3 H POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



BRITICISMS VERSUS AMERICANISMS 



By Professor EDWIN W. BOWEN 



RANDOLPH-MACON COLLEGE 



[~T is a recognized fact that there is a considerable variation in the 

 - 1 - English language as spoken by the two great branches of the 

 Anglo-Saxon race. The English people differ from the American 

 people in the use of our common speech not only in their characteristic 

 mode of pronunciation and orthography, but they also differ from us 

 in no less striking a manner in the use of certain idioms and house- 

 hold phrases, which constitute the small change of our every-day speech. 

 This difference is the natural outgrowth of the separation of the two 

 peoples by the estranging ocean, which is of necessity a great barrier 

 to complete intercourse. To be sure, the fact that the English people 

 and the American people have distinct national entities with the re- 

 sulting difference, during the last hundred years, of national ideals 

 and pursuits, has had the natural and inevitable effect of widening 

 the breach between the speech of the two countries. N"o doubt the 

 present variation will be accentuated more and more as the years go 

 by, and the language of Great Britain and of America, far from 

 becoming absolutely identical in pronunciation and idiom with the 

 flight of centuries, will go on developing with an ever-increasing 

 divergence from the common standard. If this be true — and certainly 

 the facts as to the present tendency seem to warrant such a conclusion 

 — the final result may be the unique linguistic phenomenon of two 

 separate and distinct English tongues, if such a thing be not an im- 

 possibility. 



Before pointing out the variations of our American English from 

 British English, it may be interesting to note the source of our Amer- 

 ican vernacular, and the contributing causes of the chief variations 

 from the authoritative standard of the mother country. 



When our Saxon forefathers found their way to the shores of this 

 western continent and here established their permanent abode, the 

 settlers naturally brought with them the language of their native 

 country. This w r as, of course, the noble tongue of Shakespeare and 

 Milton. Our British cousins who criticize our English so freely and 

 cast reproach upon it as if it were a mere jargon, a barbarous patois, 

 evidently lose sight of the fact that it boasts the same high pedigree as 

 their own much-vaunted Elizabethan speech. When the English lan- 

 guage was first transplanted in American soil, it was identical in 

 orthography, orthoepy and idiom with the speech of the mother 



