How English has evolved

In the UK, we have a niche television channel called Talking Pictures which is run from a family’s garden shed. If you ever find yourself flicking over to channel 328 on your Sky television box then you will probably see a classic British film from the forties or fifties.

The channel has become very popular during the coronavirus lockdown as it has taken us back to a golden era of a confident United Kingdom with a vibrant film industry.

If you watch any of the films on offer, you can’t fail to notice how English is spoken so differently — usually with a very posh accent or the classic working class cockney accent. Actors playing the posher roles fill their sentences with adverbs such as ‘awfully’ and ‘terribly’ as in ‘would you mind awfully if I borrow a cigarette for you?’

In a book written by Professor Paul Baker of Lancaster University called American and British English: Divided by a Common Language, Professor Baker has explored the changes in American and British English since the 1930s and whether the two branches of English have become more similar over time.

During the research, Professor Baker discovered that gradable adverbs such as fairly, very, quite and rather have become far less prevalent in books and films on both sides of the Atlantic. These words have traditionally been used to reduce the strength of a phrase and so British people, usually known for being diplomatic and indirect, would use them frequently to soften the effect of bad news. An American might say “This is the worst day of my life” while a British person might once have said “This has been rather a disappointing day.” There is an example from the film Brief Encounter on this page to show this.

Why has this happened? Certainly, we Brits (as with the rest of the world) are exposed to a lot of US movies and TV shows and have no doubt seen that the directness shown by actors in these shows has not resulted in anything bad happening — so we copy them.

Studies show that Americans have been moving to this more informal use of English for decades and that British are following them - although we are 30 years behind.

Baker also researched how vocabulary changes between the US and the UK (color/colour, soccer/football) and whether one side has become more dominant. It seems as though there has been no real change in this issue. In the 2000s, Brits used an American spelling about 11% of the time while Americans used a British spelling 10% of the time so there was no real difference.

While some on Twitter seem to worry about American words taking over from British ones, there are few instances of this actually occurring. We still say holiday rather than vacation, football instead of soccer and petrol rather than gas — and we seem almost delighted to do so. Some American words such as lawyer, cop and movie have begun to be more familiar to us though and are used in conversations across the UK as easy as awfully and frightfully were in the fifties.

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