[open-linguistics] Is there an American English?

[Nancy Ide]

Hi William,

You could not be more right! We have struggled with a definition of American English, and after asking the American Dialect Society and the Linguistic Society of America, we found that there is no real definition. The one on our website is an approximation that we made up with the help of people from those two organizations. 

Everything you say about US/Canadian differences is absolutely true. In fact, we include some Canadian texts in the ANC (don't tell!), especially those with US spelling (for most Canadian texts, British spelling is the main difference). In particular we include Cory Doctorow's fiction, some of which he distributes freely. We have considered including texts from various regions and dialects as well as ethnic groups, but we have no funding to do all of that. The best we can do is to gather texts that follow "standard" American (as opposed to British) syntactic and lexical regularities, since the biggest problem for computational linguistics is those pesky British syntactic constructions that throw our language models out of whack. 

Then there is a new type of English evolving--"international English", which is the English spoken by non-native speakers of English. If I may attempt a characterization, it uses a limited lexicon and certain syntactic configurations that more closely imitate direct translations from other languages--at least, this seems the case for Europeans. It is fascinating to see this becoming more and more standardized among speakers from very different linguistic backgrounds. If you have traveled extensively in Europe you are probably aware of it. I've even noticed myself slip[ping into this dialect when in the company of non-native speakers exclusively for a period of time.

Thanks for the observations!

Best,
Nancy

On Jan 15, 2011, at 3:02 PM, William Waites wrote:

> I have learned from the ANC web site that as a Montrealer,
> particularly as one who has lived abroad for a considerable
> period of time, I am not a native speaker of American English.
> So be it, actually I would tend to agree.
> 
> But this brings to mind an interesting question: is it
> reasonable to draw an arbitrary line along the 49th parallel?
> 
> I have travelled extensively in the States and I have the
> strong impression that it is culturally not one country but
> four or five, and this, in my experience, extends to language.
> 
> I suspect that, apart from spelling, the speech of a
> Vancouverite is closer to that of someone from Seattle than
> it is to a Newfoundlander. The English of someone from the
> Appalachians is very different from that of a Texan. Despite
> the French influence, an anglophone Montrealer will likely
> be closer to a New Yorker than the latter to someone from
> rural Louisiana. Not to mention Newfoundland English which
> is different from everything else on the continent.
> 
> As in Europe, but perhaps less pronounced, there seems to
> be a language continuum with East-West and North-South
> dimensions and still preceptible dialect regions that 
> correspond to historical migrations. So is the 49th parallel
> really so significant?
> 
> Cheers,
> -w
> -- 
> William Waites                <mailto:ww at styx.org>
> http://eris.okfn.org/ww/         <sip:ww at styx.org>
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>