<i>"that sort of London glottal stop", dropping the T in words like "important" or "Manhattan".</i><p>So I agree with the premise of this article, but the glottal stop is found in many regional American accents.<p>The internet removes language barriers from lines drawn on the ground, and this small difference has sped up a still very, very slow process started by television. Language is evolving towards a single shared language, right now we can see the regional differences falling away between nations. TV has dissolved much of the regional differences within the US. The difference is still there, and probably always will be, but its a lot weaker than it was a few decades ago.
Cute. Their sidebar isn't all that accurate, though. "Called Joe" a Britishism? 'Fraid not, chaps. Booking a flight? Also not that British. And "an American would say" is more than a little offensive, although surely not intentionally.<p>Also they missed "wanker" - which has been used a lot lately. It's a good word.
Maybe eventually the Britishisation will extend to returning the 'u' to colour so I make far, far fewer typos.<p>Although it's interesting see the cross-pollenisation that seems to be happening linguistically thanks to media shifting both ways across the pond. Often used to be American imported media flowing into Britain with very few things leaving, but it seems like there's more American Doctor Who fans than British ones now.
From the article: "She sees this as clearly tied to the publication in the US of the first Harry Potter book. Dozens of words and phrases were changed for the American market, but ginger slipped through, as did snog (meaning 'to kiss amorously') - though that has not proved so popular." I think this is one of the correctly described mechanisms for the spread of British terms into American English. The Harry Potter novels are wildly popular here in the United States, and as I recall the later novels (which were published simultaneously worldwide to prevent pirate editions) were less edited to match United States usage than the earlier United States editions of the novels.<p>"The use of university, rather than college or school, for example, may well be used by Americans to make sure they are understood outside the country." I definitely consciously use the term "university" (which was the proper name for my undergraduate institution of higher education) when I want to be understood by Canadians, who don't read "college" with the same implication as Americans do<p>Here in Minnesota, anyone can regularly hear BBC broadcasts by rebroadcasting on Minnesota Public Radio, and there are other parts of the United States where BBC is available over the air, besides much of British broadcasting being available over the Internet.<p>For college-educated adults, a great way to pick up interesting bits of British usage in English is reading The Economist, one of my favorite sources for new submissions here to HN. For many young people across the United States, one big source of exposure to (regional) British speech is participation in youth soccer programs, which are often coached by British expatriates.<p>For all that, we would have to describe the expected future path of English to be further koineization, with more simplification of structure and worldwide spread of useful words and phrases, as an astounding variety of mash-ups of second-language speakers use English as an interlanguage all over the world. In other words, sometimes the American way of speaking will join the pattern of world English, and sometimes the British, and no doubt sometimes Caribbean or African or south Asian or southeast Asian varieties of English will join in as well.
I think in British English it is more common to say 'best before date' rather than 'sell-by date'.<p>One 'Britishisation' I wish the US would get is 'I couldn't care less', meaning I care about some thing as little as possible, yet in the US they insist on say 'I could care less' which makes no sense.
I have acquired many of these by means of exchanging email with British customers. It's nothing worth getting anyone's knickers in a twist about, I rather fancy some of the phrases. Cheers.
There's also the distinct English dialects spoken in the various former colonies. These tend to more closely follow the original English and so, by way of analogy with a certain international institution, people talk about Commonwealth English.<p>It's interesting how the entire shape of Australian English was set by the early settlers -- you can still distinct dialects of Strine spoken in different parts of the country. Or the way that the vowel-lotto that New Zealanders play with "Unglush" has a lot to do with the heavy settlement of NZ by Scots.<p>I guess eventually we'll all speak the same English. It'll give the French something even bigger to hate. <i>Manifique</i>.
There's a good semi-serious rant by comedian Brian Limond on the reverse (though I have a feeling that there are plenty of other rants on this topic):<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnGPgCVJUsI" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnGPgCVJUsI</a><p>I would claim not to mind it, but when I think for a minute I realise that the spelling of various words like "fibre" annoy me, as well as the mm/dd/yy format (and "November 15th" instead of "November the 15th"), and describing football/sports teams as "it" instead of "they" (i.e. "Real Madrid is on an amazing run of form" vs "Real Madrid are on an amazing run of form").
"Unlike in the UK, there is no anti-ginger prejudice in the US, she says - Americans think of warm, comforting things like gingerbread."<p>As someone who grew up in America (with not ginger, but slightly reddish hair) I find this to very untrue. There's even a whole South Park episode* making fun of gingers, and there's few things more American than that. Maybe it's a relatively new thing, but I doubt many young Americans think of warm ginger bread.<p>* <a href="http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s09e11-ginger-kids" rel="nofollow">http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s09e11-ginger-...</a>
> <i>The same thing might be influencing a trend that Yagoda has spotted for Americans to use the day, month, year format for dates - 26/9/12 rather than 9/26/12.</i><p>Is this actually happening? I see YY(YY)/MM/DD sometimes (that's what I use, albeit with hyphens), but I've never seen an American use DD/MM/YY in the US.
What disappoints me most about this article, though, is that it failed to point out <i>why</i> this is happening. More than any time in history, people using different dialects of English are in regular, day-to-day contact on the Internet. We may not share time zones (especially those crazy Aussies) but it's telling that we turn out to like each other a lot, and trade our favorite words and insults.<p>So in closing, the authors of the article are a bunch of wankers.
I wonder if there'll be agreement on 'irony'. In British English, the ironic happening must necessarily be unintentional. It doesn't have to be unknown, just go against the intentions of the act (eg: an anticrime bill that the beat police know will raise crime)<p>In contrast, Americans often use 'irony' in an intentional manner. Selecting an ironic t-shirt to wear. Or the phrase that clued me into this: "The photographer has arranged the model's foot ironically".