The English language in America - статья на английском языке

The English language was brought to America by colonists from England who settled along the Atlantic seaboard in the seventeenth century. It was therefore the language spoken in England at that time, the language spoken by Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan. <...>
The first person to use the term Americanism was John Witherspoon, one of the early presidents of Princeton University. In 1781 he defined it as "an use of phrases or terms, or a construction of sentences, even among persons of rank and education, different from the use of the same terms or phrases, or the construction of similar sentences in Great Britain". In justification of the word he added, "The word Americanism, which I have coined for the purpose, is exactly similar in its formation and signification to the word Scotticism."<...>
From the time when the early colonists came, however, divergence in pronunciation began gradually to develop. <...> At the present time American pronunciation shows certain well-marked differences from English use.
Perhaps the most noticeable of these differences is in the vowel sound in such words as fast, path, grass, dance, can't, half. At the end of the eighteenth century southern England began to change from what is called a flat a to a broad a in these words, that is from a sound like the a in man to one like the a in father. The change affected words in which the vowel occurred before f, sk, sp, st, ss, th, and n followed by certain consonants. In parts of New England the same change took place, but in most other parts of the country the old sound was preserved, and fast, path, etc., are pronounced with the vowel of pan. In some speakers there is a tendency to employ an intermediate vowel, halfway between the a of pan and father, but the "flat a" must be regarded as the typical American pronunciation<...>
Except in pronunciation the distance which the English language in America has traveled in its separation from that of England is chiefly measured in its vocabulary. <...> The American on going to England or the English traveler on arriving in America is likely to be impressed by them, because each finds the other's expressions amusing when they do not actually puzzle him. As examples of such differences the words connected with the railroad and the automobile are often cited. The English word for railroad is railway, the engineer is a driver, the conductor a guard. The baggage car is a van, and the baggage carried is always luggage. <...>The American seems to have a genius for ephemeral coinages which are naturally quite meaningless to one who is not constantly hearing them. Bawl out, bonehead, boob, bootlegger, dumbbell... <...> are part of a long list of terms in an American novel which had to be explained by a glossary in the English edition. <...> There were doubtless many colloquialisms current in Shakespeare's London that would not have been understood in contemporary Stratford. <...> It is well to remember that in the written language the difference between the English and the American use of words is often so slight that it is difficult to tell, in the case of a serious book, on which side of the Atlantic it was written.
(From "A History of the English Language" by Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable)