British English?

We talk about British English as a national dialect. But Britain is an island, not a nation. The country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and it consists of four nations: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The word British can refer to the people and things of that island in particular, and occasionally to island group to which it belongs, the British Isles, which includes Ireland and about 6000 other islands. But British is also used to describe things and people from the UK, since there is no adjectival form of United Kingdom. This means that people from Northern Ireland hold British (not United-Kingdomish) passports, even though they do not live in Great Britain. That gives us three possible interpretations of British English: ‘the English of Great Britain’, ‘the English of the United Kingdom’ or ‘the English of the British Isles’. So one argument against British English is that it's an ambiguous term.

Even if we keep our attention to Great Britain, that island is home to many varieties of English, including more than one ‘standard’ variety (e.g., ‘BBC English’, ‘Scottish Standard English’). The ‘standard’ and more ‘vernacular’ varieties spoken up and down the island can have a lot in common, including their spelling systemFootnote ² and much of their vocabulary. They differ especially in pronunciation and have some grammatical and vocabulary differences. This leads to the argument that we should refer to British Englishes and among them more specific varieties, rather than to a singular British English.

Perhaps the biggest problem for British English is the sloppy tendency to associate British with England alone, and more particularly with certain varieties of the south-east of England, or with ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RP), the allegedly regionless accent of the elite. We see this when EFL schools claim to teach ‘the British accent’ (meaning some version of RP) or when anyone uses British accent to refer to the speech of someone from England, but not to the speech of someone from Scotland. (Sometimes Americans do this, but sometimes so do English people. See, for example, Katharine Jones's Reference Jones2001 study of English expatriates in America.) If the English of England is what we really want to talk about, why not say English English instead of British English?

English English?

Three things keep me from using English English when I write about transatlantic differences in English:

First, when writing about vocabulary or spelling (which I often do), it is fairly easy to generalize across the whole of the UK. Colour has a ‘u’ in Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. People from any region of the UK say plaster where Americans would say Band-Aid. At those levels, talking about British English is justifiable, as long as we have the facts straight.

The second reason to not say English English is that it gives the false impression that if we leave out Scotland and Wales, all the English on the island is the same. However, the English of east London youth and the English of Newcastle pensioners might well be more different than the Englishes of the Queen and the leader of the Scottish parliament. Variation is rife.

Finally, I have a particular allergy to the phrase English English because the doubling of the word English implies something that I don't want to imply. Think about phrases like these:

This is contrastive focus reduplication: repetition of an expression in order to highlight its difference from something else (Ghomeshi et al., Reference Ghomeshi, Jackendoff, Rosen and Russell2004). Repeating salad expresses: ‘find me the real salad, not this potato stuff!’ The natural interpretation then is to assume that the salad-orderer wanted a green salad, because we think of green salads as the ‘best’ example of a type of salad – what salad really means. French-French refers to more than possession of a particular passport; it involves having all the stereotypical properties of a French person. And so, even if we don't intend to use English English to mean ‘real English’ or ‘the best English’, that impression is bound to leak through. The assumption that the English of England is ‘real English’ is exactly the assumption that I routinely take a stand against when writing about British and American English for non-linguist audiences.

American English?

I have heard fewer protests against the term American English than against British English, which probably stems from the fact that most of the people who speak American English have no problem calling themselves Americans, while British identity is far more contentious because of the tendency for the term British to be more closely associated with one of its nations (England) than with the other three (see, e.g., Kumar, Reference Kumar2003). However, the same problems arise in attaching a single name to all the English of such a complex nation as the United States: the geographical term is ambiguous, the language varies within those borders, and stereotypes come into play in imagining what the term refers to.

American is an ambiguous adjective, in that it can to refer to just the residents of the United States of America, but also to people and things associated with all of North and South America. The complaint that American should not be used to refer exclusively to people from the United States is especially heard from people in countries where geography lessons have one continent in the western hemisphere, called America. Anglophone countries generally use the seven-continent system in which North America and South America are not the same continent (since, among other reasons, they are not on the same tectonic plate). This means that in English America generally is the United States: the two continents are referred to in the plural: the Americas. That doesn't solve the adjective problem, however. Things from the Americas are American (e.g. the Organization of American States, an alliance between the countries of the Americas). So American English could theoretically apply to all Englishes spoken in those two continents and the islands around them.

