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IRtgionaFvariation of the English language. Variants of English)
From the point of view of regional variation, English is a very special language, because it is spoken as a native language by more than 300 million people all around the world.
English became the basis for many Pidgin and Creole languages - simplified systems with j minimum morphology that serve only the most important functions of a language. Pidgin is a subsidiary language system. Spoken by people with no common language, it is a mixed language used for communication, and the vocabulary of one of the languages is more dominant than the others. Creole is the pidgin that has become a first language for some speech communities. English-based Creoles are Antillan, Jamaican, Gullah, Hawaiian, Tok Pisin and some other Creole languages on the tropical belt where plantation labourers synthesized different languages.
Nowadays English is widely used as a lingua franca - the language of communication between large numbers of people who do not share a common language.
The most intensive exporting of English, which led to its becoming a world language, began in the 17th century with the first settlements in Northern America, and later in India, Canada, Australia, Africa and New Zealand. It developed several distinct dialects which later formed literary and standard norms of their own. Thus these dialects became variants of English. The best well-known and studied variants of the English language are British and American.
[British variant of the English language!
Within the British Isles English exists and has always existed in a great variety of forms.
Only one of these forms — 'Standard English' — is taught to foreigners. Historically Standard English goes back to a southern dialect that became influential in the 14th and 15* centuries due to London's important role in England. Standard English is the language variety considered the most suitable for use in broadcasting media and at schools and universities both in Britain and abroad. It is no longer a regional dialect.
Regional, or local dialects are spoken mainly in rural parts of Great Britain. In England there are five major groups of dialects: Northern, Midland, Southern, Western and Eastern. They can be traced back to the Germanic tribal languages of the 5th century. The area occupied by the Angles gave rise to Northumbrian (Northern) and Mercian (Middland) dialects. The area settled by Saxons (south of the Thames and west to Cornwall) gave rise to Essex dialect. In the area of Jutish settlement (Kent and the Isle of Wight) people still speak Kentish dialect. But this is a very broad grouping of dialects. Every county, a shire, has its own peculiarities. These dialects differ in words, their meanings, pronunciation and even in grammar. For example, in the Lancashire dialect they use nowt for nothing, summat for something.
The words and meanings of all major dialects of the British Isles are recorded in Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1896-1905) and in a more recent dictionary of several volumes Survey of English Dialects (1962-8) edited by Harold Orton, as well as in the Linguistic Atlas of England edited by Harold Orton, et al. (1977).
The number of dialectal words is gradually reducing because everyone in England now reads and listens to Standard English on radio, TV, films and newspapers. Yet, accents, pronunciation features characteristic of some population groups, are still evident in Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle, London, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Northumbria. Instances of dialectal grammar use, like irregular forms of the plural in nouns, double comparatives in adjectives or the use of -ed inflection in irregular verbs, occur regularly.
The dialects of Scotland and Northern Ireland are a special case: they have institutionalized standard norms, dictionaries and published literature, and that is why they may be regarded today rather variants of the English language than dialects.
[American variant of the English language!
The dominant language spoken in the USA is English. English colonists brought the English of Spenser and Shakespeare to the USA from the British Isles in the seventeenth century. But a decisive moment in the history of American English was the ratification of the Federal Constitution in 1787 by the thirteen colonies on the Atlantic seaboard that established the US.
Geographically, historically and culturally separated from British Isles, English in the USA underwent some changes that gave the ground to some people, as a journalist H.L. Mencken, to call it the American language. (To a certain extent, proclamation of the American language was provoked by British English speakers' attitude toward English in America — they regarded it as an example of deterioration of Queen's English by Americans.).
Neverheless, though the difference between language and dialect is very vague, there are no serious grounds to call American English a separate language. American English uses basically the same word-stock, grammar and phonological systems as British English, and that is why American English should be regarded as a variant of English, alongside Canadian, Australian, Indian variants which, unlike dialects that are restricted to spoken forms, have their own standard literary norms.
Specific features of American English are observed in all language components- in phonetics (differences in vowel quality, intonation, specific word stress in some lexemes, pronunciation of some words, like, for, farm, lord where '/•' is still retained as a fricative, or dance, fast, half with a broad low front vowel, beating like beading, matter like madder, metal like medal, or mosquito like mosquido), in grammar (heavy use of contractions like can't, don't), and in orthography (simplified spelling of some words with -or for -our (cf.: AE color and BrE colour), -er as in theater for -re as in BrE theatre, one consonant in traveler, jewelry, -s- for -c- in BrE defence or offence and other different simplifications like ax, catalog, check or program). But the most numerous and obvious are differences in vocabulary systems between the two variants though the greater part of lexical items are common to both variants of English.
