American English has now clearly established itself as an independent variety of English. America is the strongest economy in the world these days and it occupies the topmost place of importance in matters of international trade, international politics, space exploration, computer technology, genetic engineering and the like. Gone are the days when Britain ruled over a large part of the world and so the variety of English to be learnt in the colonies could only be British English.
Because of America’s supremacy in the domains mentioned above, the number of the ugers of American English is increasing every day. And in view of its ever-increasing use and popularity, one often wonders whether after some time American English will establish itself as the only variety of English for international communication, British English occupying the place of a rather localized variety to be used only by the people in Britain and by a quickly vanishing generation of elderly people in a small number of Asian and African countries. In this connection, the famous British novelist Anthony Burgess has made the following observation:
There is no doubt at all that the model of spoken English that the whole world is now taking comes from America and not the despised and diminished Britain.
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History tells us that the prestige that a regional variety of a language acquires depends not on the intrinsic merit of that variety but on the political and economic power that the users of that variety manage to acquire and the extent to which they can socially dominate over the users of the other varieties of that language.
During the reign of King Alfred (871-901), the dialect spoken in the south-west of England was the most prestigious dialect of English. After the Norman Conquest, London became the most important political and commercial centre of Britain and during the fifteenth and the sixteenth century Oxford and Cambridge became the most important centres of intellectual attainments in Britain.
Because of all this, the dialect spoken in and around London, Oxford and Cambridge became more important than the other regional varieties of English and ultimately acquired the status of Standard English to be used all over Asia and Africa.
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Will American English also surpass British English as the dialect spoken in and around London, Oxford and Cambridge surpassed the variety of English spoken in the south-west of England? A stream, says a proverb, can never rise above its source.
Will the metaphorical content of that proverb be proven false in the case of American English? Time alone can answer such questions. What is certain is that the English language has gained enormous strength and vitality because of its use in America.
If English has turned out to be the most widely used language in science, technology, international trade and international diplomacy, it is partly because of America being a superpower in the world of today.
Its use in America has added a large number of vocabulary items and locutions to its stock. American authors like Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck and others have only enhanced the literary prestige that this language gained because of authors like Shakespeare, Johnson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Yeats, Shaw and Forster.
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William Archer has said about the enormous vitality that English has gained because of its use in America.
We are apt in England to class as an Americanism every familiar or too familiar locution, which we do not happen to like…. But there can be no rational doubt, I think, that the English language has gained, and is gaining, enormously by its expansion over the American continent.
The prime function of a language after all is to interpret the form and pressure of life the experience, knowledge, thought, emotion and aspiration of the race which employs it. This being so, the more tap roots a language sends down into the soil of life and the more varied the strata of human experience from which it draws its nourishment, whether of vocabulary, or idiom, the more perfect will be its potentialities as a medium of expression.