How to Speak American English

The good news first. If you speak American English in our world, you already speak most of the Realm’s. Its accents are the continent’s accents, its idioms are your idioms, and a citizen of the Realm dropped into a diner in Ohio would be understood perfectly and would understand everyone. The two languages share a continent, a settlement history, two centuries of commerce and most of their slang.

What separates them is a short list of things that matter a great deal: the names of the institutions, which belong to a parliamentary monarchy rather than a republic; a mixed spelling that keeps colour and centre but writes defense and program; two grammatical habits borrowed from Britain, one of them optional; the money; the holidays; and the King. Get those right and you will pass. Get them wrong and you will sound, to the Realm’s ear, like what you are, a visitor from somewhere that does not exist.

This guide takes them in order of how quickly they would give you away.

The short version

If you read nothing else, read this.

1. The country is the Realm. In formal writing it is the United Kingdom of America. In speech it is the Realm, or America, or the Union. It is never the States, the U.S., or the United States.
2. There is no President. The head of government is the Prime Minister. The head of state is the King, George V, who is fifteen; until his sixteenth birthday his mother acts for him as Regent. The Crown’s representative is the Governor-General.
3. There is no Congress and no Constitution. There is Parliament, with a House of Commons and a House of Lords, and there is the Charter of 1783.
4. The capital is New Westminster, in the Columbia District, on the Potomac. There is no Washington, D.C.
5. The states are polities, and most of them are not called states: there are Provinces, Commonwealths, Republics, Grand Duchies, two Kingdoms and a March.
6. The money is the pound. The American pound, written A£, a hundred pence to the pound, a quid in speech.
7. There was no Revolution and there is no Independence Day. There was the Four-Year War, which ended in a settlement, and the Fourth of July is Charter Day.
8. You may say the Government are. Collective nouns take either verb, and the Government are and the Government is are both correct. The plural is the one that will make you sound at home.
9. Say got, never gotten. And learnt, spelt, burnt.
10. Spell colour and centre, but defense, traveled and program. There is no rule. You learn the list.

What the country is called

The full name is the United Kingdom of America, and it is used where full names are used: on passports, at the head of statutes, in the opening sentence of an encyclopaedia. It shortens to the UKA in headlines and on official forms.

In ordinary speech its people call it the Realm, which is the word you will see on almost every page of the Register and which you should reach for first. They also say America, exactly as you do, and the Union, which is a little more formal and a little more political, the word for the federation as opposed to the Crown. Its people are Americans.

Do not say the States. There is no country called that, and the word states has a narrower meaning in the Realm than in our world, because only some of its polities are States. Do not say the U.S. or the United States at all; they name a country that was never made. If a character in the Realm uses either phrase, it should be because they are talking about history that did not happen, and they should sound as though they find the idea odd.

The other countries you know mostly exist, but a few have different names, and two of them border the Realm:

The government

This is where a visitor from the real United States gives themselves away fastest, because the vocabulary of government is so automatic. The Realm is a parliamentary monarchy, and its government talks like one. The words are mostly those you know from British politics, and nobody in the Realm thinks of them as British; they are simply the words.

Some of the most useful words are the small ones. The government means the ministry of the day, not the state as a whole; the Crown means the state as a whole, in its permanent and impersonal sense; the Cabinet is the inner circle of ministers; a minister is the head of a department; a backbencher is an MP who is not a minister. A government falls when it loses a vote of confidence. The Prime Minister goes to the country when an election is called. Parliament is opened with a Crown Speech and prorogued at the end of a session. A law is passed as a bill and becomes an Act when it receives the royal assent.

There is also an older layer, which belongs to the counties and towns and is entirely American: sheriffs, county commissioners, selectmen, town meetings, mayors. The line between the two runs where the constitution runs. Everything the Charter created or the Crown carries speaks Westminster’s English; everything the colonists built for themselves speaks their own. A sheriff in the Realm is exactly the sheriff you know. A President is not anything at all, except in the Republic of Texas, which has two of them, and you will have to read the Register’s article on Texas to find out why.

The polities

The Realm has forty-nine polities, plus the Columbia District around the capital and the Territory of Loreto, and they are not uniform. The settlement of 1783 brought the colonies in under their own charters and kept their own titles, and the polities admitted afterwards came in under whatever form the bargain of the day required. Learning the forms is the single best way to sound as though you have read about the place.

