Languages Of The World » American English

A recent LotW post discussed a newly introduced gender-neutral third person Swedish pronoun hen. It appears that a similar gender-neutral pronoun is developing naturally in a local dialect of Ame...

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Several previous posts discussed differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and even grammar across dialects of American English. Which terms do you use: Sneakers or tennis shoes? Hoagie or hero? ...

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  Despite what their names suggest neither Jerusalem artichokes nor Jordan almonds are from the Middle East. Both expressions are examples of folk etymology, a process by which the form (and som...

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A recent article on paidContent.org by Robert Andrews states:   “Google (NSDQ: GOOG) already operates its own legal book sales elsewhere on Android Market and in Google Books. But its control...

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In the previous posting, I’ve mentioned a number of lexical peculiarities of various regional American English dialects. Let’s now consider some pronunciation peculiarities. Take, for example...

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In a number of recent postings, I’ve discussed American English words that have penetrated into British English and vice versa. But it must be remembered that neither American English nor Briti...

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In the previous posting, I mentioned the word posh, an adjective describing stylish items or members of the upper class, which came into the American lexicon from “across the pond”. But what ...

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In a recent posting, I’ve looked at the journalist Matthew Engel’s BBC piece on Americanisms in British English and discussed some of the fallacies found in that article. One of the points I ...

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Imagine a bewitched frog, waiting to be kissed in order to turn back into a human. Given a choice between a prince and a princess, who will the enchanted frog kiss? If you are an English speaker...

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Recently a student of mine forwarded to me this article from the BBC website. BBC has long been the stronghold of “proper English”, so I am not completely surprised to see such a strong rheto...

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