AHC: Have American and British English be mutually unintelligible
- Thread starter Mechadogzilla
- Start date
Or otherwise, the cultural center of the UK shifts from London to Yorkshire, or even worse: Hull.
(I spent 4 months as an exchange student there. I thought I understood English, even British English from watching enough BBC, until a bus driver on my first day informed me that there is "Ner smerk'n 'n hur", pointing at a 'No Smoking' sign.)
Driftless
Donor
I had a somewhat similar experience in York a thousand years ago in the days of my youth....
To be fair, by comparison, I had a teacher once describe American Great Lakes dialect by using this example: "Trow da horse over the fence some hay, ya..."
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My experience in school was mostly with "BBC English" and I was definitely surprised how much the accent/dialect seemed to change the further away from London I went. A lot of people in the north of England sounded the way I had thought a Scottish person would sound - until I went to Scotland and actually heard Scottish accents. I thought at first there were just a lot of tourists from Holland or Germany until I realized they were speaking in English...
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"You're a man of culture and erudition, aren't you?"
"Why aye, man."*
(* Or "Why aye, ma'am" if you're addressing the Queen.)
I suspect that if there are enough Frenchmen around to make French the lingua franca of the frontier, there'll be enough Frenchmen to stop New France falling to the British, probably butterflying away the US as we know it.
Yet another different (but quite similar) version: I meen thair wer atemps ta yooz a fonetik speling uv Inglish in Amerika.
Driftless
Donor
Very possibly.... I'd think the British origin and influence would remain dominant on the coasts to the Appalachians to the east side of the Adirondacks, more or less into the early 1800's. Then it might become a question of how many people from the East cross the mountains into the Ohio River basin - and when. Of course, in this scenario, how many immigrants do you get to the British coastal colonies? That's maybe heading off into a different topic
Or: Ah meen der wur atems te yooz ey funatik spelin' off Inglish in Eymehuika.
Lusitania
Donor
The thing is that to accomplish the main premise of this thread would also prevent there be a standard English language in North America.
In many ways English language followed other European languages where central government or organization imposed their version of language on a people. Education, communication and transportation advances allowed these languages to become more structured and unified.
A POD where industrial revolution and advances in spread of education to masses resulted in people being taught a standard language that at times overtook a local distinct dialect.
so if we had another 100 years of the 18th century after ARW with its limited technology, political differences we have several “English” languages in the US andin Britain they still have Difficulty communicating between areas.
In many ways English language followed other European languages where central government or organization imposed their version of language on a people. Education, communication and transportation advances allowed these languages to become more structured and unified.
A POD where industrial revolution and advances in spread of education to masses resulted in people being taught a standard language that at times overtook a local distinct dialect.
so if we had another 100 years of the 18th century after ARW with its limited technology, political differences we have several “English” languages in the US andin Britain they still have Difficulty communicating between areas.
Driftless
Donor
Another thought..... Not just Frenchmen using their native tongue, but the multitude of Native American tribal groups using French as a common second language. Many of those tribal groups were based on different languages, so they had some difficulties in inter-tribal communications historically.
To be technical, a creole isn't a mix of two languages ("Chiac" in eastern Canada actually is an example of that), it's a specific type of language that emerges in a context where two groups speak totally different languages but one has dominance over the other (usually via slavery). The subordinate group starts to speak a highly simplified form of the dominant language (pidgin) to communicate and then its children grow up with this and develop it into a full language, a creole. The vocabulary of the creole will normally be 95-99 % from the dominant language (though some words may change meaning) but the grammar will be very different.
It does work both ways, people in Britain often have to use subtitles for American TV and Movies.
Artaxerxes
Banned
Stronger surviving Northumbria is my bag baby.
You’d need to cut down ties and wealth flowing to Kent and the South from the continent though and have it survive the Vikings
The only time I remember watching an American programme with subtitles was the show "Rat Bastards", about a bunch of swamp rat exterminators, some of which had very strong accents.
They were also the most red-neckingest red-necks I had ever seen.
Shows | Rat Bastards
Studio Lambert is a fast-growing independent television production company based in London and Los Angeles. It is part of All3Media, the global production group
Interesting response all around! Here's my own take on it. One, you would have to drastically decrease English immigration to the U.S., and two, you would have to remove Anglophilia among Americans. Third, you'd probably have to delay the invention of steam powered ships and the railroad until the 1860s, and have them not catch own and be widespread until the 1880s. That's probably the hardest change to pull off, but I don't think it's impossible.