• Provinces are the founding colonies of the seaboard: the Province of New York, the Province of Virginia, the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and so on. Plymouth is a Province of its own, separate from Massachusetts Bay.
• Commonwealths include Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, West Virginia, California and Cascadia, which is our Oregon and Washington in one.
• Republics: Texas, Florida and Vermont, each of which was independent before it joined.
• Grand Duchies: Louisiane, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, each with a reigning house.
• Kingdoms: Alaska and Hawaiʻi, each with its own crown inside the Realm.
• The March of Arizona, the only March.
• States, the ordinary form for much of the interior: the State of Missouri, the State of Kansas, the State of the Dakotas, which is one polity rather than two, the State of Deseret, which is our Utah, and Oklahoma-Sequoyah.
• And the oddities: the Lower Counties on the Delaware, which is our Delaware; the Free State of Colorado; the Free City of Philipsburg.

The general word for all of them is polity. The everyday word, in the same way that you say state without thinking, is to name the polity itself: in Virginia, back in Ohio. If you need a general noun in speech, province is the one most people reach for in the East and state in the West, and neither is wrong.

The heads of many polities’ governments are Premiers, though the titles vary, and the polities with their own reigning houses have a Grand Duke or Grand Duchess, a King or a Queen, of their own. Do not call a Premier a governor; the word survives in a few places with a particular meaning, and the Register’s polity articles will tell you where.

Separate from the forty-nine are the treaty nations, several hundred of them, semi-sovereign and outside the polity count. The Navajo Republic is the best known. They are not polities, and their peoples are particular about the difference.

History

The Realm’s history begins in the same place as yours and goes somewhere else in 1775, and the words for it are different from the start.

The last line is the one that trips people most. Many of the famous names of American political history are present in the Realm, but in the Commons rather than in a White House, and their careers are differently shaped. Roosevelt governed from 1929. Eisenhower was Prime Minister from 1952 to 1960. Nixon was Prime Minister for two years and a half, from January 1972. If you write about a real American politician in the Realm, look them up in the Register first.

Holidays

Money and measures

The currency is the pound: the American pound, written A£ where it must be told apart from the British pound sterling and simply £ where it need not. It is divided into a hundred pence. A one-pound coin is a pound coin, a sum of money is so many pounds, and in speech a pound is a quid, plural also quid. Ten quid is ten pounds. The Realm has never had a dollar, and the word in the Realm means the currency of New Albion or of a handful of foreign countries. Bucks is not used.

Prices in the Register are given in pounds, and it helps to know the scale: an American pound buys about what a dollar and a quarter buys in our world, so a Realm income of A£80,000 is a comfortable professional salary, not a fortune. Where the Register takes a price from our world, it converts at that rate, A£1 to US$1.25, and rounds as a shop would, to the nearest fifty pence: a five-dollar pint is A£4.

Measures are yours: miles, feet, inches, pounds, ounces, gallons, and temperatures in Fahrenheit. A gallon in the Realm is the American gallon, smaller than the British one. Science, medicine and the armed forces use metric, and so, by its own choice, does the Register, which gives distances in kilometres and temperatures in Celsius. A character in the Realm talking about the weather says it is ninety degrees out; the Register describing the same afternoon says thirty-two.

Spelling

Here the Realm is genuinely strange, and the strangeness is worth understanding before you try to imitate it.

Real American spelling was reformed by Noah Webster, and almost all of his reforms won. The Realm had the same Webster, and only some of his reforms won. The result is a spelling that is neither American nor British but a list, settled word by word in the nineteenth century, with no rule behind it.

So a character in the Realm writes the theatre program, my neighbour’s check, the labor-saving… no, the labour-saving device. The -our and -re words went British and nearly everything else went American. If you are writing dialogue or a letter in the Realm’s everyday English, the practical rule is: spell as you normally would, except for the -our and -re words, which take the British form. That will get you through ninety per cent of pages.

There is a second layer. The Crown and the courts never took sides on the list at all: in their documents both spellings of every word are correct, and both are used, defence and defense, travelled and traveled, programme and program. A statute may write one in one section and the other in the next, and a tax form may print licence in its heading and license in the instructions beneath, and nobody in the Realm finds this odd. Works of reference, the Register among them, chose the full British spelling for the sake of consistency, which is why the Register itself reads as British. It is not how the Realm’s people write their letters. If your character is a judge or a civil servant, either spelling is correct; if they are writing a postcard home, use the list.

Punctuation is mixed too. Quotations take double quotation marks, as yours do, but full stops and commas go outside the closing mark unless they belong to the quotation. Mr, Mrs, Dr and St take no full stop.

Grammar

The Realm’s grammar is yours, with one exception and one option, and they are the two things that most reliably mark a speaker as from the Realm rather than from our United States.

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. They mean exactly the same thing: the Government are bringing in a bill and the Government is bringing in a bill are the same sentence, and there is no rule about when to use which. It is habit, and many people use both. You will never be wrong with the singular. But the plural is the form that no reader from our United States would think to use, and a character who uses it now and then will sound as though they grew up in the Realm, especially if they grew up in the East.

Past tenses are British. The Realm says learnt, spelt, dreamt, burnt and leapt, and the past participle of get is got: I’ve got it, she’s got older. Gotten is regarded in the Realm as a distinctively foreign word, and a character who says it is either a foreigner or making a joke.

Everything else is yours. In the hospital, not in hospital. On the weekend. Monday through Friday. Different than. Write me. Do you have, not have you got. Shall is formal and rare.

Words

Most everyday words in the Realm have two names, one that sounds American to you and one that sounds British, and both are current. The American one is usually commoner, but the British one is not an affectation; it is simply the other word.

Two of the British words have held their ground especially well, and using them will make you sound at home: post, which in the capital is still commoner than mail, and queue. The British words are also commoner in the East and among older speakers, and in old buildings: the ministries of New Westminster have lifts, because they were built by people who said so, and the office towers of the West have elevators.

The words of school are yours: elementary school, high school, grades, college for any higher education. The words of the law are partly British: a barrister argues in court and an attorney does everything else, and the Crown’s chief lawyer is the Attorney-General. The words of the armed forces are older than the Realm and mostly British: the regimental mess, the colours, the parade ground. The services are the Royal American Army, the Royal American Navy, whose ships are HMS, and the Royal American Air Force.

Sound

You do not need to change your accent. The Realm’s accents are the continent’s: the r after a vowel is sounded nearly everywhere, can’t has the vowel of cat, and schedule begins with sk. A Realm speaker sounds American to a British ear, and a speaker from the real Midwest would sound like a speaker from the Realm’s Midland, which is where the Realm’s ear places the accent with no accent at all.

There are three things to know.

Zed and zee. The last letter of the alphabet is zed in the old East and in the capital and zee in the West, with both heard in the South. Pick according to where your character grew up.

Lieutenant is both lef-tenant and loo-tenant, and has been argued about in the officers’ messes for two centuries.

The Potomac accent. The capital has a prestige accent of its own, grown from the old tidewater speech of Virginia and Maryland, soft, slow and r-less: Charter is Chahtah, Parliament is Pahliament. It was the accent of judges, officers and newsreaders until the Second Great War and is now the accent of the capital and of state occasions. It is not a class accent; a porter’s son raised in New Westminster speaks it as naturally as a judge’s daughter. If your character is a senior judge of the old school or a courtier at Columbia Palace, give them the Potomac. If they are anyone else, do not.

And a fourth, which is about what is absent. The Realm’s English carries no mark of class. It has a King, a Court and a peerage, and a peer’s son and a docker’s son raised in the same town speak the same English. British visitors find this the most surprising thing about the language. Do not give your aristocrats a posh accent; give them the accent of where they grew up.

Dates

The Realm writes dates two ways, and which a person uses depends on where they grew up. In the thirteen founding Provinces and the capital, it is day first: 8 July 2028, 8/7/2028. In the West it is month first, as yours is: July 8, 2028. The line runs roughly with the line between zed and zee. Official forms print the month as a word to avoid the confusion, and the formal register, the Register included, writes day first everywhere.

The King, and how to speak of him

This is the part of the language with no equivalent in yours, and it is where a careful visitor most wants to get things right.

The King is George V, of the House of Hanover, who came to the throne on 31 October 2028, aged fifteen, when his father, Ernest V, who had reigned since 1972, gave up the Crown. He is King of America in his own right, not the King of Britain who also happens to rule America: the Realm’s Crown is a separate legal Crown, the Crown in right of America, which he holds on the advice of the Realm’s ministers alone. He is also King of Great Britain, of New Albion and of eleven other places, each separately. Do not call him the British king. Do not call him the English king. To the Realm he is the King, and in writing His Majesty.

His mother is Queen Christina, who is Queen of Sweden in her own right and acts as Regent for her son until 2 May 2029. His father is now the Duke of Cumberland. The King has no brother or sister and no heir apparent, so the heir’s titles, Prince of Columbia in America and Prince of Wales in Britain, are unused for now; the next in line is his aunt, Queen Caroline.

In September 2028 Ernest V’s aircraft was lost at sea, and he was found alive after four days with a serious head injury. The Queen became Regent of the Realm on 30 September; he woke on 20 October but did not recover, and on 31 October he abdicated and his son became King. A character in the Realm in the Register’s present will be thinking about this. They will speak of the King, meaning the boy, of the Regent or the Queen, and of the Duke, who is still in hospital in New Westminster, and they will not speculate about the succession in polite company.

The King does not govern. He reigns, which in the Realm means he opens Parliament, gives the royal assent, appoints the Prime Minister on the Commons’ arithmetic, and speaks to the country on King’s Day and in disasters. His representative, the Governor-General, does most of this in practice, from Government House in New Westminster. Columbia Palace, the Crown’s house in the capital, is open to the public most of the year and is known to everyone, the Crown included, as the White House, which is a joke you may make exactly once.

The country’s toast is “The King”, standing, and the royal anthem is God Save the King. The national anthem is the Battle Hymn of the Kingdom, and when both are played, the Battle Hymn comes first, because it speaks for the nation and God Save the King speaks to the Crown. If your character stands for one and not the other, they are making a political statement, and the Realm will notice.

Forms of address

In speech the Realm is plain. A citizen meeting the Prime Minister says Mr Prime Minister or Madam Prime Minister; the Speaker is Mr Speaker or Madam Speaker; a judge, outside court, is Judge; an MP is addressed by name; and a peer is Lord or Lady whoever, the only point at which a title intrudes on ordinary talk. The Governor-General is Your Excellency, once, and then whatever comes naturally.

In court, judges are Your Honour in the lower courts and My Lord or My Lady in the higher.

On paper the forms are fuller. The Prime Minister and privy counsellors are the Right Honourable, MPs and senior judges the Honourable, the Governor-General His or Her Excellency. A letter to an MP is addressed to the Honourable Jane Smith MP on the envelope and begins Dear Ms Smith inside, and the difference between the envelope and the letter is the whole of the Realm’s attitude to rank.

The King, if you are ever presented to him, is Your Majesty the first time and Sir after that. The Register does not expect this to come up.

The giveaways

These are the slips by which a reader from our world is most often caught, roughly in order of frequency.

• “The President.” There is none, outside Texas.
• “Congress”, “the Senate”, “the Constitution”, “the Supreme Court” without Royal American.
• “The States”, “the U.S.”, “stateside”.
• “Washington”, meaning the government. The government is New Westminster.
• Dollars, bucks, cents.
• Independence Day, the Revolution, the Founding Fathers said with reverence. The Realm reveres the Charter, not a separation.
• Twenty-one as the age for a drink. It is eighteen, everywhere in the Realm, and a twenty-first birthday is just a birthday.
• “Gotten” for got. (The Government is is fine; the Government are is fine too.)
• color, center, theater: the -our and -re words are British in the Realm.
• “Governor” for the head of a polity’s government, which in many polities is a Premier.
• Canada. It is New Albion.
• “The British king.” He is the Realm’s King.
• A posh accent for a lord. The Realm has no class accents.
• “The administration.” It is the ministry, or the government.
• “Federal government in Washington.” The phrase the federal government is fine; Washington is not.
• The War of 1812, the Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg as the turning point of a four-year war, or anything else from the real American nineteenth century that the Register has not confirmed. Look it up.

A paragraph, translated

Here is a paragraph written as an ordinary American newspaper in our world might write it, and then as a newspaper in the Realm would.

President Johnson told Congress on Tuesday that the administration will send a new health bill to the Senate before the Fourth of July. “The program is going to work,” he said, speaking from the White House. Governors from twelve states have gotten behind the plan, which would cost $40 billion. The Supreme Court has not ruled on whether it is constitutional.

The Prime Minister told the Commons on Tuesday that the Government are to bring a new health bill to the Lords before Charter Day. “The programme is going to work,” he said, speaking from Charter House. Premiers from twelve polities have got behind the plan, which would cost A£40 billion. The Royal American Supreme Court has not ruled on whether it is consistent with the Charter.

Notice that the newspaper’s program has become programme, because the official record of the Commons, which the paper is quoting, used the British form that day, as it may; in the same paper’s sports pages, it would be program. Notice too that the paragraph has become a little drier and a little more procedural. That is the Realm.

Where to go next

The Register’s main article on American English describes the language from inside: its history, the speller of 1783 and Webster’s dictionary of 1828, the regional accents, the Potomac accent’s two centuries, and the arguments the Realm still has about all of it. The Glossary defines the constitutional terms that appear across the Register with a dotted underline. For the government, start with the United Kingdom of America, the Charter, Parliament and the Prime Minister. For the Crown, start with Ernest V and the Crown in right of America. And for the two languages spoken beside English in the Realm’s heartland, try the primers in Louisianais and Wisconsindeutsch, which are written from inside the world and which you can now read as a native would.

See also

• American English, the language described from inside the Realm
• A note from the author, on why the Register exists and how to read it
• The Charter of Union of the American Colonies, the Realm’s constitution
• The American Pound, the money
• King’s Day and Remembrance Day, two of the holidays
• New Albion, the northern neighbour you know as Canada