Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/27



Unluckily for Dr. Matthews, there is not the slightest sign that the novelists and newspaper men on the two sides of the ocean will ever bring themselves to such eschewing. On the contrary, they apparently delight in the use of the "localisms" he denounces, and the result is a growing difficulty of intercommunication. Americans, trained in book English and constantly reading English books and journals, still make their way in British-English comfortably enough, though now and then, no doubt, an English novel daunts them. But the English have a great deal more difficulty with American, and devote a great deal of attention to its peculiarities—often with very ill grace. For a long while, as we shall see in the next chapter, they viewed its differentiation from standard English with frank indignation, and sought to put an end to the process by violent denunciation; even so late as the period of the Civil War their chief spokesman saw in every Americanism that quality of abhorrent barbarism which they looked upon as the salient mark of the American people. But in later years, despite a certain lingering waspishness, they have brought themselves to a more philosophical view, and the fact that American-English is definitely separating itself from British-English is now admitted as a matter of course. The Cambridge History of English Literature, for example, says that the two have become "notably dissimilar" in vocabulary, and that American is splitting off into a distinct dialect. The Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, going further, says that the two languages are already so far apart that "it is not uncommon to meet with [American] newspaper articles of which an untravelled Englishman would hardly be able to understand a sentence." A great many other academic authorities, including A. H. Sayce and H. W. and F. G. Fowler, bear testimony to the same effect, and the London