Over the last few decades, technical innovations such computerized spectrographic analysis (see box) have greatly aided the study of changes in pronunciation.

Studying ongoing changes can help us learn more about how English developed in the past and predict how it is likely to evolve in the future. Throughout its history, English has undergone changes similar to those heard today, but until recently linguists have been limited to the evidence of the written record in trying to understand the dynamics of the process. The methods used now expand our perspective on how and why English changes.

The detailed examination of differences in speech also has applications outside the field of linguistics. The ability of computers to recognize and understand natural human speech can be greatly enhanced by a fuller account of the rich variety of accents across the country.

Interpersonal connections that promote new pronunciations also influence other social behaviors

The study of pronunciation changes also can provide insight into how innovations of various types are spread. The networks of influence involved in the diffusion of, say, the Northern Cities Shift may also serve as conduits for other innovations such as new technology. Similarly, the interpersonal connections that promote new pronunciations also influence other social behaviors. An improved understanding of these connections might be useful to, for example, public health officials in disseminating information about disease, child safety, etc.

Changes such as those described here have had and will continue to have a significant impact on the sound of American English. For linguists studying such changes, this is an exciting time. Research into these developments brings a greater understanding of how language functions and the vital role it plays in our dynamic and diverse society

Matthew J. Gordon is assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri - Columbia. He has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan. His research specializes in sociolinguistics and American dialectology. His book Small-Town Values, Big-City Vowels (Duke University Press, 2001) is a study of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan. He is also co-author with Lesley

Milroy of Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation (Blackwell, 2003), a book that presents an overview of current practices in the field of sociolinguistics. He is currently studying sound changes in the state of Missouri.

6.2 Are Americans Ruining English?

For more than 200 years, right up through Prince Charles, people have complained that Americans trash the English language. But is it corruption -- or simply normal change? John Algeo investigates how both American and British English's have evolved. (The research in this essay was first published in 1999.)

America is ruining the English language - everyone knows that. We have heard it from early days right up to the present. We have heard it from English men and English women, of course, but from Americans as well - self-confessed linguistic vandals. We have heard it from the famous and the obscure. So it must be true. But in what does the ruination lie? How are Americans ruining English?

In the early days, British travelers in the American colonies often commented on the `purity' of the English spoken in the new world. It wasn't until the American impertinence of 1776 that Americans seem to have begun ruining English. Yet, as early as 1735, a British traveler in Georgia, Francis Moore, described the town of Savannah: `It is about a mile and a quarter in circumference; it stands upon the flat of a hill, the bank of the river (which they in barbarous English call a bluff) is steep.' The Americans had taken an adjective of nautical and perhaps Dutch origin, meaning `broad, flat and steep', to use as a noun for the sort of river bank that hardly existed in England and for which, consequently, earlier English had no name.

6.2.1 American English is `very corrupting'

In 1995, in much the same vein as the comment of 260 years earlier, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales was reported by The Times as complaining to a British Council audience that American English is `very corrupting.' Particularly, he bemoaned the fact that `people tend to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs and make words that shouldn't be.' By this time the barbarous use of bluff for a steep bank had been civilized by being adopted into the usage of the motherland, but doubtless if the Prince had lived about nine generations earlier, he would have agreed with Francis Moore that bluff was a word that shouldn't be.

The Prince concluded: `We must act now to insure that English - and that, to my way of thinking, means English - maintains its position as the world language well into the next century." His concern seems to be as much commercial as merely ethnocentrically aesthetic, the English language being one of England's most popular exports, along with gossip about the escapades of the Royals. The Prince, after all, was only doing his bit to keep the English pecker up.

One way Americans are ruining English is by changing it. Many of us, like Francis Moore and Prince Charles, regard what is foreign to us as barbarous and corrupt. We owe the term barbarous to the Greeks; they pitied the poor foreigner who could only stammer `bar-bar' and hence was a `barbaros'. Barbarians are simply those who do not talk as we do, whether they are outsiders, Yanks or fellow countrymen and countrywomen whose style we do not admire.

The journalist Edwin Newman is a linguistic prophet who sees the language style of his fellow Americans as deadly. In 1974 he vaticinator in a book called Strictly Speaking, which was subtitled Will America be the Death of English? In it, he too objected to the invention of all sorts of nouns and verbs and words that shouldn't be. In particular he objected to verbosity and euphemism as bad style. A number of Americans bemoan the baleful influence of their fellow citizens on the health or integrity of the language, but only a few, like Edwin Newman, have been able to make a career of it.

In England, on the other hand, a perception that America is ruining the language pervades the discourse of the chattering classes. Indeed, a fair number of British intellectuals regard `new', `distasteful', and `American' as synonymous. A knowledgeable British author complained about the supposedly American pronunciation controversy and was surprised to hear that the antepenult accent is unknown in the States, being a recent British innovation. The assumption is that anything new is American and thus objectionable on double grounds.

Change in language is, however, inevitable, just as it is in all other aspects of reality. Particular changes will be, in the eyes of one observer or another, improvements or degenerations. But judgements of what is beautiful or ugly, valuable or useless, barbarous or elegant, corrupting or improving are highly personal idiosyncratic ones.

There are no objective criteria for judging worth in language, no linguistic Tables of the Law, no archetypical authority called `The Dictionary', though there are wannabe authoritarians aplenty.

A language - or anything else that does not change - is dead

On the other hand, no one is required to like all or any particular changes. It is, in the great Anglo-American tradition, our God-given right to have our own opinions and to take it or leave it when it come to style in couture, diet, entertainment, religion and language. We need not be equally enthusiastic about catsuits and muu-muus, macrobiotics, and haute cuisine, grunge rock and Philip Glass, the World Wide Web and MTV, bank and bluff or controversy and controversy. We don't have to like particular changes, or even the fact of change itself. But a language or anything else that does not change is dead.

