American English

American English is the English of the United Kingdom of America: the first language of most of the Realm’s people, the language of its Parliament and its courts, and the common tongue of forty-nine polities that between them speak dozens of others. Nobody who speaks it calls it American English. In daily life it is simply English; the longer name belongs to linguists, to lexicographers, and to the covers of dictionaries sold abroad.

It is easiest to describe by where it sits between the two larger standards of the language. In the mouth it is American: its accents, its idiom and the greater part of its everyday vocabulary are the continent’s own. On the page it is mixed, because its spelling was settled word by word over the nineteenth century, so that the Realm writes colour and centre in the British manner but defense, traveled, program and check in the American one, and has never had a rule that would tell a child which is which. In the Crown’s hand it is either: the Crown’s own documents and the courts accept and use both spellings of every word, works of reference such as this Register keep the full British one, and all of them write the day-first date and the parliamentary forms of address, in a formal register that everybody can read and comparatively few are required to write.

Over its regional accents sits one accent with standing, the Potomac accent of the capital and the Court, the voice in which the Realm heard its judges, its officers and its newsreaders for most of two centuries, and which has been receding since the Second Great War. What the language does not carry, for all its Crown and its peerage, is any mark of class. American English tells a listener where a speaker grew up and sometimes what they do for a living. It does not tell them what rank the speaker’s family holds, and it never has.

Name

The language has no name in ordinary use because it has never needed one. The Realm’s people speak English; the people of Great Britain speak English too, and are recognised as doing so differently in the way that a speaker from the Carolinas is recognised in the Grants, without anyone supposing that two languages are involved. When a distinction has to be drawn, the usual form is British or the English of England on one side and plain English on the other, which is the ordinary habit of a large country naming its neighbour and not itself.

“American English” is the term of the scholars. It was in use among philologists by the middle of the nineteenth century, it is the name under which the language is taught to foreign learners and under which its grammars and dictionaries are catalogued in the libraries of other countries, and it is the name of this article for the same reason: a reference work must call its subject something. The phrase has the defect of suggesting that the language belongs to the continent’s geography rather than to its people, and it has survived because nothing better was ever proposed.

Other names have had their moment and not lasted. The King’s English, in the sense of correct English, is a British phrase and is understood in the Realm but seldom used there, partly because the King’s English and the Realm’s English differ in half the spellings on any page. Continental English was tried by a handful of nineteenth-century grammarians who wanted a name that would include the West, and it never left their title pages. Webster’s English, meaning the everyday standard as opposed to the formal register, is a schoolroom joke rather than a term.

The shape of the language

American English is best understood as one language with two written standards and one spoken standing.

The everyday standard is the English that schoolchildren are taught, that newspapers print, that shops put on their signs and that people write to one another. Its spelling is the mixed list the Realm settled in the nineteenth century and keeps in Webster’s dictionary; its dates are written day first or month first depending on the polity; its punctuation keeps double quotation marks, sets full stops outside them and writes Mr and Dr without a point. It is the standard of almost everything the Realm reads.

The formal register is the English of the Crown’s documents, of the courts and of works of reference. It recognises both spellings of every word, defence and defense, travelled and traveled, programme and program, and uses both; it writes dates day first everywhere; it addresses office-holders by their parliamentary styles; and at its highest it keeps the ceremonial language of the Charter and the liturgy. Letters patent, commissions, proclamations, judgments, statutes as printed, the official government gazette and the Register itself are written in it. It is not a separate language and not quite a separate standard. It is a register, in the linguist’s sense: a way of writing that belongs to certain occasions and certain institutions, which a reader moves into without noticing and a writer has to be taught.

The two standards meet on every page where the Crown meets the public. A tax form prints licence in its official heading and license in the instructions beneath it, and both are correct. A court’s judgment may spell defence in one paragraph and defense in the next, and quotes a witness’s written statement as it was written, since either spelling is the Crown’s. Most of the Realm’s people will spend their lives reading the formal register occasionally and never writing a line of it, and they do not find the doubling strange, any more than they find it strange that a church service is not conducted in the language of the dinner table.

Over the two written standards sits one standing in speech, the Potomac accent, which is described below. It is a prestige accent without being a class accent: it belongs to a place and to a set of professions, and anybody who grew up near the capital speaks it whatever their family did.

Spelling

A list, not a rule

The everyday spelling of American English is the result of a reform that partly succeeded. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the schoolmaster and lexicographer Noah Webster proposed a set of simplified spellings, most of them intended to make words look more like they sound. Some of them won and some of them lost, and they did not win or lose in groups. Each change was settled word by word, over two or three generations, by the habits of printers, teachers, clerks and newspapers, and the standard that came out at the end was not the application of any principle but a list.

The list is easiest to show than to state:

A foreign learner looking at that table naturally tries to find the rule behind it, and there is none. The -our words survived and the -re words survived, while nearly everything else Webster touched went his way. The reasons are specific to each word and in most cases are no longer recoverable: a printer in one decade who happened to set centre in his books, a generation of schoolmistresses who happened to prefer colour, a government department that happened to print license on a form that everybody saw. Historians of the language have spent a good deal of ink trying to find a pattern in the survivals, a north against a south, schools against printers, the frequent words against the rare, and each proposed pattern fails on a dozen counterexamples. The standard ruling among them is that there is no pattern to find, and that the Realm’s spelling is a record of a great many small decisions nobody coordinated.

The practical consequence is that American English spelling has to be learnt as a list. Children in the Realm are drilled on the mixed words, the colour-but-gray words, the theatre-but-program words, in a way children elsewhere are not, and the words are the famous traps of every spelling test and every examination. The labour of labor-saving, which is always labour-saving, and the defense of the Ministry of Defence, which is spelled one way in the newspapers and the other on the ministry’s own letterhead, are among the classic confusions of the schoolroom.

Webster’s

The list is kept by a dictionary. The Realm has no academy of its language, no statute of spelling and no official body with authority over either, and it has never seriously wanted one. What it has instead is Webster’s: the dictionary Noah Webster published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language, continued after his death by the publishers who bought its rights, revised in edition after edition, and consulted for two centuries by every schoolteacher, newspaper sub-editor and ministry clerk who needed to know how a word is spelled. A word in the Realm is spelled correctly because Webster’s spells it so. The dictionary’s authority rests on nothing but use, which is the only authority a dictionary ever has, and it has been sufficient.

The dictionary does not claim to legislate. Its prefaces have always described the language rather than prescribing it, and where usage genuinely divides it gives both forms and says which is commoner. But because it is the only dictionary most people consult, its first form becomes the standard in practice. Rival dictionaries have been published, some of them excellent, and none has displaced it; the Realm’s publishers, newspapers and schools settled on Webster’s in the second half of the nineteenth century and have never had a reason to move.

The formal register’s spelling

The Crown and the courts never chose between the list and the older British forms. In their documents both spellings of every word are correct, defence and defense, licence and license, travelled and traveled, programme and program, cheque and check, grey and gray, and both are used, often in the same document. The usage is older than the everyday standard: when the Realm’s courts and its Crown began keeping written records, British spelling was simply how English was spelled, the list came in beside it as their clerks learnt it, and the institutions that keep records have never had a reason to strike either form out of their own past. Works of reference, the Register among them, chose the full British spelling for the sake of consistency.

The two spellings are taught side by side in the law schools, to the civil service on entry, and to the editors of works of reference. The British forms are not taught in the ordinary schools except as something to be recognised, and the average citizen of the Realm never needs to write them. A letter to a Member of Parliament in the everyday standard receives a reply that may spell either way, and neither side regards the other as having made a mistake.

Learning the formal register

The formal register is learnt on the job. A new entrant to the Crown’s civil service is issued, on the first day, with the service’s own style book, a slim volume setting out the formal spellings, the order of dates, the styles of office-holders and the forms of the Crown’s documents, and is expected to have absorbed it within a month. The law schools teach it to their students in the first term, alongside the forms of pleading, and the Bar examinations are set and answered in it. The editors of works of reference learn it from their predecessors’ pages. Everywhere else it is met rather than learnt: in the letters that come from government offices, in the judgments reported in the newspapers, in the commissions framed on office walls.

Because it is learnt late and on the job, the formal register is relaxed about spelling in a way that the schools are not. The everyday list is learnt in childhood and half-forgotten, and adult writers of the Realm misspell its mixed words all their lives; the formal register accepts both forms of every word, so that a clerk never has to remember which side a word fell on. It is the only part of the Realm’s written English in which no spelling of an English word is wrong.

The British forms in the Crown’s documents are sometimes mistaken abroad for pretension, and sometimes, inside the Realm, for the badge of a caste. They are neither. They are part of the Crown’s inheritance, kept beside the list rather than instead of it, and a barrister may spell defence in one pleading and defense in the next.

The spelling bee

A language whose spelling has to be learnt by list might be expected to make a national sport of it, and the Realm has not quite done so. There is a spelling bee in most schools and a national final, held each spring since the nineteen-twenties, in which the finalists from the polities spell against each other for a trophy and a scholarship. It is reported in a paragraph, watched by the finalists’ families, and forgotten by June. Its most famous feature is the round of mixed words, in which competitors are asked to spell pairs such as theatre program or neighbour’s check, and in which more finalists fall than in any round of obscure words from Latin or Greek.

Teaching the list

Because the everyday spelling cannot be derived, it has to be drilled, and the Realm’s schools have drilled it in much the same way for a century and a half. Each week of the early grades brings a list of words, a test on Friday and a set of corrections on Monday, and the mixed words are taught as mixed words, in pairs that show the trap: colour beside gray, centre beside program, honour beside defense. Generations of the Realm’s teachers have taught them with rhymes, most of which do not scan and all of which are remembered for life, and the best known of them, which begins with the colour of the sky and ends with the price of a check, is recited in every polity with small local variations.

The formal register is not taught in the schools, beyond a lesson in the upper grades that shows pupils what it looks like and explains why the Crown’s letters spell differently from their own. Children are not marked down for writing defence in an essay, since it is not wrong, merely formal, and a child who does it is usually found to have a parent in the civil service or the law.

The drilling works, up to a point. The Realm’s adults spell the common mixed words correctly and misspell the rarer ones for the rest of their lives, and the Realm’s spell-checking software, which had to be taught the list word by word, is the most consulted authority on its spelling after Webster’s, and the least respected.

