But perhaps the most important question facing English as it lumbers toward the twenty-first century is whether it will remain one generally cohesive tongue or whether it will dissolve into a collection of related but mutually incomprehensible sublanguages.
But perhaps the most important question facing English as it lumbers toward the twenty-first century is whether it will remain one generally cohesive tongue or whether it will dissolve into a collection of related but mutually incomprehensible sublanguages. In 1978, in a speech to 800 librarians in Chicago, Robert Burchfield, then the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries, noted his belief that British English and American English were moving apart so inexorably that within 200 years they could be mutually unintelligible. Or as he rather inelegantly put it: “The two forms of English are in a state of dissimilarity which should lead to a condition of unintelligibility, given another two hundred years.” (And this from the man chosen to revise Fowler’s Modern English Usage!) The assertion provoked a storm of articles on both sides of the Atlantic, almost all of them suggesting that Burchfield was, in this instance, out of his mind.
People, it must be said, have been expecting English to fracture for some time. Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster, as we have seen, both expected American English to evolve into a discrete language. So did H. L. Mencken in the first edition of The American Language, though by the 1936 edition he had reversed this opinion, and was suggesting, perhaps only half in jest, that British English was becoming an American dialect. The belief was certainly not uncommon up until the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1880s, Henry Sweet, one of the most eminent linguistic authorities of his day, could confidently predict: “In another century . . . England, America and Australia will be speaking mutually unintelligible languages.” But of course nothing of the sort happened—and, I would submit, is not likely to now.
Following the controversy aroused by his speech, Burchfield wrote an article in the London Observer defending his lonesome position. After expressing some surprise at the response to his remarks, which he said had been made “almost in passing,” he explained that he felt that “the two main forms of English separated geographically from the beginning and severed politically since 1776, are continuing to move apart and that existing elements of linguistic diversity between them will intensify as time goes on.” This is not quite the same thing as saying they are becoming separate languages, but it is still a fairly contentious assertion.
The main planks of Burchfield’s defense rest on two principal beliefs. The first is that the divergence of languages is a reasonable historical presumption. In the past, most languages have split at some point, as when the mutually intelligible North Germanic dialects evolved into the mutually unintelligible languages of German, Dutch, and English. And, second, Burchfield observed that English already has many words that cause confusion. “It is easy to assemble lists of American expressions that are not (or are barely) intelligible to people in this country,” he wrote in The Observer, and cited as examples: barf, boffo, badmouth, schlepp, and schlock. That may be true (though, in point of fact, most Britons could gather the meaning of these words from their context) but even so the existence of some confusing terms hardly establishes permanent linguistic divergence. An Iowan traveling through Pennsylvania would very probably be puzzled by many of the items he found on menus throughout the state—soda, scrapple, subs, snits, fat cakes, funnel cakes, and several others all would be known either by other names or not at all to the Iowan. Yet no one would suggest that Iowa and Pennsylvania are evolving separate languages. The same is surely no less true for American and British English.