The eighteenth-century hope that language could be `fixed' - that is, improved, or changed in a way some self-appointed linguistic judge would approve of until it reached a state of perfection and then preserved so that it would not thereafter degenerate or change in a way the judge disliked - was a chimera. It was an illusion based on misunderstandings about the nature of language, values and human nature.

The earliest English we can catch sight of in manuscripts of the seventh century was the product of millennia of change. We can only reconstruct its earlier history back through stages we call Anglo-Frisian, Germanic, Indo-European, and maybe even Nostratic and Proto-World. During the recorded history of English, the language has changed from something quite incomprehensible to a present-day English speaker, which we call Old English (Hwaet! We Gar-dena in geordagum the odcyninge thrym gehyrdon) to something equally incomprehensible to many of us, computer speak (Some memory resident programs steal too much of the CPU to work with an asynchronous download).

During its roughly thirteen centuries of recorded history, English has diversified in many ways. Any two varieties of a language become increasingly different from each other when their speakers do not communicate with one other but more alike as those who use them talk among themselves. That is the way language works.

British and American started to become different when English speakers first set foot on American soil because the colonists found new things to talk about and also because they ceased to talk regularly with the people back home. The colonists changed English in their own unique way, but at the same time speakers in England were changing the language too, only in a different way from that of the colonists. As a result, over time the two varieties became increasingly different, not so radically different that they amounted to different languages, as Italian and French had become a millennium earlier, but different enough to notice.

The differences between American and British are not due to Americans changing from a British standard. American is not corrupt British plus barbarisms. Rather, both American and British evolved in different ways from a common sixteenth-century ancestral standard. Present-day British is no closer to that earlier form than present-day American is. Indeed, in some ways present-day American is more conservative, that is, closer to the common original standard than is present-day British.

Americans generally retain the r-sound in words like more and mother, whereas the British have lost it

Some examples of American conservatives versus British innovation are these: Americans generally retain the r-sound in words like more and mother, whereas the British have lost it. Americans generally retain the `flat a' of cat in path, calf, class,whereas the British have replaced it with the `broad a' of father. Americans retain a secondary stress on the second syllable from the end of words like secretary and dictionary, whereas the British have lost both the stress and often the vowel, reducing the words to three syllables, `secret'ry'. Americans retain an old use of the verb guess to mean `think' or `suppose' (as in Geoffrey Chaucer's catch-phrase `I gesse'). Americans have retained the past participle form gotten beside got, whereas the British have lost the former. (The British often suppose that Americans use only gotten, in fact they use both, but with different meanings: `I've got a cold' = `I have a cold' and `I've gotten a cold' = `I've caught a cold'). Americans retain use of the subjunctivein what grammarians call `mandative' expressions: `They insisted that he leave,' whereas the British substituted for it other forms, such as `that he should leave' or `that he left'.

On the other hand, the British are more conservative than Americans in other ways. Thus, they continue to distinguish atom (with a t-sound) and Adam (with a d-sound), whereas Americans typically pronounce the two words alike, with a flap sound that is more d- than t-like. Similarly, in standard British callous and Alice do not rhyme, whereas they usually do in standard American, both having a schwa. So too, the British have different stressed vowels in father and fodder, whereas Americans pronounce those words with the same first vowel. The British have retained an old use of reckon in the sense `think' or `suppose'in serious discourse, whereas that use in America is old-fashioned or rural, a comic marker of `hick' talk. The British have retained the term fortnight, whereas Americans have lost it. The British have retained the primary meaning of corn as `grain', whereas Americans have changed it to `maize' (the image many Americans have of `Ruth amid the alien corn' being both anachronistic and ectopic). The British have retained the inversion of have with its subject in questions: `Have you the time?' whereas Americans use the auxiliary verb do with it: `Do you have the time?'

On balance, it is hard to say which variety of English, American or British, is the more conservative and which the more innovative. A lot depends on how you look at the question. It is clear that the British are keen on (Americans would say `fond of') the pluperfect, whereas Americans prefer the simple past: British `He had left before they arrived' versus typical American `He left before they arrived.' But it is less clear which usage should be regarded as older. Is the American preference a degeneration of the tense system? Or a preservation of the English of the Anglo-Saxons, who had little truck with complex tenses?

Both American and British have changed and go on changing

Both American and British have changed and go on changing today. Among recent innovations in British English, in addition to the pronunciation of controversy already cited, are such vocabulary novelties as gazumping and gazundering, Essex man and Estuary English, toy boy, and redundancy for `sacking' or `firing' (a bureaucratic euphemism fit to exercise the spleen of a British Edwin Newman). Paralleling the American retention of the mandative subjunctive (`They insisted that he leave') is a British innovative use of the indicative in such expressions: `They insisted that he left,' which in American use could only be a statement of fact (`They insisted it was a fact that he had left').

British speakers have also been extraordinary fertile in expanding the range of use for tag questions. Tag questions are little bobs at the end of sentences that can turn them into questions, or sometimes into something else. The basic tag questions are general English, shared by British and American:

informational: `You don't wear glasses, do you?' (I'm not sure, but think you don't. Am I right?)

inclusive: `It's a nice day, isn't it?'(It obviously is - I'm not really asking, but just making polite remarks so you can join in the conversation).

emphasizing: `I made a bad mistake, didn't I?' (This is a soliloquy. I'm not talking to anybody but myself and don't expect an answer to the rhetorical question. It's the verbal equivalent of underlining.)

The last of the above types is more characteristic of British than of American use, but the next two are distinctively British and are relatively recent contributions of British English to the rhetorical inventory of impoliteness:

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