Pronunciation and accent

The regional accents

The Realm’s English is spoken in a great many regional accents, which follow its geography and the history of its settlement rather than its polity boundaries. A practised listener can often place a speaker within a hundred miles. There is no deep dialect fragmentation of the kind found in Germany or in the north of England: speakers from any two corners of the Realm understand each other without effort, and the differences are of accent and a little vocabulary rather than of grammar.

The accents fall into a handful of great families, each laid down by the settlement that made it.

New England speaks the oldest English on the continent, and the accents of its coast are among the few in the Realm that drop the r after a vowel, in the eastern towns and the ports above all. Inland, in the hill country and the Grants, the r returns and the vowels flatten. New England’s English is the one most often described as dry, and its speakers are the Realm’s great users of understatement, which the rest of the Realm hears as coldness and New England hears as manners.

New York has an accent of its own, the product of three centuries of every language on earth arriving in one harbour, and it is the most imitated accent in the Realm, usually badly. Around it, the accents of the Jerseys and the Hudson are its quieter relations.

The Chesapeake is the home of the Potomac accent and of the tidewater speech it grew from, and the old accents of Virginia and Maryland, soft and unhurried, are described below.

The South, from the Carolinas and Georgia to the Mississippi, speaks the accents the Realm hears as warmest and slowest, in a great many local forms, with the gliding vowels and the y’all by which the rest of the Realm identifies them. The Gulf adds to them the French of Louisiane, whose rhythms run through the English of the whole coast.

The Midland, the broad country settled from Pennsylvania westward along the rivers, speaks the accent the rest of the Realm hears as having no accent at all, which is the usual fate of the accent in the middle.

The Great Lakes and the upper Midwest carry the vowels of the German and Scandinavian languages their settlers spoke, and their English is recognisable across a room by its long o and its careful consonants.

The West, from the prairies to the Pacific, speaks the newest accents in the Realm, levelled by a century and a half of settlers from everywhere, and in the south-west the English of the March of Arizona, of Texas and of California carries the sounds and the rhythm of Spanish.

The accents are, as a family, those of the continent rather than of Britain. The r after a vowel is sounded almost everywhere, can’t and half take the short vowel of cat, and schedule begins with sk. To a British ear the Realm sounds American, and to the Realm’s ear a British speaker sounds British, with no sense on either side that the other’s accent is the older or the correct one.

The exception that proves the rule is the one accent that is not sounded that way.

The Potomac accent

The Potomac accent is the speech of the capital and the Court, and the only prestige accent the Realm has ever had.

It grew from the speech of the Chesapeake gentry, the planter families of the Virginia and Maryland tidewater whose English, in the eighteenth century, dropped the r after a vowel as the English of southern England was then beginning to do. When the government moved to New Westminster in 1801, on the Potomac between the two provinces, the tidewater accent was the speech of the district around it, and it became the speech of the capital: of the officials who moved there and the families who grew up there, of the Court at Columbia Palace, and of the Realm’s political life. In the Potomac accent Charter is Chahtah, Parliament is Pahliament, the vowels are long and the manner is slow; it is soft rather than clipped, and it sounds neither British nor like any other accent of the continent.

For most of two centuries it was the accent in which the Realm heard itself addressed. Judges spoke it on the bench, whatever polity they came from, because they had learnt their law in the capital’s courts. Officers of the army and navy spoke it because their schools were near the capital and their careers ran through it. Ministers spoke it or acquired it, and the House of Commons, whose members come from every corner of the Realm, was for generations the place where a provincial accent was most conspicuous. When the American Broadcasting Corporation began broadcasting in 1927, its announcers spoke it, and for the first seventeen years of the corporation’s life the national service was read in no other accent.

It was a prestige accent without being a class accent, and the distinction is the most important thing to understand about it. The Potomac accent belonged to a place and to a set of professions, not to a rank. A porter’s son who grew up in the capital spoke it as naturally as a judge’s daughter, and a duke’s heir raised on a ranch in the West did not speak it at all unless he went to the capital to learn a profession that required it. Its standing was the standing of the capital itself: it was the accent of the people who ran things, and it was learnt the way a trade is learnt, by working near it, not the way a manner is inherited.

The accent began to recede with the Second Great War. Millions of the Realm’s men served together, from every region, in units where nobody’s accent was the correct one; officers were commissioned from every polity and every walk of life, in numbers the capital’s schools could not supply; and the men who came home had spent four years hearing their own Realm speak in all its voices. When the ABC’s Charter was renewed in 1944, its announcers ceased to be required to speak in the capital’s voice, and the national service has since been read in whatever accent its newsreaders brought with them. The Commons followed more slowly. The courts followed more slowly still.

The Potomac accent is still spoken today by the people of the capital and its district, and it is still heard at every state occasion: in the proclamations read at the Palace, in the formal opening of Parliament, in the voices of the older judges. It is no longer the only voice in which the Realm’s institutions speak, and a young barrister from the Pacific coast who acquired it for her career would now be thought to be trying rather too hard.

Zed and zee

The last letter of the alphabet is called zed in the North and in the capital and zee in the West. In the South both are heard, often within the same family, and there is no agreement on which is older there. The line between the two runs roughly with the line between the old settled seaboard and the country settled after the Charter, which is also, roughly, the line between the polities that write the date day first and those that write it month first. Nobody is corrected for either. Children in the West who learn their alphabet from a Northern teacher learn zed, and forget it.

Lieutenant

Both lef-tenant and loo-tenant are correct, and both are heard in every branch of the Crown’s forces and in every province. The older pronunciation is the one the army and navy brought from Britain; the newer is the one the continent arrived at by reading the word as it is spelled. Neither the services nor Webster’s has ever ruled between them, and a lieutenant is addressed in whichever form the speaker grew up with. The same holds for a Lieutenant-Governor.

Vocabulary

Everyday words

The everyday vocabulary of American English is, at bottom, the continent’s own. The words of home, work, travel and trade are overwhelmingly those the colonists and their descendants made or borrowed on the continent, and a visitor from Britain in any of the Realm’s cities spends the first week translating.

What distinguishes the Realm’s vocabulary is that the British words never went away. Most everyday things have two names, both current and both correct: one that a British speaker would recognise and one that would sound American to them. A flat is also an apartment, a lift also an elevator, a lorry also a truck, and the Realm uses both words in each pair without regarding either as foreign. In most pairs the continental word is the commoner, and a child in the Realm grows up hearing apartment, gas, fall and store more often than flat, petrol, autumn and shop. But the British word is not a survival confined to the old or the pretentious. It is simply the other word, used by everybody some of the time and by some people most of the time.

The balance within a pair varies by region and generation. The British member tends to be commoner in the old seaboard and among older speakers, and the continental member in the West and among the young, but the tendencies are weak and every speaker uses both. Post and queue are the two British words that have held their ground best, and in the capital the post is still commoner than the mail. The pairs are not quite synonyms at the edges: holiday in the Realm means a public holiday as often as a vacation, and shop has a faint suggestion of the small and the local that store does not.

The pairs sort themselves, in practice, by occasion. The British word is commoner in writing than in speech, in older buildings than in new ones and in poetry than in advertising: the Realm’s poets have written of autumn for two centuries and its department stores have held fall sales for one. Signs painted before the Second Great War say petrol and chemist, and many of them are still up; signs painted since say gas and drugstore. Government buildings in the capital have lifts, because they were built by people who said so, and the office towers of the western cities have elevators. A speaker who uses the British word in the West is not heard as affected, merely as old-fashioned or from the East, and a speaker who uses the continental word in the capital is not heard as vulgar, merely as young.

Children’s books have been the great preservers of the British words, because the stories the Realm’s children grow up with were for a long time printed in the capital and in the older eastern cities, and a child who has never said biscuit in their life will have read it a hundred times before they are ten.

The words of government

The words of national government are those of a parliamentary monarchy, because that is what the Realm is. The Realm has a Parliament with a House of Commons and a House of Lords, a Prime Minister and a ministry, Members of Parliament, a Speaker, a Cabinet, a Governor-General, the Crown, a Privy Council, and Provinces and other polities whose heads of government are in several places called Premiers. The vocabulary of Westminster is the vocabulary of New Westminster, and nobody in the Realm thinks of it as borrowed.

Local government speaks another language. The counties, towns and cities of the Realm are governed in words that grew up on the continent: a county has a sheriff and county commissioners, a New England town has its selectmen and its town meeting, a western township has its trustees, and a city has a mayor and a council. The line between the two vocabularies runs where the constitution runs. Everything the Charter created or the Crown carries speaks Westminster’s English; everything the colonists built for themselves before and after it speaks their own.

The words of the law

The legal profession keeps the division of the colonial courts. A barrister argues cases in court; an attorney does everything else, the conveyancing, the wills, the contracts and the advice. The two titles descend from the colonies, where barristers were called to the bar of the superior courts and attorneys practised in the lower courts and the offices, and they have been preserved by the profession’s own habits rather than by any law that requires them. Every practitioner is admitted to do both, and many style themselves both, but the words still mark the two kinds of work. The Crown’s chief law officer is the Attorney-General, whose title is older than the division and is the one place where an attorney appears in court as a matter of course.

Judges are judges in speech, whatever their formal style, and their courts are courts. The Realm’s judgments are written in what the Royal American Supreme Court calls “plain modern American English”, clear enough that the citizen bound by the law can read it, and in the formal register’s spelling.

The words of school

The words of education are the continent’s. Children go to elementary school and high school, are sorted into grades, and graduate; what follows is college, which in ordinary speech means any institution of higher education, universities included, and a student at the Realm’s oldest university is said to be in college there. The British vocabulary of forms, sixth forms and public schools is understood but not used, except by a few private schools that have adopted it as a mark of distinction and are gently mocked for doing so.

The words of the forces

The Crown’s forces speak an English of their own, which is older than the Realm and has changed less than any other part of it. The army’s regiments keep the vocabulary of the regiments they descend from, some of which were raised before there was a Realm to raise them: the regimental mess, the colours, the adjutant and the quartermaster, the orderly room and the parade ground, and a set of ceremonial words of command that no civilian understands and every recruit learns in the first week. The navy’s English is older still and would be recognised on the lower deck of any ship of the eighteenth century. Both services use the formal register for their orders and their records, and both use the everyday standard for everything else, including, most of the time, their own spoken English, which is as regional as the men and women who speak it.

The two pronunciations of lieutenant live side by side in every mess in the Realm, and the question of which is correct is one of the oldest arguments in the services, conducted with the enthusiasm of people who know it can never be settled.

Money and measures

The currency is the pound, the American pound, divided into a hundred pence, spoken of as pounds and pence and, informally, as quid. The sign for it is the pound sign, and where it must be distinguished from the pound sterling it is written A£.

The Realm measures in customary units: miles, feet and inches, pounds and ounces, gallons, quarts and pints, and it reads temperature in Fahrenheit. The units are the English measures of the eighteenth century, which the Realm’s own Parliament inherited and has never replaced, and they differ in places from the British imperial units that Britain adopted by its own reform in 1824: an American gallon is smaller than a British one, and so is an American pint, which is a matter of permanent grievance to British visitors and of indifference to everybody else. Metric units are used in science, in medicine, in the Crown’s forces for most purposes and in a great deal of manufacturing, so that the Realm’s people are accustomed to two systems of measure in the way they are accustomed to two spellings, and move between them without much thought. Works of reference follow science rather than the street, and this Register gives its distances in kilometres, its areas in square kilometres and its temperatures in degrees Celsius, leaving the reader to convert them or not.

Grammar and usage

The grammar of American English is, in almost every respect, the grammar of the continent. Its constructions, its prepositions and its idioms are those a British speaker hears as American: one is in the hospital, not in hospital; things happen on the weekend and run Monday through Friday; things are different than one another; one writes someone rather than writing to them; and one asks do you have rather than have you got. Shall is formal and rare; while, among and toward are the ordinary forms.

Two features of the grammar belong to the older British pattern, and they are the grammatical marks by which a linguist can tell the Realm’s English from any other on the continent, though only the second is a rule.

The first is that collective nouns take either verb. The Realm says the Government are and the Government is, the Commons are sitting late and the Commons is sitting late, the team are playing well and the team is playing well, and both are correct. Like the paired words of everyday vocabulary, the two forms are both current and neither is foreign. The two mean exactly the same thing. There is no difference of sense between them, and a speaker who says the Government are bringing in a bill and one who says the Government is bringing in a bill have said the same sentence; which one a person uses is habit, and many use both in a single conversation. The plural is the more noticeable to outsiders, because the continent’s other Englishes have lost it, and it is commoner in the East and in Parliament; the singular is commoner in the West and in print. Webster’s gives both, and no examiner in the Realm has marked either wrong.

The second is a set of past tenses in the British form. The Realm writes and says learnt, spelt, dreamt, burnt and leapt, and the past participle of get is got: I have got it, never gotten, which the Realm’s speakers regard as a distinctively foreign word and use, if at all, as a joke.

Beyond those two, the grammar is the continent’s, and it is the least contested part of the language: no one in the Realm has ever argued about grammar with the heat they bring to spelling.

Punctuation and print

The everyday standard’s punctuation is its own mixture, and like the spelling it follows no single rule. Quotations are marked with double quotation marks, with single marks for a quotation inside a quotation. But full stops and commas go outside the closing quotation mark unless they belong to what is quoted, so that one writes that the Prime Minister called the proposal “premature”. Abbreviated titles take no point: Mr, Mrs, Ms, Dr and St are written without one, in the British manner. The formal register follows the same rules, which are one of the few matters on which the two standards agree.

Dates

The Realm writes dates in two orders, and which one a person uses depends on where they grew up.

In the thirteen founding Provinces and the Columbia District, the date is written day first: 8 July 2028, or 8/7/2028. In the West and in the polities that joined the Realm after the founding, it is written month first: July 8, 2028, or 7/8/2028, as the settlers who carried it west wrote it. The line between the two runs roughly along the line between zed and zee, and it produces exactly the confusion that anybody would predict. A date written in numbers alone is ambiguous across half the Realm, and official forms, bank documents and airline tickets print the month as a word, or print both orders, or ask the reader to write the date in a box marked Day and a box marked Month.

The formal register writes the date day first everywhere, in the Crown’s documents, the courts and works of reference, and this Register follows it.

Forms of address

In speech, the Realm addresses its office-holders plainly. A citizen who meets the Prime Minister says Mr Prime Minister or Madam Prime Minister; the Speaker is Mr Speaker or Madam Speaker; a judge is Judge; a Member of Parliament is addressed by name; and a peer is Lord or Lady whoever, which is the only point at which a title intrudes on the everyday. Most people would not know how to address a Governor-General in person and do not expect to need to; those who do say Your Excellency once and then whatever comes naturally.

On paper the Crown’s forms survive intact. Envelopes, commissions, the official government gazette, lists of precedence and the formal register generally give office-holders their full parliamentary styles: the Right Honourable for the Prime Minister and the Privy Council, the Honourable for Members of Parliament and judges of the superior courts, His Excellency or Her Excellency for the Governor-General. A letter to a Member of Parliament is addressed to the Honourable on the envelope and opens Dear Mr Smith inside it, and the difference between the envelope and the letter is the difference between the two registers of the language.

Register

Plain by default

The Realm’s everyday English aims to be plain, and its official English aims to be plainer. The doctrine that the courts write in “plain modern American English” is a civic value rather than a judicial habit. It holds that a statute, a judgment or a form that the citizen bound by it cannot read has failed at the thing it exists to do, and the Realm’s government has been criticised, periodically and with justice, whenever its prose has fallen short of it. The formal register is not an exception to the doctrine: a judgment written in the formal spelling is still expected to be written in plain words.

