In addition, a growing tendency for Americanization has been observed for Philippine English, which, despite being rooted in American English, has experienced a rise in the frequency of American forms. Likewise, a tendency for Postcolonial varieties of English in South-East Asia to prefer American spelling over the British one has been observed, at least, for Nigerian English, Singapore and Trinidad and Tobago, regarding spelling and lexis, for Indian English and the Bahamas, regarding syntax, and for Hong Kong, regarding phonology. Īs an example, if we focus on spelling, some the original differences between British and American English orthography (most of which are the result of Webster’s reform ) are somehow blurred and, for instance, the tendency for verbs and nouns to end in -ize and -ization in America is now common on both sides of the Atlantic. Although it is found to work along with other processes such as colloquialization and informalization, the spread of American features all over the globe is generally assumed to be result of the American ‘leadership’ in change. In fact, the “Americanization” of (global) English is one of the main processes of language change in contemporary English. The cultural rise of the United States also implied the exportation of their specific form of English resulting in a change of how English is written and spoken around the world. The transfer of political, economical and cultural power from Great Britain to the United States has progressed gradually over the course of more than half a century, with World War II being the final stepping stone in the establishment of American supremacy. Ī heatmap showing the location of geolocated English tweets in our dataset that match our keywords. Given such an extended presence, it is only natural that English would absorb words, expressions and other features of local indigenous languages resulting in dozens of dialects and topolects (language forms typical of a specific area) such as “Singlish” (Singapore), “Hinglish” (India), Kenyan English, and, most importantly, American English a variety that includes within itself several other dialects. Thanks to both its global extension, late demise, and the rise of the US as a global actor, the English language enjoys an undisputed role as the global lingua franca serving as the default language of science, commerce and diplomacy (see Fig 1). In the case of the British empire, its preeminence faded as the United States of America –one of its first colonies– took over the dominant role in the global arena.Īs an empire spreads so does the language of its ruling class because the presence of a prestigious linguistic variety plays an important role in language change. However, as history has shown countless times, empires rise and fall due to a complex set of internal and external forces. At its zenith, it extended from North America to Asia, Africa and Australia deserving the moniker “the empire on which the sun never sets”. With roots dating as far back as Cabot’s explorations in the 15th century and the 1584 establishment of the ill-fated Roanoke colony in the New World, the British empire was one of the largest empires in Human History. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. These files enumerate how many times each word appears in the Google Books corpus each year.įunding: We acknowledge support from MINECO (Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness) ( ), the Spanish Agency for Research AEI and the European Regional Development Funds (ERDF) under Grants No. Regarding Google Books information, the data was downloaded from the "American English" and "British English" Ngram (N = 1) viewer datasets available at. An example of query is provided as a Supporting Information S1 File for this manuscript. Twitter data is publicly available through the streaming API ( ). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Our results are based on two corpora: one built from Twitter geolocated messages and one from Google Books whose characteristics are explained in Ref. Received: JanuAccepted: Published: May 25, 2018Ĭopyright: © 2018 Gonçalves et al. Citation: Gonçalves B, Loureiro-Porto L, Ramasco JJ, Sánchez D (2018) Mapping the Americanization of English in space and time.
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