185. American English

I spent the last 35 years teaching English and the last 58 studying it. It wasn’t until about 20 years ago that I really began appreciating my own version of the language: American English. There’s little doubt that I typically speak and write the standard variety of that version of English, but I’ve learned to be especially proud of it.

I think most people who speak any variety of English are at least vaguely, if not fully, aware that American English spellings are different than British English. We can thank Noah Webster, an early 19^th century American English teacher, grammarian, and lexicographer. He viewed some letters as excess since only one vowel sound seemed necessary to the pronunciation (most of these words were those that wandered into English from French), such as the u’s in the British colour and flavour that become color and flavor in American English. He also saw words with the silent gh as superfluous and tried his best to get rid of them and make words such as fight into fite but the American public would not go that far. He was, however, successful in changing the re in words like center and theater into the current American spelling instead of the British centre and theatre (interestingly enough, theatre or theater will not be corrected by American spell checks because both seem to be acceptable).

While Noah Webster was instrumental in changing the written variety of English, it has been the American people as a whole who have modified the language for our own continent. We have assimilated many new languages into our own, yet we carry on with the pronunciations of those words in the languages from whence they originated. A filet of fish is pronounced in the French way so that it sounds like fill-ay, not fill-it. In American the word garage does not rhyme with the word carriage as it would in England, but it has a second soft g so that it is a guh-razh, not a “garriage.”

In American English when we wash up, we wash our hands. In Britain when you wash up, you wash the dishes. In America we only mind a few things while watching others. In London, when stepping off the underground, you must Mind the Gap, the gap between the train and the platform. We mind our manners but our children are the ones who better mind us, not the other way around. Parents run the show in the states, but in the Isles, I was never quite certain of that. At any rate, after all these years I’m very appreciative of all the varieties of the English language, but I’m especially fond of the American dialect.