The ceremonial register

Alongside the plain default, a high register survives for solemn use, and it is deliberately preserved. The Charter of 1783 is written in the legal English of its century, with its whereas and its meaneth, and it is quoted in that English on every occasion that requires it. Proclamations, letters patent and the formal acts of the Crown keep the ancient forms. The liturgy of the Church of America keeps a prayer book whose language was old when the colonies were founded. None of these is used in daily life, and all of them are understood, in the way that the language of scripture is understood by people who do not speak it.

The three registers of the Realm’s written English are therefore not two standards and an exception but three degrees of formality, each with its occasions: the everyday standard for nearly everything, the formal register for the Crown’s business and the courts, and the ceremonial register for the moments when the Realm speaks to itself about what it is.

The language of Parliament and the courts

The Realm’s Parliament speaks the everyday language of the country and writes the formal register. Its debates are conducted in the accents of forty-nine polities, and they are reported in the official record of its proceedings in the formal spelling, so that a member from the West who says program in the Commons will find the word printed programme the next morning. Members have occasionally objected, and the reporters have always replied that the record is the Crown’s and is spelled as the Crown spells, which is the same answer the courts give.

The Commons has its own language of courtesy, older than the Realm and borrowed from Westminster: members speak of one another in the third person, as the honourable member for their constituency, address the chair rather than each other, and are called to order by the Speaker for words the House regards as unparliamentary. The list of such words, which has never been written down in full, is the one part of the Realm’s English that is governed by a ruling authority, and the Speaker rules on it word by word, as the Realm has done with everything else.

The courts write their judgments in the formal register and in plain words, and their spoken English is the English of the barristers who appear in them, which for most of the Realm’s history was the Potomac accent and is now whatever accent the barrister grew up with. Judges are addressed in court by their formal styles, Your Honour in the lower courts and My Lord or My Lady in the higher, and are Judge everywhere else.

Region and class

American English marks region strongly and class not at all.

A speaker’s accent, and some of their vocabulary, tells a listener where they grew up. Whether they say zed or zee, whether they write the date day first or month first, whether they call the evening meal dinner or supper, and above all how their vowels sound, are all regional, and the regions of the Realm are audible. What none of this tells the listener is the speaker’s rank. The son of a peer and the son of a dock labourer, raised in the same town, speak the same English, and there is no word, no pronunciation and no turn of phrase in the Realm’s language that belongs to one class and not another.

The absence is striking in a Realm with a Crown, a Court, a peerage and a prestige accent, and it has been much remarked on by British visitors, who expect to be able to hear a person’s standing and cannot. Its causes are debated. The most common explanation is that the Realm’s upper classes were never a single class: the planter gentry of the South, the merchant families of the northern ports, the peers created from every polity and the new fortunes of the West had no common schools and no common speech, and no one of them could impose its speech on the others. The Potomac accent, which might have become a class accent, belonged instead to a place, and the place was open to anyone who went there to work.

Names

The Realm’s place-names are the record of everyone who has named anything on the continent, and they are the part of American English least touched by any standard.

The oldest are the continent’s own. The names of rivers, lakes and mountains across the Realm, and of a great many of its polities, towns and cities, come from the Indigenous languages spoken there before any European arrived, often shaped by English, French or Spanish mouths into forms their original speakers would not recognise. The Dutch named the Hudson country, and the names of New York’s boroughs and villages still carry them. French named the Mississippi and the Gulf, Spanish the south-west and California, and the Russians a scattering of the far north-west.

The English-speaking settlers named things after the places they came from, after their saints and their preachers, after their landowners, and after their monarchs. The royal names of the colonies were kept when the colonies became a Realm, because there was no reason to change them: Virginia for the first Elizabeth, Maryland for a Stuart queen, the Carolinas for the Charleses, Georgia for the second George, and after the founding the capital itself, New Westminster, named for the seat of the Crown’s first Parliament. The capital’s district took the name of Columbia, the poetic name of the continent, which the Realm uses as the English of other countries uses Albion or Britannia.

Personal names follow the continent’s habits rather than Britain’s. The Realm’s naming is more various than Britain’s, more ready to use surnames as given names and to invent names outright, and it has drawn freely on every language its people have spoken. Titles are the exception: a peer takes a title in the British manner, Lord Whitlock, the Marquess of Monticello, and the Realm’s peerage, which the Register describes in its own article, has given the language most of its British-sounding names.

Languages in contact

American English is the common language of a Realm that speaks many others, and it has taken words from all of them.

The Louisianais French of the Grand Duchy of Louisiane has given the Realm’s English the vocabulary of the Gulf coast’s food, law and waterways, and a great many of its place-names. The German of the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin, Wisconsindeutsch, and the Scandinavian languages of Minnesota and the upper Midwest, including Nordmålet, have supplied words of the kitchen, the church and the farm, and have given the English of their polities a rhythm and a set of vowels that are audible across a room. Spanish is the first language of millions of the Realm’s people in the south-west, in the March of Arizona, in Texas, in California and in the Territory of Loreto, and its words run through the English of every one of those places. Hawaiian has given the English of Hawaiʻi its words for the land and the sea. The Indigenous languages of the continent, which the Register treats in their own articles, gave American English more of its place-names than any other source, and a smaller but significant share of its words for the plants, animals and landscape of the continent.

None of these languages has ever been a threat to English as the Realm’s common tongue, and none has been treated as one for long. Their relation to English is the relation of a regional language to a national one: they colour the English of their regions, they supply it with words, and they are spoken beside it rather than instead of it.

