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The World and the LAnguage

5. Retell the text. What is American English?

If we think about defining American English in terms of geography, we might claim that American English is the language that’s spoken in the United States of America. This is obviously wrong, though, because many languages are spoken in the United States in addition to American English. For example, think about all the Native Alaskan languages, or Spanish, or Russian, or any other of the languages spoken in America on a daily basis. Gordon lists the United States of America as having 162 living languages spoken within its borders. This number includes the languages spoken by immigrants and American English varieties of languages, such as Pennsylvania Dutch, as well as native languages such as the Aleut spoken in Alaska.

Claiming that American English is the English spoken in America is also wrong. Many other kinds of English are spoken regularly in the United States. Just think about all the British, Canadian, Scots, Irish, Australian, and other English speakers inside American borders who would be quite surprised if we were to claim they were speaking American English. Further­more, American English speakers also exist in other countries around the world. Thus we have to conclude that using geography to identify American English doesn't provide a valid basis for a definition.

If we think about defining American English in terms of nationality, we might claim that it's the language spoken by Americans. Yet this definition, too, is flawed. Americans speak a wide variety of languages in addition to English; in fact, many Americans either don't speak English at all or are learning English as their second language. So identifying a speaker's nationality also fails to help when defining American English.

Having rejected the previous approaches, let's turn to a historical point of view, which might help us out. We can define American English as one of the many types of English, like Canadian English or Australian English or British English or Indian English and so on, that originated in England and travelled to America with British colonists. American English differs from the other types because it adapted over time to fit the needs of its speakers in the United States. This perspective is more helpful than the previous two approaches to defining American English because it gives us a way to describe the language. It also guides us toward thinking about The US Census Bureau its connection with the community that uses it and its reports that one in five Americans important role in shaping a national American identity, speaks a language other than English as well as the identities of individual Americans.

    1. Study the vocabulary:

a national American identity – национальная американская самобытность

living language – живой язык

the Aleut – алеутский или унанганский язык

the community – 1. общество, 2. община

the identity of individual Americans – отличительная черта присущая американцам

the Native Alaskan languages – коренные языки Аляски

the US Census Bureau – американский комитет переписи населения

to originate – происходить, возникать, брать начало

  1. Answer the questions.

  1. Can we claim that American English is the language spoken only by Americans?

  2. How many living languages does Gordon list the USA spoken within its borders?

  3. Where did American English originate?

  4. Why does American English differ from the other types of English?

  5. Do American English speakers exist in other countries around the world?

  6. What role does American English play in shaping a national American identity?

  7. What approaches are there to define a term “American English”?

  8. What is American English?

  1. Translate the sentences from Russian into English.

  1. Утверждение о том, что американский английский является языком только жителей Америки, считается неверным.

  2. Происхождение языка связанно с Англией и получило свое развитие в Соединенных Штатах Америки.

  3. Население Америки общается на различных диалектах.

  4. В действительности многие американцы либо не говорят на английском вообще, либо изучают его как второй язык.

  5. Со временем американский английский претерпел изменения в связи с коммуникативными потребностями общества.

  6. Язык играет огромную роль в формировании нации.

  7. Американский английский является одной из разновидностей английского языка Соединенных Штатов Америки.

  1. Match the following words from American English in column A with their equivalents from British English in column B.

  1. Mail, highway, apartment, cab, intersection, attorney, movies, pants, expiration, railroad, schedule, baggage, elevator, gas, subway, ticket office, fall, to be sick, truck,1 floor, billion, drugstore, salesman, corporation.

  1. Ground floor, flat, lawyer, luggage, milliard, taxi, company, chemist’s, lift, expiry, autumn, petrol, motorway, crossroads, post, cinema, trousers, railway. shop assistant, time-table, underground

booking office, to be ill, lorry

  1. . Retell the text.