Countries where English is spoken... (in order of total speakers) U.S. India Nigeria (see here for more data)here

Countries where English is spoken

Varieties of English NOT DEVIANT FORMS BUT SIMPLY DIFFERENT SYSTEMS

When you hear someone speaking you can guess... Regional origins Gender Age Cultural background Education Social status...

“dialect” (=any variety of a language) Everybody speaks a dialect Some dialects get more attention, have more prestige, but this has nothing to do with its linguistic status Dialects are systematic and regular The negative or positive connotations of dialects are purely SOCIAL

Eddie Izzard on British and American English Aluminium Centrifugal Leisure Basil Herbs

Americanisms: examples […] In Miral Freida Pinto is a Palestinian teen... For this role she has taken her share of the critical hits. The London-based Guardian found her "uneasy" and Slant said her performance "creates a vacuum." Reaction since opening overseas in the fall has been mostly mixed to negative, although it grossed a respectable $65,000 on just four screens in New York and Los Angeles. "Come then," he gestured and turned back to his shop. As they walked, she fanned herself with her big hat and looked around. "Lovely landscape. Do you own all this?" He replied “Hardly, only fifty acres: this shop and that barn and house up there on the hill. " She turned and looked at a modest adobe ranch house and a red barn. "It's still very nice." One important revival will hit Broadway this month: on the 25th, Driving Miss Daisy, the tale of an unlikely friendship in the Jim Crow South, starring Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones, starts at the John Golden Theatre My daddy always said “nothing like a glass of bourbon and branch water after a hard days work”

Accent + Lexicon and... Culture

English in the US Consequence of history: at first natural...

Then... Gradual loss of contact Natural growth of the language in the new land Later Revolution, new system, etc.

John Algeo (1992) BE, just like AE, was born in 1776 “A language is not a landscape, a tree, a river, or any of the other metaphors we use as concrete visualizations of what a language really is – an abstract system of relationships contained in the minds of people and expressed by sounds and marks. We must remind ourselves that when 2 'branches' of a language grow apart, they are not categorically distinct like the branches of a real tree, but continue to exchange influences and may grow back together”

AE is rooted in the varieties of language spoken in England before colonization but the “trunk” is far from a homogeneous... At first AE was criticized, considered inferior (especially after the war of independence)

The first use of the word Americanism is by John Witherspoon (1781), a Scot and then president of the Princeton College: “Americanism, by which I understand an use of phrases or terms, or a construction of sentences, even among persons of rank or education, different from the use of the same terms or phrase, or the construction of similar sentences, in Great Britain […] it does not follow in every case, that the terms of phrases used are worse in themselves, but merely that they are American and not of English growth.”

In his consideration Witherspoon (unusually dispassionate for those times) admitted the need for some uniformity, but was aware that language change cannot be prevented

More recent definitions of Americanism From the Oxford English Dictionary. The Dictionary of American English: “not only words and phrases which are clearly or apparently of American origin, or have greater currency here than elsewhere, but also every word denoting something which has a real connection with the development of the country and the history of its people” (William Craigie)

From Dictionary of Americanisms: “'Americanism' means a word or expression that originated in the United States. The term includes: outright coinages, such as appendicitis...such words as adobe...which first became English in the US; and terms such as faculty, fraternity, refrigerator when used in senses first given them in American usage” (Mitford Mathews)

2 points reconciled by John Algeo Synchronic Americanism: “expression with characteristic ofrm or use in America, whatever its origin may have been” Diachronic Americanism: “expression that originated in America, whatever its current use may be”

Americanisms began to enter the language in the “Age of Discovery” - the late 16 th and early 17 th century In England, in the same period: French, Latin, Greek; spoken upper-class English based in the London area and southeast Midlands; popular speech dominated by geographical varieties At first the American colonists acknowledged the prestige of standard English centered in London

First additions: Contact between Indians and explorers: GUAIACUM CHOCAOLATE CANOE POWWOW MOCCASIN CAWCAWWASSOUGH > CAUCUS ISQUONTERSQUASH > SQUASH WEJACK > WOODCHUCK

LATER CONTRIBUTUTIONS FROM VARIOUS ETHNIC STRANDS: BOGUS (< African) JUKE-BOX (< African American) COOKIE (< Dutch) BAYOU (< French) MACARONI (< Italian) GEISHA (< Japanese) VIGILANTE ( < Spanish) LUTEFISK ( < Swedish, Norwegian) BAGEL (< Yiddish)

MULTILINGUALISM and MULTIDIALECTALISM and their corresponding linguistic attitudes and ideologies are at the heart of the history of American English

In situation of mixed languages... LINGUA FRANCA: a working language, a bridge language, a third language used by people who don't share a mother tongue PIDGIN: simplified language that develops in areas of contact and exchange as a means of communication CREOLE: stable language that originated from pidgin

1580s First English establishment in ROANOKE > Sir Walter Raleigh “the lost colony” Next attempt: Jamestown, Virginia, 1607 > the Virginia company of London

The “Columbian exchange” Interaction between Natives and Europeans: they exchanged a range of items (plants, animals, ideas, diseases, etc.)