American English abroad

The English of the Realm and the English of Britain are the two great standards of the language, and every other English-speaking country, and every foreign learner, has had to choose between them or mix them. The Realm’s standard is the one more often chosen. It is spoken by more people than any other, it is the language of the Realm’s films, which have given most of the world its idea of how English sounds, and it is the English of the ABC’s World News, heard abroad in the accents of whichever of the corporation’s correspondents is on the air.

Foreign learners are taught the everyday standard, since it is the English they will meet, and are generally not taught the formal register at all. They find the mixed spelling the hardest thing about it, as the Realm’s own children do, and the textbooks written for them have been printing the list of mixed words in an appendix, with a short apology, for a century and a half.

British opinion of the Realm’s English has passed through every stage from disdain to indifference. Nineteenth-century visitors from Britain wrote of it with the condescension they brought to everything on the continent; twentieth-century Britain, which heard it in every cinema, absorbed a great many of its words; and the present century hears it as simply the other English, less correct in its spelling than British English and more consistent in its grammar, which is broadly the Realm’s opinion of Britain’s.

History

Colonial English

The English carried to the colonies in the seventeenth century was the English of its settlers, which is to say the English of a dozen regions of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, mixed in each colony in different proportions. By the middle of the eighteenth century the colonies had begun to sound like themselves: the English of New England was distinct from that of the Chesapeake, and both were distinct from that of London, and educated visitors from Britain remarked on the purity of colonial speech and the strangeness of its vocabulary in almost the same breath.

The written language was British. The colonies imported their books, their schoolbooks and their dictionaries from London, and their printers set English as London set it. When the Crown’s quarrel with its colonies came to a head in 1775, the colonists who argued their case against the ministry argued it in the spelling of the ministry, and the Declaration of American Grievances of 1776 was engrossed in the orthography of Samuel Johnson.

The speller of 1783

Noah Webster was born in 1758 in the hills west of Hartford, in the Colony of Connecticut, the son of a farmer. He went up to Yale in 1774, served a few weeks in the Connecticut militia in the campaign of 1777, and came out of college into a country still at war and a profession, the law, that had no work for him. He kept school instead, and it was the schoolroom that made him: he found the spelling books he had to teach from disorderly, British, and badly suited to the children of the continent, and he set out to write a better one.

In 1783, the year the Charter was signed, the young Connecticut schoolmaster published the first part of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, a spelling book for children, which was soon being called by the colour of its cover. The Blue-Back Speller became the schoolbook of the continent. It taught generations of the Realm’s children to read, it was printed in editions that together ran to tens of millions of copies, and for a century it was, after the Bible, the book most likely to be found in any house in the Realm.

He published more after it, in the same spirit: a grammar, a reader, essays on the language in which he proposed reforms far more radical than any he later printed, and in 1806 a small Compendious Dictionary that carried his simplified spellings into a work of reference for the first time. The radical proposals, tung for tongue and wimmen for women among them, were laughed at and quietly dropped, and Webster, who did not like being laughed at, never proposed them again.

Webster was, by the account of everyone who knew him and by the evidence of everything he wrote, a pedant. He believed that the spelling of English was disordered and that it should be made to follow its sound, and he held the belief with the persistence of a man for whom the matter was simply one of being right. His speller carried a few of his simplifications, and the dictionaries he published afterwards carried more. He had no politics about any of it. The spellings he proposed were proposed because he thought them better, and the idea, common later, that he was trying to make the Realm’s English different from Britain’s would have struck him as beside the point.

An American Dictionary

In 1828 Webster published An American Dictionary of the English Language, the work of more than twenty years, and it is the foundation of every dictionary the Realm has used since. It recorded the vocabulary of the continent that British dictionaries ignored, it defined its words with a clarity that made it the working tool of schoolteachers and clerks, and it spelled a great many of them in Webster’s reformed manner.

Its title has been read, ever since, as a statement. A dictionary of the English language that called itself American, published in a Realm that had kept its King and would keep him, has been cited by two centuries of patriotic writers as the only declaration of independence the Realm ever printed. Webster meant nothing of the kind. The dictionary was American because it recorded the English of America, and he said so in its preface, in the plainest terms, to readers most of whom did not believe him.

Webster died in 1843. The rights to his dictionary were bought by the publishers who continued it, revised it and sold it under his name, and by the end of the century Webster’s had become the name for a dictionary in the Realm in the way that a trade name becomes the name for a thing.

Word by word

The reformed spellings did not win or lose together. Over the middle decades of the nineteenth century the Realm’s printers, newspapers, schools and government offices each made their own choices, word by word, and the choices slowly converged. Defense won in the newspapers and the schools before the century was half over; colour never lost, though Webster had spelled it without the u in every edition; center was printed for a generation and then abandoned in favour of centre for reasons no historian has been able to establish; program won everywhere outside the Crown’s own documents by the eighteen-eighties. By the end of the century the list had settled into very nearly its present form, and the editions of Webster’s that recorded it were recording a standard the Realm had arrived at rather than one the dictionary had imposed.

The Crown’s documents and the courts took no part in any of this. Their spelling was the spelling of their own records, and the institutions whose business is to be consistent with their own past had no reason to follow a reform in anybody’s present. They kept the spelling of their own records and took up the list beside it as their clerks did, so that both forms of every word stand in the Crown’s documents. Nobody decided this. It was simply never tidied.

