LL-L "Language varieties" 2014.01.09 (01) [EN]

Thu Jan 9 09:15:46 UTC 2014

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 L O W L A N D S - L - 09 January 2014 - Volume 01
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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

What do you think, Lowlanders? Or ... what's the point?

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

Language squabbling benefits US and UK

[image: Michael Skapinker]By Michael Skapinker

Americans see those who adopt Britishisms as pretentious and snobbish

British and American letter writers to the Financial Times have spent the
past few weeks scrapping over whether
“one-time”<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ced11bf4-673a-11e3-8d3e-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=uk>
is
a better phrase than “one-off”, how far cricket
metaphors<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cf8defa4-673a-11e3-8d3e-00144feabdc0.html>
travel
and whether “backstop” comes from baseball or from the older English game
of rounders<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/99c610f4-6ef6-11e3-9ac9-00144feabdc0.html>
.

One UK correspondent expressed
irritation<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6e4595b0-72f9-11e3-b05b-00144feabdc0.html>
over
the Americans who would have said “the past several weeks” rather than the
“past few” in sentences such as the one above.

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A sub-theme was the infiltration of American and British words into each
other’s speech and how bad this was. When Brits use American words, their
more fastidious compatriots take it as evidence of declining standards,
while Americans see those who adopt Britishisms as pretentious and snobbish.

This linguistic fractiousness has been going on for a long time. In 1828,
Noah Webster, champion of a US vernacular that did not look across the
Atlantic for validation, published *An American Dictionary of the English
Language*. The languages never diverged much, in spite of Webster’s
efforts; UK and US English remain siblings – and, like many siblings, they
squabble.

Sibling rivalry is destructive. That is the message of our earliest stories
– Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau. There is extensive online advice on how
parents can stop siblings from arguing and fighting.

But siblings learn from each other too. There is plenty of research showing
the importance of parental involvement in ensuring children become
competent speakers, readers and writers. But a 2001 article in the Journal
of Early Childhood
Literacy<http://ecl.sagepub.com/content/1/3/301.abstract> pointed
to the role of siblings in developing each other’s language skills. As
parents discover, often to their distress, children pick up much of their
language from their peers.

“Even more than peers, siblings close in age are likely to share a common
‘language’ and cultural ‘recipes’,”the study said.

It looked at the sibling interactions of two groups of east London
children. In one group, the children, at a Church of England school, were
monolingual English speakers with at least one English-born parent.

The other group, in a primary school in Spitalfields, was almost entirely
of Bangladeshi origin. In both groups, the researchers found that siblings
developed each other’s English, either through school role plays or by
telling or reading stories.

The Spitalfields children were following a long tradition. The area has
long received non-English speaking immigrants – French Huguenots, eastern
European Jews – who learnt English not from their parents but from their
teachers and, more importantly, from each other.

The study found that the learning was not all one-way. The questioning
younger siblings forced the older ones to clarify their language.

The researchers seem to have found these sibling interactions largely
harmonious. But we know that, even when they are not, siblings who mock
each other over getting playground slang wrong are also sorting out
misunderstandings and setting each other straight on what words mean.

That is what our anglophone letter writers were doing too. Speaking two
English varieties that are almost entirely mutually comprehensible, they
were, in effect, pointing to the few differences that occasionally impede
communication, so that people can either understand the other’s metaphors,
incorporate them into their own speech, or indicate to the other side when
they should stop using a word or phrase if they want to be understood.

The US and UK readers of the FT are, of course, a select, literate and (it
goes without saying) highly intelligent group, but this smoothing of
transatlantic differences occurs among a wider section of both populations
too.

The US’s cultural reach means that people in the UK are so used to
listening to American speech that they barely notice they are doing so, but
the linguistic traffic travels in the other direction too.

American children read the *Harry Potter* books. *Saving Mr Banks*,
starring the English actress Emma Thompson, was one of the most seen
films <http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/05/boxoffice-chart-idUSL2N0KF06J20140105>in
the US last week.

UK and US readers will no doubt use this column as a prompt to mention yet
another phrase the other side uses that annoys them. It may look
acrimonious. But what they are really doing is making sure the English
language preserves its general unity – and maintains its world domination.

michael.skapinker at ft.com
Twitter: @Skapinker <https://twitter.com/Skapinker>
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/478af79c-7788-11e3-807e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2ptGjhh1V

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