#News » Is the Internet Americanising (or Americanizing) British English? Comments Feed [p?c1=2&c2=6035736&cv=2.0&cj=1] News RSS Feed -- [daniel_hannan_140_small.jpg] Is the Internet Americanising (or Americanizing) British English? By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: March 13th, 2011 -- The Internet â much to the consternation of Euro-integrationists â is drawing the English-speaking peoples into a common conversation. And a good thing, too: it was always fatuous to pretend that geographical proximity was more important than history or sentiment, blood or speech. Where the EU is united by government decree, the Anglosphere is united by organic ties, by language and law, by shared habits of thought. Here, though, is a question, posed to mark the centenary of the Commonwealth. Is the common online dialogue also leading to a more direct harmonization of the English language? This blog, in a typical week, attracts 80,000 readers from the UK, 30,000 from the US and 10,000 from elsewhere, mainly from other Anglosphere nations: a proportion that is fairly representative of British websites. In consequence, British bloggers and readers are far more familiar with the American Weltanschauung. But are we also starting to write like Americans? Is the combination of the Internet and US-designed spell-check programmes (or programs) hastening the Americanization of British English? We all have our personal bêtes noires. Damian Thompson, the Blogs Editor, deplores the increasingly common use of double spacing. Others rage at the use of upper case letters after colons. My own particular bugbear is the employment of American sporting metaphors (âstepping up to the plateâ, âgetting to first baseâ etc). I mean, we invented practically every team game on Earth: it seems perverse in the extreme to plunder the vocabulary of one of the very few we donât play. Then again, there is quite a lot of evidence that baseball was, in fact, invented in England: itâs mentioned in one of Jane Austenâs novels, for example. Which only goes to show how difficult it is to disentangle our idioms, to identify an expression that has genuinely evolved in North America without roots in the mother country. Take âI guessâ, in the American sense of âI supposeâ. One occasionally hears the phrase used that way in Britain, but always with the aura of a foreign import, like âsureâ, to mean âyesâ. But hereâs the thing: go back to Chaucer, and you will find âI gesseâ used exactly as the cousins now use it. You will, likewise, still hear âgottenâ in parts of Lancashire and even, in some Dorset and Somerset villages, âfallâ to mean autumn. Now âfallâ, on any measure, is far prettier than âautumnâ. It is descriptive and, like the names of the other three seasons, it is of Anglo-Saxon origin. I should be very happy to see it return and displace the French interloper. By the same token, but the other way around, âliftâ is far prettier than âelevatorâ. If the Internet means a more efficient market in vocabulary, we should expect the more useful, more expressive and more attractive phrases to spread. I mean âattractiveâ here in the literal sense of attracting people. In recent years, for example, I have noticed some Americans taking up that undeniably expressive, but hardly pretty, British epithet âwankerâ. There is nothing new in this process. In his 1908 magnum opus, H W Fowler inveighs against such American imports as âplacateâ, âtranspireâ, âhoney-colouredâ, âantagonizeâ, âjust how muchâ and âdo you have?â (instead of âhave you got?â) Hardly anyone these days thinks of these phrases as Americanisms. Yet âsidewalkâ, âback ofâ (for behind) and âexcuse me?â (if you havenât heard someone) have failed to penetrate at all. âMadâ still means insane rather than angry, âsmartâ means well turned-out rather than clever, "pissed" means drunk rather than cross, and âsuspendersâ hold up a womanâs stockings rather than a manâs trousers. Nor has there been much approximation of pronunciation. A major survey by the British Library lists a lengthy series of words that almost everyone in the British Isles pronounces differently from Americans: advertisement, buoy, era, glacier, nuclear, research, schedule, vase, Z and so on. What weâre seeing, I think, is what we see everywhere as a result of the web: a more perfect market, in which innovation spreads more swiftly, and memes travel further. Let me finish on a positive note. In my own lifetime, there has been a comprehensive shift in Britain towards âiseâ instead of âizeâ in such words as, well, Americanize. You can see why it has happened: using both forms means having to remember which words can only be written with âiseâ; but using âiseâ is never wrong. None the less, it can be clumsy, and the OED has always preferred to maintain the distinction. The movement towards âiseâ seems now to have reached its limit and, under the influence of American software, we are starting to return to the form that our grandparents regarded as correct. If we can do so with language, why not with politics? Letâs bring back elected sheriffs, local control of welfare, proper parliamentary control of the executive and the rest of the Direct Democracy agenda. Itâs not Americanization; itâs repatriation. Tags: Americanisms, Anglosphere, British Library, dialect, English language, internet