Webster’s after Webster

The dictionary outlived its author by almost two centuries, and its later history is the history of the Realm’s standard. The publishers who bought its rights revised it at intervals of a generation or so, each edition larger than the last, and each recording the list as it then stood; the editions of the later nineteenth century are the ones in which the everyday standard can be watched settling into its modern form. The great unabridged edition of the twentieth century became the reference of every newspaper office, school and government department in the Realm, and its editors, who never claimed any authority but that of usage, became the nearest thing the language has to authorities.

The dictionary’s one great controversy came in the early nineteen-sixties, when an edition that recorded the language as its speakers actually used it, including forms that schoolteachers had spent a century correcting, was attacked in the newspapers as the abandonment of standards. The editors replied that a dictionary records usage and does not make it, which was what Webster had said in 1828, and the argument ended, as such arguments do, with the dictionary unchanged and its critics consulting it.

The Potomac century

The capital moved to New Westminster in 1801, and from then until the middle of the twentieth century the Potomac accent was the voice of the Realm’s institutions. It was the accent of the judges, the officers, the senior officials and the Court, and of those ministers who had it or took the trouble to acquire it, and when broadcasting came in 1927 it became the accent of the ABC’s national service, under a Director-General who held that a national broadcaster should speak in a national voice.

It never became the accent of the Realm’s people. It was heard as correct rather than imitated, and the provinces kept their own speech while listening to the capital’s. The arrangement lasted as long as the institutions it served were staffed from the capital.

The war and after

The Second Great War ended the arrangement. The Realm’s forces were drawn from every region and every polity; their officers, for the first time in large numbers, came from everywhere; and a generation of the Realm’s men spent the war listening to one another. The ABC’s renewed Charter of 1944 no longer required its announcers to speak in the capital’s voice, and the national service began to sound like the country it broadcast to. Television, from the nineteen-fifties, carried the regional voices of the Realm into every house, and by the end of the century the Potomac accent had become what it is now: the accent of a place, and of state occasions.

American English today

The language the Realm speaks at present is, in its essentials, the one it spoke a century ago. Its spelling has not changed in living memory, and the list children learn now is the list their great-grandparents learnt. The digital age has done what it has done to every language, filling it with borrowed words and abbreviations and loosening the standard in informal writing, and the Realm’s spell-checking software has had to be taught the mixed list word by word, which its makers found as irritating as every schoolchild in the Realm has always found it. The formal register continues unchanged in the Crown’s documents and the courts. The Potomac accent continues to recede. The one change that has come quickly is in the language of the Realm’s government, which has been rewriting its forms and letters in plainer English for a generation and has not yet finished.

Controversies

The spelling has been argued about for as long as it has existed, though never with much consequence. Reformers have proposed at intervals that the list be regularised, in one direction or the other, and have been met by the unanswerable objection that nobody could agree which. Proposals to spell center, color and theater in the continental manner and complete Webster’s work have been made in every generation, and so have proposals to restore defence, travelled and programme; both have been defeated, if that is the word, by the indifference of the people who would have had to learn a new list. The general view in the Realm is that its spelling is illogical, that it is theirs, and that the cost of changing it would fall on every child and every sign in the country for the sake of a consistency that nobody has ever missed.

The formal register attracts a different complaint: that a Realm whose people write one standard should not be governed in another. The complaint has been answered, so far, by the plainness of what the formal register actually says. A judgment that anyone can read does not become harder to read for spelling defence with a c, and the Realm’s courts have been careful to keep it that way.

The Potomac accent is no longer controversial. It was, in the decades after the war, when the question whether the national broadcaster and the courts should speak in it was argued with some heat. Its defenders held that it was the voice of the Realm’s institutions and that a Realm needed one. Its critics held that a voice belonging to one district could not speak for forty-nine polities. The critics won, and the argument is now remembered chiefly as the moment the Realm decided it could be addressed in any of its own accents.

Assessment

American English is the most complete evidence the Realm offers of how it was made. Nobody designed it. Its spelling is a list that no one drew up, its accents are the record of who settled where, its two written standards are the result of institutions declining to change and a country declining to wait for them, and its one prestige accent belonged to a place rather than to a class because the Realm’s upper classes never had a place of their own. At every point where a decision might have been made about it, none was: Webster proposed and the Realm disposed, one word at a time, over a century, without anybody being in charge.

The result is a language that is American in the mouth and mixed on the page, that writes to its citizens in one spelling and to its Crown in another, and that has never marked the difference between a peer and a porter. Its speakers do not find any of this strange, and do not call it anything but English. The Register’s view is that the Realm’s English is the Realm in miniature: inconsistent where it grew by habit, consistent where it was inherited, and entirely at ease with both.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Louisianais, Wisconsindeutsch and Nordmålet, the Realm’s other languages
• The American Broadcasting Corporation, whose national service spoke only in the Potomac accent until 1944
• The Charter of Union of the American Colonies, the source of the ceremonial register
• Parliament, the source of the national vocabulary of government
• The Royal American Supreme Court, and its doctrine of plain modern American English
• The Columbia District, the capital’s district and the home of the Potomac accent
• Daily Life, for the Realm’s customs, measures and money in use
• How to Speak American English, a practical guide written for readers from outside the Register’s world

Categories

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