Even if we agree that American English is United States English (when we want to include Canadian English, we can say North American English), there's the problem of variation. While I'm occasionally told by British folk that ‘Americans don't have accents like we do’, that's much the same as many Americans not being able to distinguish among British accents (and even Australian and South African ones). As I wrote about last time (Murphy, Reference Murphy2016), we are more able to recognize differences within the groups we belong to than in those we're less familiar with. American accents are distinguishable enough to allow for a good deal of accent-based comedy in the U.S., such as the recent parodic film trailer by Seth Meyers for Boston Accent, in which he performs several distinguishable Boston accents plus a failed attempt at a Boston accent by a ‘British actor’, also played by Meyers (Late Night, 2016).

American regional variety in vocabulary and grammar is plentiful enough to warrant the multi-volume Dictionary of American Regional English (2013) and the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project [2016], respectively. And, as in the UK, the variation in English is not just regional. Some linguists and educationists have argued that African-American Vernacular English (sometimes referred to as Ebonics) so different from ‘standard’ American that children who speak it should be offered bilingual education services at school (Carpenter, Reference Carpenter2012). So, as for British English, the term American English hides subtle and not-so-subtle variation.

As with British English, there is a tendency to think of American English as being some particular kind of American English, though these might differ from context to context. For instance, when the UNILAD website asked young adults on London streets to give their ‘best American accent’, Californian ‘Valley Girl’/surfer and hip hop stereotypes were on show (UNILAD 2015), but when South Korean English schools advertise ‘American English’ teaching, they mean ‘Standard American English’ (Strother, Reference Strother2015).

Other nations, other Englishes

I've kept my attention to British and American here primarily because they are the Englishes I'm writing about in this series. But it's also the case that the naming problems are particularly fierce for these two varieties. There is less polysemy in geographic terms like New Zealand or Canadian than in British or American. Any ‘national English’ tag will obscure variation – though the level of variation might not be as striking or as region-based as those in the UK and US (e.g. Australia – see, e.g., Harrington et al., Reference Harrington, Cox and Evans1997). Another reason for concentrating on British and American is that they are the two that – for right or wrong – tend to be cited as models in EFL courses.

Solutions

While they are not perfect, the labels American English and British English can be useful. But of course they should be used with care. When I write about American English and British English, I don't mind the ambiguities too much, since the boundaries between geographically close dialects within those nations are also ambiguous and since – and this is key – I mainly write about vocabulary and spelling. Whether we're talking about Britain, the United Kingdom or the British Isles, Texas, Missouri or Oregon, the written form is fairly standardized within each country and the vocabulary variations are limited to certain semantic fields.

But while the terms British English and American English feel justifiable when talking about, say, the names for car parts, it is rarely appropriate in serious discussions of accents, since there is no one ‘British accent’ or ‘American accent’. Beyond accent, there are regional and sociolectal variations in grammar, vocabulary, word frequency, pragmatic behaviours, and so forth. If we're talking about accents or about regional or class-based, or age-based (etc.) variations in grammar, vocabulary or usage, then we should be more specific. That's easy to remember to do when talking about the dialects that are considered further from the ‘standard’. But we should also remember to be specific when talking about the English of the Queen or a BBC reporter, instead of assuming the features of their speech are ‘British English’ or ‘English English’, and similarly for American English. There are not always ready-made labels available, but descriptions can work.

In the end, however, when studying lexical semantics and pragmatic phenomena (as I will do in the remaining two columns), writing about American and British English is less a convenience than a necessity. The resources that I rely on (and that I critique), corpora and dictionaries, are rarely about ‘Manchester English’ or ‘Southwestern American English’ or any such thing (at least not the ones that are big enough to do me any good). They are things like the British National Corpus (2007) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies Reference Davies2008-). Undoubtedly, one misses a lot of semantic and pragmatic variation when using such tools. But they offer places from which to start. If we find consistent differences across national corpora or dictionaries, that's telling us something at least about predominant usages in those countries. The next instalment in this series discusses some US-UK differences that we can find by looking closely at the wording of dictionary definitions in the two countries – and some that the dictionaries miss.