I was thinking of a timeline where the American Revolution is violently defeated, only for a second revolt to achieve victory during the Napoleonic Wars. Britain would be forced to spend significant amounts of resources fighting the second rebellion, allowing the French eek out victory. With America and Britain having two wars within a generation of each other, and the inevitable disagreements over the border between them, Anglo-American relations would be low. France would be a powerful natural ally to the US here. Thus Francophilia would be a lot more common than it already was. Art and culture in America would be mostly French in origin or French inspired. And with French domination of the continent, German, Spanish, and Italian immigrants would move to the U.S. in much higher numbers and much earlier. English immigrants would likewise avoid America for other Commonwealth colonies.
Mix that timeline with slower technological growth, and the two dialects would grow apart quickly. American English would have massive French influences, and different regional accents would have more influences from other immigrant groups. If the British are disliked, different spellings and pronunciations may be preferred because they would be seen as more 'American'. New technologies might be called entirely separate things. Add in some natural growth in both languages and separate national dictionaries, within 100 years they would be fairly distinct. I don't know if this is enough to make them unintelligible or not though.
I was thinking of a timeline where the American Revolution is violently defeated, only for a second revolt to achieve victory during the Napoleonic Wars. Britain would be forced to spend significant amounts of resources fighting the second rebellion, allowing the French eek out victory. With America and Britain having two wars within a generation of each other, and the inevitable disagreements over the border between them, Anglo-American relations would be low. France would be a powerful natural ally to the US here. Thus Francophilia would be a lot more common than it already was. Art and culture in America would be mostly French in origin or French inspired. And with French domination of the continent, German, Spanish, and Italian immigrants would move to the U.S. in much higher numbers and much earlier. English immigrants would likewise avoid America for other Commonwealth colonies.
Mix that timeline with slower technological growth, and the two dialects would grow apart quickly. American English would have massive French influences, and different regional accents would have more influences from other immigrant groups. If the British are disliked, different spellings and pronunciations may be preferred because they would be seen as more 'American'. New technologies might be called entirely separate things. Add in some natural growth in both languages and separate national dictionaries, within 100 years they would be fairly distinct. I don't know if this is enough to make them unintelligible or not though.
Driftless
Donor
Interesting! As you can tell, I'm no wizard with language origins and structures. Are there more-or-less current languages composed of 60-40%, or 75-25% of two distinct languages? From my limited knowledge base on the subject I could imagine vocabulary being somewhat more malleable, in that English has drawn loan words from many cultures over time. Do you see mashups of grammar and other structural language components?
There are quite a few languages where the vocabulary is drawn from multiple major sources, but I think usually the grammar of a language tends to come from mainly one source. English is an example of that, where there a huge amount of French/Latin vocabulary mixed in, but its grammar is still fundamentally Germanic (even if simplified compared to the other Germanic languages in some respects). I think Persian (Farsi) is similar - a lot of Arabic loanwords but Indo-European grammar.
Besides Chiac, the Louisiana dialects of both French and English show a lot of lexical influence from the other language.
I'm wondering if *American English ends up as some kind of pan-European/Native American version of Jamaican Patois.
Lusitania
Donor
We have to consider what makes languages diverge, such as Québécois French from Parisian French of Afrikaner from Dutch snd in each case it’s isolation and jack of contact between each other.
Therefore you need physical separation over several generations to achieve what this thread hopes to achieve.
British-American history following the ARW is one of continuous interaction between the two countries and immigration from British isles to America. as I indicated before the 19th century was one of unifying language, expanded literacy and easy of transportation and travel.
So come up with a POD that either stops british American interaction and immigration from Britain. Note this will greatly reduce American development since a great percentage of investment in American development came from Britain.
Therefore you need physical separation over several generations to achieve what this thread hopes to achieve.
British-American history following the ARW is one of continuous interaction between the two countries and immigration from British isles to America. as I indicated before the 19th century was one of unifying language, expanded literacy and easy of transportation and travel.
So come up with a POD that either stops british American interaction and immigration from Britain. Note this will greatly reduce American development since a great percentage of investment in American development came from Britain.