The American linguist F. Emerson maintains that American English had not had time to break up into widely diverse dialects and he believes that in the course of time the American dialects might finally become nearly as distinct as the dialects in Britain. He is certainly greatly mistaken. In modern times dialect divergence cannot increase. On the contrary, in the United States, as elsewhere, the national language is tending to wipe out the dialect distinctions and to become still more uniform.
Comparison of the dialect differences in the British Isles and in the USA reveals that not only are they less numerous and far less marked in the USA, but that the very nature of the local distinctions is different. What is usually known as American dialects is closer in nature to regional variants of the literary language. The problem of discriminating between literary and dialect speech patterns in the USA is much more complicated than in Britain. Many American linguists point out that American English differs from British English in having no one locality whose speech patterns have come to be recognized as the model for the rest of the country.
CANADIAN, AUSTRALIAN AND INDIAN VARIANTS
It should of course be noted that the American English is not the only existing variant. There are several other variants where difference from the British standard is normalized. Besides the Irish and Scottish variants that have been mentioned in the preceding paragraph, there are Australian English, Canadian English, Indian English. Each of these has developed a literature of its own, and is characterized by peculiarities in phonetics, spelling, grammar and vocabulary. Canadian English is influenced both by British and American English but it also has some specific features of its own. Specifically Canadian words are called Canadianisms. They are not very frequent outside Canada, except shack 'a hut' and to fathom out 'to explain'.
The vocabulary of all the variants is characterized by a high percentage of borrowings from the language of the people who inhabited the land before the English colonizers came. Many of them denote some specific realia of the new country: local animals, plants or weather conditions, new social relations, new trades and conditions of labour. The local words for new not ions penetrate into the English language and later on may become international, if they are of sufficient interest and importance for people speaking other languages. The term international w о г d s is used to denote words borrowed from one language into several others simultaneously or at short intervals one after another. International words coming through the English of India are for instance: bungalow n, jute n, khaki adj, mango n, nabob n, pyjamas, sahib, sari.
Similar examples, though perhaps fewer in number, such as boomerang, dingo, kangaroo are all adopted into the English language through its Australian variant. They denote the new phenomena found by English immigrants on the new continent. A high percentage of words borrowed from the native inhabitants of Australia will be noticed in the sonorous Australian place names.
Otherwise an ample use was made of English lexical material. An intense development of cattle breeding in new conditions necessitated the creation of an adequate terminology. It is natural therefore that nouns like stock, bullock or land find a new life on Australian soil: stockman 'herdsman', stockyard, stock-keeper 'the owner of the cattle'; bullock v means 'to work hard', bullocky dray is a dray driven by bullocks; an inlander is a stock-keeper driving his stock from one pasture to another, overland v is 'to drive cattle over long distances'; to punch a cow 'to conduct a team of oxen'; a puncher 'the man who conducts a team of oxen'; tucker-bag 'the bag with provision'.
The differences described in the present chapter do not undermine our understanding of the English vocabulary as a balanced system. It has been noticed by a number of linguists that the British attitude to this phenomenon is somewhat peculiar. When anyone other than an Englishman uses English, the natives of Great Britain, often half-consciously, perhaps, feel that they have a special right to criticize his usage because it is "their" language. It is, however, unreasonable with respect to people in the Vfiited States, Canada, Australia and some other areas for whom English is their mother-tongue. Those who think that the Americans must look to the British for a standard are wrong and, vice versa, it is not for the American to pretend that English in Great Britain is inferior to the English he speaks. At present there is no single "correct" English and the American, Canadian and Australian English have developed standards of their own.
Conclusion
I. English is the national language of England proper, the USA, Australia and some provinces of Canada. It was also at different times imposed on the inhabitants of the former and present British colonies and. protectorates as well as other Britain- and US-dominated territories, where the population has always stuck to its own mother tongue.
II. British English, American English and Australian English are variants of the same language, because they serve all spheres of verbal communication. Their structural pecularities, especially morphology, syntax and word-formation, as well as their word-stock and phonetic system are essentially the same. American and Australian standards are slight modifications of the norms accepted in the British Isles. The status of Canadian English 'has not yet been established.
III. The main lexical differences between the variants are caused by the lack of equivalent lexical units in one of them, divergences in the semantic structures of polysemantic words and peculiarities of usage of some words on different territories.
IV. The British local dialects can be traced back to Old English dialects. Numerous and distinct, they are characterized by phonemic and structural peculiarities. The local dialects are being gradually replaced by regional variants of the literary language, i. e. by a literary standard with a proportion of local dialect features.
V. The so-called local dialects in the British Isles and in the USA are used only by the rural population and only for the purposes of oral communication. In both variants local distinctions are more marked in pronunciation, less conspicuous in vocabulary and insignificant in grammar.
VI. Local variations in the USA are relatively small. What is called by tradition American dialects is closer in nature to regional variants of the national literary language.