Who owns english article

Premium Digital access, plus: Convenient access for groups of users Integration with third party platforms and CRM systems Usage based pricing and volume discounts for multiple users Subscription management tools and usage reporting SAML-based single sign-on SSO Dedicated account and customer success teams. Learn more and compare subscriptions content expands above. Full Terms and Conditions apply to all Subscriptions. Or, if you are already a subscriber Sign in. Other options.

Close drawer menu Financial Times International Edition. Search the FT Search. World Show more World. Americans cannot even be said to be constantly reading, let alone in British publications. And Britons are bombarded by American television, American movies, American bestsellers, and the continuous drone of American English in the news media on the Internet.

The cachet of American popular culture — applauded by young people and begrudged by older generations — forces Americanisms into British English today at a far greater rate than Americans ever took on Briticisms. Even the most traditional of Britons, who would sooner choke on their cucumber sandwiches than utter a blatant Americanism, have no trouble at least in understanding American speech and popular writing: today it is ubiquitous and nearly inescapable.

This cannot be said of British speech and popular writing, which arrive on American soil and via its airwaves in much more selective doses. We read of people lining up on the docks in New York in the 19 th century in order to read the latest installments in the serialized novels of Charles Dickens. Today there is no such clamoring for anything British in the United States, and the reciprocal image is probably of a queue meandering around Leicester Square in London for the premiere of a Hollywood movie starring Tom Cruise or Jennifer Lopez.

Britons today do not clamor or, as they would insist, clamour for American English, but they do still clamor for many things American, and many other American products arrive and are digested by them without any clamoring on their part.

All of our intangible exports to the UK are delivered in American English, and this results in very lopsided traffic in the dialects today. Whether they regard it as a barbarian and vulgar dialect or a breath of fresh air infusing their own moribund version of the language, Britons have to contend with the fact that American English is an unstoppable influence on English generally, and on their own dialect in particular.

There is a roadsign used in Britain that has no exact American equivalent. It is used in situations where two-way traffic shares access to a single lane, and it indicates very eloquently with arrows, without using words, that oncoming traffic has priority, or as Americans would prefer to say, that oncoming traffic has the right-of-way. When you drive up to the sign, you know that you have to give way, or again as the Americans would say, you have to yield to oncoming traffic.

For a person situated in the United Kingdom, this road sign pretty well illustrates the reciprocal traffic in British English and American English today. It is still a two-way street, but American English has the clear priority, and Britons on the transatlantic English highway often have to stop and wait for the din of American English to die down before there is a chance of a British word making it to the other side. Not so the matter of influence.

Here there is a very clear trajectory of American English increasing, and British decreasing. Of course it cannot be denied that the foundation of English today, its genome if you will, is British. But American English words, phrases, and patterns of usage are like potent viruses in the body of English: they may appear at first as dangerous and foreign invaders, but very soon work their way seamlessly into the blueprint of the host, and go on to perform many useful functions.

British writers and intellectuals in the early 19 th century who first resisted American coinages were soon enough using them, and within a generation, words of American origin may not even have been recognized as such.

Alistair Cooke remarked in a radio broadcast that the average Englishman uses 30 or 40 Americanisms a day. This phenomenon, the capacity of American English to worm its way into the greater organism of English, battering down all defenses, goes some way toward explaining why British pundits continue to obsess about it. We have seen already from the quotations noted above, the whingeing to use a good British word tone that characterizes the British view of American English. Suddenly the icon for deleting files wasn't called the Wastebasket anymore.

It was called the Trash. Britons who have not given up their Macs one assumes that this is most of them who already had one can no longer drag and drop their unwanted files into the wastebasket or the dustbin or the rubbish or any other place that might make them feel more comfortable; they have to take them to the trash. It is telling that the laments of British writers on American English lack any reciprocal complaints from their American counterparts, and it is evidence of the fact that British English today has no significant impact on American English.

If a British word or usage does manage to slip into American English, it may be regarded as quaint, amusing, or delightful, but never diabolical or insidious: such qualities are reserved for agents that are actually perceived as being potent. A case in point is the appearance of the British adjective bespoke to denote custom designed computer hardware or software.

The New York Times devoted a whole article to it: the implication is that the appearance of a Briticism in American English is like the adventitious appearance of a bird outside of its territory: notice goes up immediately, and crowds gather to observe. There may be small comfort for British speakers who seek to inject a word now and then into American: the world-shrinking technology that now beams media reports to every digital nook and cranny is giving British English more raw exposure in the American mainstream than it got in the last century.

Why would an American correspondent use this phrasing? Probably because she had heard it among her colleagues in journalism there, who may be disproportionately British, or read the phrase in the press there, which can be assumed to be in the thrall of British English. But there the phrase is, raw and unedited, from the lips of an American for American consumption. Another example of a British word making its way surreptitiously into American English is the noun minder. American English has no ready equivalent: handler works in some cases, but for the particular case of Iraqi minders — the security thugs whose presence is thought to intimidate Iraqi scientists and others from speaking the truth — the British term is clearly the best one, and is now being used in US news outlets, with or without quotation marks around it.

The way forward from here might seem inevitable at first glance: American English will conquer all, and British English will eventually have to content itself with being a boutique variety of the language, available only from special outlets and probably at a premium. They should probably not be so complacent.

The wild card in the future of English is those who will speak it not as their mother tongue, but as a second or foreign language, and at present, Britons are considerably better organized than Americans in addressing this crowd. There is a sense in which Britons assert ownership of the language, and they do it quite successfully. First, it must be said that they have things you can never take away from them: the King James Bible, Shakespeare, the romantic and metaphysical poets, the great tradition of 19 th century novelists.

Even with political corrections made to the canon of English in order to de-emphasize its dead and white aspects, the American contribution pales in relation to the British one in terms of grandeur. And British publishers have left their American counterparts in the dust with regard to the publication of ELT dictionaries and teaching materials. Two British publishers in particular, Oxford and Longman, have probably given as much work to American lexicographers working on ELT dictionaries as all US publishers combined have done.

The latest and greatest monolingual ELT dictionary, the Macmillan English Dictionary , is published in two editions, one for American English and one for British English; but its editor in chief is a Briton, and the editorial team who put it together was run out of an office in Soho Square, London, using American lexicographers who picked up and submitted their work by email.

Likewise in the area of linguistic research, Britons can point with pride to the British National Corpus, a searchable database of a staggering million words of British English. The corpus is available on line and is an invaluable tool for lexicographers, linguists, and other researchers in language. While there is work underway to erect an American National Corpus, to date it has been more talk than substance.

Progress seems to be languishing, only a tiny fraction of the corpus available to search and only to those who have paid a staggering licensing fee , now more than five years after plans for its compilation were announced. While American English enjoys many speakers today, the dialect itself has no widely spoken descendants.

All other major dialects of English in the world today — Irish, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Caribbean, and Indian — are all direct descendants of British English, and largely conform to British spelling and other conventions. Asian countries where the use of English is on the rise are more likely to look to British English than American English. Consider the case of the English-language Straits Times of Singapore. I also observed that the assumption that speaking with a native-like accent equals being competent in English has been underlying many English learning resources online.

These findings are also crucial for the contexts of migration. Of course, to counter this myth of native English speaker superiority would require a lot of time and effort at the level of national education systems fortunately, such changes have in fact been gradually taking place in some countries. At the individual level, however, sometimes the mere awareness of some facts about the language may help Please Share this post to help spread this awareness!

It is important to remember that language belongs to everyone who uses it and as I already noted — English is a global language spoken all over the world.