Whingeing and Cringing

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From  the Chronicle of Higher Education,

Tuesday, January 3, 2006

A glance at the winter issue of Critical Quarterly: Defending their
lorries and lifts

The British "moan about their own English being supplanted by the American
kind," writes Deborah Cameron, a professor of languages in education at
the University of London. Popular belief, she says, is that "adolescents
are accused of importing American slang instead of inventing their own,
and of trying to sound like the moronic American teens featured in
cartoons like South Park." That anxiety is relatively recent and not fully
justified, she says. The preference for the English of England was shared
by American colonists.  "Even after the patriotic efforts of Noah Webster
to develop an independent language for an independent nation, a certain
linguistic Anglophilia persisted among the U.S. intelligentsia," she says.
Even into the 1980s, English-language authorities felt secure in the
superiority of British English. In fact, she adds, "'Americanisms' were
regarded by the British as merely quaint rather than threatening."

Infected by television, starting with Sesame Street ("zee" for "zed"), and
by American marketing ("can I get" for "can I have" a latte at Starbucks),
the British have, according to popular reports, become enamored of
Americanisms. Even politicians fall into baseball metaphors ("stepping up
to the plate"), even though very few Britons understand the rules of the
game. But the invasion may not be as extensive as complaining Britons
believe, she says. Indeed, in a study she completed with a group of
students from the University of Oxford, she found that Britons generally
avoid Americanisms when they can, and that the use of Americanisms is
greatest not among youth but among working people. In another study, a
researcher found that youth slang has more roots in the culture of
Bangladeshis and other large immigrant groups in Britain than in American
culture.

"In language, at least," she suggests, "we resist cringing to America;
perhaps we should also stop whingeing (to use a term we borrowed from
Australia) about American linguistic imperialism." The article, "Whingeing
and Cringing," is available online to subscribers and for purchase at
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8705.2005.00678.x





--Peter Monaghan



Harold F. Schiffman