Is American Vocabulary Invading Our Language?

While trawling through the capacious eternity that is the Facebook News Feed, I discovered a rather disturbing pattern. On most occasions I can bring myself to excuse the poor spelling, grammar and punctuation that has become commonplace on social media sites such as Twitter and the aforementioned Facebook. "I hope there happy with there lives" and "I seruslee need to go brighton tommorow" are just a small taster of this. Recently however, I've been faced with something that I can't tolerate.

American English vocabulary is beginning to rear its ugly head, and I wasn't just reading the endless statuses of my two American cousins either. I was reading short paragraphs and minor sentences that could have been written by an American Ninth Grader, but were authored by Year 10s, 11s and 12s who were born and raised in England. When I first noticed a handful of people that I'm friends with using the proper noun "Mom" rather than "Mum" or "Mother" I almost fell off of my chair. The media is a big influence, with ever present American cartoons and television shows with American actors using American English being watched by an English audience; it's no wonder. It's a shame really; we seem to be losing the very essence of our identities; powerful, all conquering speakers of British English. But is this new found vocabulary a bad thing? According to Webster's New World Dictionary (1991) there are roughly 11,000 words in British English that can trace their heritage to the USA, showing that the invasion began quite a while ago.

Personally, I believe that a diverse world is a wonderful thing. It allows us to experience other people's beliefs, ethos's and values, and it can educate us about different cultures. We eat their foods, we go to their festivals and we listen to their language. Multiculturalism is an essential factor in a modern society, but on the other hand there is also a need for people to take pride in their origin, and not allow others to deeply influence them. Language is one of the biggest victims of other cultures and other countries. I use the term "victim" in a nicest possible sense. Take the English Language for example; it's an amalgamation of languages, such as Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin and Ancient Greek. There are also a vast array of variations including American, Australian and Irish. These "invasive" languages have made British English what it is today, if American English is becoming a benefactor of our language, then I suppose we must welcome it with open arms.

So it's not really a big surprise then to witness American vocabulary entering British English, as other languages have done so before it. English is an ever evolving language and has been for centuries.  My opinion of the American invasion has changed over the short course of this article and I've now convinced myself that American vocabulary may not be as bad as first feared. The galvanisation of so many languages into one has made British English stronger; I just hope that this is the case for the most recent addition.

Hayden Edwards