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It's inevitable that aspects of American English will infiltrate British English due to the prevalence of TV, films (sorry - I mean movies) and, of course, pop culture, but if the average American were to visit the UK s/he would find that American slang isn't quite like it is "back home". Hardly anyone here uses the word "dude", just for starters - we have our own versions for that term. Conversely, I doubt very much that any American would use the word "bloke", which is the equivalent of the American "dude".
Terms like "taking a rain check" and "that's the way the cookie crumbles" are understood by most people, but not used very much over here, AFAIK.
An expression which many Brits use, on an extremely regular basis, is one that seems to irritate a lot of Americans who either live here or just visit us regularly. (Just visit the American Expats in the UK sites to discover the many grouses and gripes, as well as pleasures, Americans reveal about living in this sometimes delightfully pleasing, sometimes unfathomably, annoyingly frustrating country of ours!) "At the end of the day" - it so annoys many Americans for some reason, so irritations with each other's modes of expression are a two way street! ;-) It simply means the final outcome of any situation, such as: "Well, we will all have to pay out a bit more money at the end of the day, won't we?" I have yet to hear any American use that term.
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The matter, though, is that a lot of such forms sound very strange in Real Life to even myself as an American. The matter is that many of them are either highly socially and or regionally circumscribed in nature or simply highly dated, and are not things I would expect anyone I know in Real Life to say here. Furthermore, they are often associated with speech varieties which have less prestige than you may think. Take "dude" for instance - such is really a marker of Californian English dialects in particular, and sounds very weird coming out of the mouth of anyone not from California (to the point that it sounds like they are just desperately trying to sound "cool" or whatnot). And while one may think of Californian English as sounding "cool" or as being prestigious due to its frequent use in movies and TV shows made in the US, it actually has no extra prestige associated with it here in Real Life (with more extreme forms of such actually often being made fun of). Likewise with many forms from AAVE, which would sound very strange in Real Life when not spoken by someone who natively speaks AAVE, and would not really make them sound "cool" at all.
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Damian - you seem to suggest that "Movies" is an Americanism, and a week ago I'd agree but mate, I was watching a film recently from 1967 with Hayley Mills (don't ask why) and they used the term "movies" a lot which surprised the hell out of me. Surely the prevalence of the American media wasn't such that us Britons were being Americanised even in the 60's?? Apparently it was the Irish that came up with that word (not 100% though). So geezer, is "movie" an Americanism?? Yeah, on second thoughts it probably is.
You know, I think people really underestimate the influence of US English on British English I really do. The two most recent Americanisms I heard came out of my 12 year old sisters mouth - "sick" to mean "good" and "my bad" to mean "my fault". What on earth??
I think it has got to the point now where British English really is beginning to be pretty much white-washed. I'm sure we will always retain a certain degree of our unique dialect and may even actually invent a new word here and there (as opposed to importing the 'ready made' variety from our American friends) but it is obvious to me that our language/dialect is being dictated now not by the speakers of it by speakers who live in an entirely different country.
If it was a word here or there then I wouldn't see a problem - but it REALLY isn't. I'm all for importing words which enrich the language, the American "24/7" being a prime example (the nearest we had/have is "day in day out" or "week in week out"). But the thing is the majority of these new words we are adopting from the US are just not needed. They merely serve to replace perfectly good words of our own that we already had merely making it the language here more American, thereby ensuring that the uniqueness of our take on English is being all but extinguished.
Sure, new words are invented that replace old ones in any language - languages change. But shouldn't changes to a language be in the main, by the speakers of that dialect?? This isn't happening here anymore I’m sure of it, and so far I have only been referring to all the American words we are adopting - just wait until I get started on how Americanised our pronunciations have become!!!!!!! Nah, I'll leave that one.
Oh but I must say that thanks to the rise of the Internet and Microsoft our spelling is next to go (it'll take some time but watch, just like in Australia it will be acceptable to use British or American spellings in our schools and once that happens the American version will take over) I am seeing evidence of this already. Bye bye British English.
By the way, I have nothing against American English at all, it is a great language and if it was being extinguished like my mine is I'd be just as cheesed off (well, almost).
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Sorry, as ever, for the errors.
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Ok, just before I log off and while I'm on the subject I would like to add one more thing.
To really show the extent to which British English is moving closer to American English consider this. In England we don't have "periods" we have "full stops" yet more often than not nowadays I will hear people say "period" as opposed to "full stop" when meaning "end off" at the end of a sentence. As in a sentence along the lines of "I'm not going out with you - full stop".
Why in God's name would we ever use "period" when it is not (or rather wasn't) a feature of our language???? When people say this sometimes I'll actually ask them what a period is and they ALWAYS have no idea (I have to say that I only know what it is due to this site).
Also, at the moment in the media there is a lot of talk regarding skinny women and size zero's, but there is one problem with this - in Britain we DON'T have size zeros!! Why the hell would we talk about a clothing size that we don't have here??? AARRGGGHHHH!!!!
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The dot that indicates the end of a sentence was called a "period" in the Britain before it was ever called a "full stop". Many American words and/or expressions are actually older and in many ways more "traditional" than their modern BE equivalents.