The USA, being a country of immigrants speaking different languages and dialects, the country of improvisation and experimentation, is a place with a rich supply of linguistic expressive possibilities.
The following name-creating means are especially active in American English:
American English adopted a lot of borrowings that displaced some British words, or filled in lexical gaps that became obvious to American people, or created new stylistically marked lexemes that are used alongside with the British. Some examples are:
from Native Indian languages: chipmunk, hickory, hominy, moccasin, moose, muskrat, opossum, potato (from West Indian Taino batata), pow-wow, raccoon, sequoia, skunk, squash, succotash, totem, wigwam;
from French: depot, gopher, lacrosse, portage, prairie, pumpkin, rapids, shant;
from Spanish: alligator, canyon, cargo, chocolate (from Nahuatl xocoatt), barbeque, corral, bronco, cafeteria, cockroach, lasso, marijuana, mesa, patio, plaza, ranch, rodeo, sombrero, tornado, vanilla;
from Dutch: boss, caboose, cookie, Santa Claus, sleigh, snoop, spook, stoop, waffle, wagon;
from German: delicatessen, ersatz, frankfurter, hamburger, noodle, pretzel, sauerkraut, spiel;
from Italian: spaghetti, ravioli, pizza, minestrone, tuttifrutti, espresso;
from Yiddish: gefiltefish, shtick, schnook, bagel, zaftig, schmo, schmaltz;
from West African languages •.jazz, boogie-woogie, goober, cooler, voodoo, okra.
As scholars state, in recernt years Japanese has surpassed all languages except Spanish to become the second greatest source of new borrowings in American English /Daniel Long: 165/. Examples of Japanese loan words are bonsai, sushi.
There are also some peculiarities in American English word-formation. More often than the British, Americans use minor means of word formation, such as acronyms (O.K. for 'oil korrect' — the former spelling, Jeep from GP — a military vehicle for general purposes; POW for prisoner of war, yuppies for young upwardly-mobile professionals, dinks for couples with double income, no kids), clipping (coon for raccoon, possum for opossum, still for distillatory), backformation (sculpt from sculpture, enthuse from enthusiasm, resurrect from resurrection), blends ('ravelogue, sellathon), and proper name extension (pullman, diesel, Fahrenheit).
They also actively use such major types of word-formation as word composition (backwater, homestretch, hired hand, sky-scraper) and conversion (a try-out, to soft- pedal, to side-track, a showdown).
Some affixes are more active in American than in British. For example, suffixes -ette (usherette, drum-majorette, dinette, launderette), -ize (itemize, burglarize, winterize), -ее (trainee, parolee, escapee, retiree), -burger (cheeseburger, chickenburger, fishburger), -dan (mortician, beautician).
Lots of words that first appeared in America are of uncertain origin, like cocktail, Yankee, spondulicks, gizmo.
Many Elizabethan English words remained in American English, while in British English they became obsolete and were replaced by some new names, for example, American sick
for British ///, faucet for tap, fall for autumn, guess, reckon for British think, candid for white (candid flames).
Vice versa, many British English words underwent semantic changes in American English. The word bug, for example, originally denoted insects in general, and in this meaning it is still used in American English, while in British English the word began to denote a more specified concept, 'a bedbug'. Laurel was and still is used to denote 'bay' in British English, and in American English it is used to denote 'an evergreen magnolia'. Fork in England was used only as an eating utensil but in America it has the meaning 'branch of a road or a river'.
Different name creation activities and different uses of lexical items in these two language communities result in lexical-semantic differences of vocabulary systems in British and American variants of the English language that may be described along the following patterns:
1. Different words for common i
There are many cases when the same concepts are named in Englishes by different words and phraseological units. For example, in American English gas, or gasoline, is equivalent to petrol in British English. A car in America has a trunk (BE boot), a hood (BE bonnet) and fenders (BE bumpers). What the Americans call corn, elevator, truck, wind-shield, garbage-man, drugstore the British call maize, lift, lorry, windscreen, chemist's. Flat is British and apartment is American, cock is British and rooster is American, queue is British and line is American, railway is British and railroad is American, shop is British and store is American.
2. Common words for different concepts.
Both Englishes have common word-stock but they may apply them in a slightly different way to refer to different concepts. For example, Americans use vest for the concept 'a man's or woman's sleeveless garment worn under a suit coat', but British use this word to refer exclusively to a man's underwear (AE undershirt).
Robin stands for different thrush-like birds, hence in Britain robin is a symbol of winter, of Christmas, while in the USA it is a symbol of spring.
