How Americanisms are killing the English language

And yet the British History magazine recently published an article expounding on the fact that the English spoken by Americans is closer to that spoken by Shakespeare than that spoken by Brits today. I shared it here on RP a couple weeks back. The reason, the article explained, is that Great Britain became industrialized sooner than America, and industrialized societies go through changes more rapidly than do agrarian ones. Another article I read, ages ago, in American Heritage magazine, compared British slang with American slang. Again, Brits today are far removed from the roots of their language in this regard. British slang is like "baby talk". We say television or TV. They say "telly". We say "diaper" (as Shakespeare would have), they say "nappy". Just watch a program on the BBC and count the number of times you hear words ending in "ie" or "y", as you might speak to a baby. Most of the Americanisms spoken of (or complained of) come from the fact that Americans are far more inventive than other peoples and invent new words to describe new products and methods or services. If you want a good laugh, watch the French dealing with Americanisms. They even have an Académie Française to filter out such offensive terms as "genes" and "Coke". Once upon a time I wrote promotional and instructional materials for the photographic industry that were translated into multiple languages and I received many complaints from them.

Interesting read.