kettle that we must keep scoured and return without a dent?’
Th e British, of course, take a diff erent view of American linguis-tic independence and innovation. As one of their writers put it: ‘Th e Americans are determined to hack their way through the language, as their ancestors did through the forests, regardless of the valuable growths that may be sacrifi ced in blazing the trail.’
Leaving aside the questions of quality and quantity, the ques-tion that remains is this: What is the future of these two dialects of English? It turns out that the wild card that will have the most weight in determining that future is held not by the Brits or the Yanks, but rather by those who will speak English as a second or foreign language. In a few years, that third group will outnumber the native speakers of English. And it turns out that those learners may not want any ‘branded’ variety of English; they just want a kind that they can use. Consider this: in 2000, a Chinese training program for steel engineers chose neither Americans nor Britons, but rather Belgians, to teach them English: the Chinese saw it as an advantage that the Belgians, like the Chinese themselves, were not native speakers. Th e Belgians, they thought, would have a feel both for the diffi culties of learning the language in adulthood, and for using it with other non-native speakers.
Imagine, then, a conversation between a Belgian teacher of English and a Chinese engineer: if a pronoun fails to decline and there is no native speaker there to hear it, does it make a diff erence?
Th e heyday of the big-brand dialects of English is probably over.
In this century, the chief demand placed on English will be for an ability to adapt to the needs of the millions of speakers who use it as a second language.
And what about that clip recorded for the denizens of outer space? Well, the aliens lucky enough to decode it will hear the voice
of a schoolgirl—who sounds to our ear as though she lives closer to Cape Canaveral, Florida, than to Sloane Square in London—saying,
‘Greetings from the children of Earth.’
About the author
Orin Hargraves is a tenth-generation American of almost undiluted British Isles ancestry, and has lived for considerable periods in London.
He is the author of Mighty Fine Words and Smashing Expressions
(Oxford University Press, 2003), which explores the diff erences between British and American English. He has made substantial contributions to dictionaries and other language reference works from publishers including Berlitz, Cambridge University Press, Chambers-Harrap, HarperCollins, Langenscheidt, Longman, Merriam-Webster, and Oxford University Press. He now lives in Carroll County, Maryland.
Suggestions for further reading
In this book: Th e contrasts between diff erent regional versions of languages are discussed in chapters 3 (dialects and languages), 26 (U.S. Southern English), and 41 (dialect change); linguistic standards are discussed in chapters 17 (prescriptivism) and 43 (dictionaries).
Elsewhere:
Th e author’s book, noted above, is a good place to start exploring the subtle and pervasive diff erences between the two main dialects of Eng-lish. Other suggestions:
Fiske, Robert Hartwell, ed. Vocabula Bound (Marion Street Press, 2004).
A book of essays about English, one of which (a longer article by the author, entitled ‘Who owns English?’) inspired this chapter.
Bragg, Melvyn. Th e Adventure of English (Hodder & Stoughton, 2003).
An enjoyable overview of the subject.
McArthur, Tom, ed. Th e Oxford Companion to the English Language (Oxford, 1992). Th is book is the place to go for one-stop shopping con-cerning all things English.
Graddol, David. Th e Future of English? (British Council, 1997). Forecast-ing the popularity of the English language in the twenty-fi rst century.