Still another example is the word pants, a shortening of pantaloons, which is observed m both the variants. But in American English the word pants denotes 'an outer garment extending from the wa:st to the ancle or sometimes only to the knee covering each leg separately and worn typically by men and boys'and corresponds to British English trousers. Pants in British English mainly refers to 'an undergarment worn below the waist which does not cover the upper part of the leg, worn by women and girls: underpants'.
Differences in meaning of commonly used words cause differences in the semantic structures of correlative words and sometimes confuse learners and even native speakers.
3. Special words for specific concepts.
Some words in both Englishes stand for ideas of objects (events or qualities) that do not have counterparts in the other country. They are names for geographical places, plants, animals, constructions, social events and institutions that can be found only in one of the countries. For example, canyon, sequoia, gopher, senator, lynching, drive-in ('a cinema where you can see the film without getting out of your car') are mostly characteristic of American English, and wicket, silly mid-off (terms from the game of cricket) are characteristic of British English.
4. Lexical gaps in one of the variants for common concepts.
We noted above that not all concepts are lexicalized, and we usually become aware of that only when two languages or two variants of the language are to be compared. In American English, for example, there are words like caboose 'a freight-train car attached usu. to the rear mainly for the use of the train crew', or zaftig 'a plump, attractive woman'. But in British English these concepts are just rendered descriptively or by means of a quasy-equivalent, like guard's van (BE) 'the part of a train, usu. at the back, where the man in charge travels'.
5. Stylistic or emotional colouring of correlative words in different variants may be different.
In American English, for example, autumn is bookish, while in British English it is neutral. On the whole American usage is less formal than British.
Differences between the two Englishes are gradually fading due to development of modern means of communication. More and more Americanisms come into British English. Now in Great Britain the American words radio, run (in a stocking), Santa Claus, movie are widely used as well as their own wireless, ladder, Father Christmas and film. At the same time Briticisms may be used in American English, especially in certain word combinations or compounds. Thus, the British word luggage is used in American English alongside the Americanism baggage though in different contexts: luggage compartment, but baggage room, baggage check. Such Briticisms as cop, copper 'policeman', headmaster 'principal of a private school', charwoman 'daily cleaner' are also used, sometimes in a jocular manner, in the USA.
Dialect variation in American English derived mainly from original British dialect differences and from new geographic and social determinants (see, for example, Kurath's Word Geography of the Eastern United States /1949/, or more recent and comprehensive Speaking Freely: A Guided Tour of American English from Plymouth Rock to Silicon Valley by Stuart Berg Flexner and Anne H. Soukhanov /1997/).
Now there are four major groups of dialects in the USA: Northeastern, Southern, Midwestern and Western. These are some examples of lexical differences between them:
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The form of speech used by radio and television, mostly used in scientific and business discourse, is often referred to as General American, the language that may be also heard from Ohio through the Middle West and on to the Pacific Coast, and that may be described as the norm of American English. (Some scholars, however, object to this term and use Network Standard instead).
Concluding the chapter, it is worth mentioning again that English like all other languages is an abstraction consisting of many regional variants, local and social dialects, accents and idiolects. From a social point of view some of the dialects arc considered superior than others, though there is no linguistic evidence for such prejudice. It should also be noted that these days dialect identification has become more difficult due to mobility of people and wide use of mass media. Its study now requires more elaborate methods.
Further reading:
Швейцер А.Д. Социальная дифференциация английского языка в США. - М.: Наука,
1983. Ярцева В.П. Развитие национального литературного английского языка. - М.:
Наука, 1969.
Aitchi.ion,. /. Linguistics. - London: Teach Yourself Books, 1992. Chambers, J.K. Dialectology. - Cambridge: CUP, 1980. Flexner, S.B.and Soukhanov, AM. Speaking Freely: A Guided Tour of American English
from Plymouth Rock to Silicon Valley. - New York, Oxford: OUP, 1997. Freeborn, D., French, P. and Langford, D. Varieties of English. An Introduction to the
Study of Language. Second Edition. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and
London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1993.
Holmes, J. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. - London and New York: Longman, 1994. Hughes, A. and Trudgill, P. English Accents and Dialects. An Introduction to Social and
Regional Varieties of British English. London: Edward Arnold, 1979. Long, D. Sociolinguistic Aspects of Japanese Loan words in English // XVIth
International Congress of Linguists. Abstracts. - Paris, 1997. p.165. Marckwardt, A.H. American English. New York, Oxford: OUP, 1980. O'Donnell, W.R. and Todd, L. Variety in Contemporary English. London: G.Allen &
Unwin, 1980.
Quirk, Л. Grammatical and Lexical Variance in English. UK: Longman, 1999. Strevens, P. British and American English. - London: Cassell Ltd., 1978. Wardhaugh, R. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. - Oxford: Basic Blackwell Inc, 1986
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