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There is no such word in the English language as "slangs". It is an uncountable noun like "information" or "news" and is always singular.
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<<To really show the extent to which British English is moving closer to American English >>
I was under the impression that most people thought US and UK English are moving further apart? Even in the US, aren't the various dialects drifting away from each other, so that some time from now, they will diverge into mutually unintelligible languages?
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"At the end of the day" is used in America, as is "in the end" or "all in all" etc. And the tendency of languages is to grow farther apart... At one point American and British English were exactly the same. If not in vocabulary, the grammar, pronunciation, and semantics of both languages have continued to diverge and will continue to do so.
Although I imagine Americans would have no intention of the renaming the language American (or anything else for that matter)...
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Actually, many make the argument that because of television and mass media in general, we are speaking more similarly than we ever have before. Some accents have blurred or fallen away altogether.
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<<I was under the impression that most people thought US and UK English are moving further apart? Even in the US, aren't the various dialects drifting away from each other, so that some time from now, they will diverge into mutually unintelligible languages?>>
Actually it's the opposite. In the US we watch news programs in California where the person announcing the news may be in New York or Atlanta. From movies to music to television, we're brought closer to people in other parts of the country where there may be a different accent. So a kid in Ravenswood, West Virginia watches television shows that take place in Beverly Hills and as a result grows up with a Valley Girl accent. If anything the media probably produces less variation in accents across the United States.
Others here may be more knowledgeable than I, but I don't believe we really have "dialects" per se in the US, perhaps with the exception of Gullah.
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<<The dot that indicates the end of a sentence was called a "period" in the Britain before it was ever called a "full stop". Many American words and/or expressions are actually older and in many ways more "traditional" than their modern BE equivalents. >>
Yeah that's right my friend apparently we did, the same also goes for the use of "I guess" as well as "Fall" to mean "Autumn".
But you have missed the point completely mate, and that is that we STOPPED using them, our language, as the years went by changed and these uses (to name but a few) fell out of use here. That they were maintained by Americans and that they have now been 're-introduced' back into our spoken language makes them completely and utterly an Americanism.
I also disagree with the notion that our languages are moving apart, in my opinion that is completely ludicrous. But I am certainly no linguistic expert and if this is what the experts are saying then I am certainly no-one to argue.
But the bottom line is that I understand Americans far better in 2008 than I did, say, in 1988 (when I first met some American relatives - man I remember having some mix-ups with my cousins who were roughly the same age) and I bet I'll know even more about their language in 2018. Of course I do realise that at no point were British and Americans unintelligible from one another.
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At least in North America, the real change is not the general levelling of dialects across the board, but rather the levelling of dialects at the local level occurring simultaneously with the divergence of dialects at the regional level. The driver behind this is not the media at all, but rather population becoming more mobile than it was in the past; people who at one time would likely have lived in the same village their entire lives are now more likely to live in a greater region, and hence there is greater contact between individuals speaking different *but related* dialects.
A good example of this is while many local dialects along the eastern seaboard are being lost and watered down into more general regional dialects, there are simultaneously significant regional-level sound changes going on within NAE dialects, such as the NCVS and the California Vowel Shift. The latter is quite notable as it affects dialects which were much closer together just 50 years go than they are today, as the modern dialects spoken in California are descended essentially from Midwestern dialects brought there through internal immigration around the end of WW2.
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>>But the bottom line is that I understand Americans far better in 2008 than I did, say, in 1988 (when I first met some American relatives - man I remember having some mix-ups with my cousins who were roughly the same age) and I bet I'll know even more about their language in 2018. Of course I do realise that at no point were British and Americans unintelligible from one another.<<
Mind you though that there is a major difference between becoming more familiar with other dialects and actually speaking closer to them. For instance, I myself am far more familiar with other English dialects than I was in, say, elementary school, but at the same time I likely actually speak *further* from most other English dialects today than then (due to effectively abandoning trying to speak in a GA-like fashion away from home due to finding such to actually not really have any social prestige on a local level amongst people of my age group).
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<<At least in North America, the real change is not the general levelling of dialects across the board, but rather the levelling of dialects at the local level occurring simultaneously with the divergence of dialects at the regional level. The driver behind this is not the media at all, but rather population becoming more mobile than it was in the past; people who at one time would likely have lived in the same village their entire lives are now more likely to live in a greater region, and hence there is greater contact between individuals speaking different *but related* dialects.>>
Oh absolutely Travis, the same thing applies here. You only need to see (or rather hear) the effect this has had on our beautiful West country dialects, put simply the Cornish folk don't sound quite so... er.. Cornish any more!
It is probably the best part of England to live and hence, the influx of migrants from other parts of the British Isles has pretty much rendered the accent and the dialect there obsolete (same goes for Devon and Somerset).
Of course, as you imply, in the place of one accent another will surely spring up and a newer accent has formed in the Western counties of England (one that's not quite as nice mind, just think Pirates and you pretty much have the 'old' Cornish/West Country accent). Actually, obsolete is a tad harsh, some of the original pre-war accents do survive amongst the older generations and the farm folk (who don't tend to mingle as much!).
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