Is the Internet Americanising (or Americanizing) British English?

Divided by a common language? Not for much longer...

The Internet – much to the consternation of Euro-integrationists – 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 (“stepping up to the plate”, “getting to first base” 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 don’t play.

Then again, there is quite a lot of evidence that baseball was, in fact, invented in England: it’s mentioned in one of Jane Austen’s 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 “I guess”, in the American sense of “I suppose”. One occasionally hears the phrase used that way in Britain, but always with the aura of a foreign import, like “sure”, to mean “yes”. But here’s the thing: go back to Chaucer, and you will find “I gesse” used exactly as the cousins now use it. You will, likewise, still hear “gotten” in parts of Lancashire and even, in some Dorset and Somerset villages, “fall” to mean autumn.

Now “fall”, on any measure, is far prettier than “autumn”. 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, “lift” is far prettier than “elevator”. 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 “attractive” 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 “wanker”.

There is nothing new in this process. In his 1908 magnum opus, H W Fowler inveighs against such American imports as “placate”, “transpire”, “honey-coloured”, “antagonize”, “just how much” and “do you have?” (instead of “have you got?”) Hardly anyone these days thinks of these phrases as Americanisms. Yet “sidewalk”, “back of” (for behind) and “excuse me?” (if you haven’t heard someone) have failed to penetrate at all. “Mad” still means insane rather than angry, “smart” means well turned-out rather than clever, "pissed" means drunk rather than cross, and “suspenders” hold up a woman’s stockings rather than a man’s 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 we’re 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 “ise” instead of “ize” 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 “ise”; but using “ise” is never wrong. None the less, it can be clumsy, and the OED has always preferred to maintain the distinction. The movement towards “ise” 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? Let’s bring back elected sheriffs, local control of welfare, proper parliamentary control of the executive and the rest of the Direct Democracy agenda. It’s not Americanization; it’s repatriation.