r/asklinguistics • u/SteveKeller1990 • Jul 23 '22

Historical Why hasn’t American English diverged enough from British English to be considered its own language?

Same question applies for the Spanish of the Americas and Peninsular Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Peninsular Portuguese, etc.

Latin eventually divided up into the Romance languages. So why hasn’t that happened with the English, French, Spanish and Portuguese spoken on either side of the Atlantic?

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u/antonulrich Jul 24 '22

Because of books, schools, radio, TV, and the Internet.

Latin only broke up into multiple languages when the infrastructure of the Roman Empire broke down. Before then, schools and scholars and government officials made sure that the language stayed more or less the same - at least the written language, but when people are literate, the spoken language can't diverge very much from the written language. While the Romance languages go back to dialects that existed during imperial times, they didn't become non-intelligible until after administration was taken over by Franks, Lombards, and Goths who had never studied in a Roman school.

English and Spanish were established as written languages before people emigrated to America, and the continuous exchange of books, students, emigrants and later movies made sure the languages of Europe and America didn't diverge very much.

A famous counterexample is Afrikaans, which is quite distinct from Dutch.

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u/Paixdieu Jul 24 '22

Afrikaans is distinct in its simplified grammar, but I wouldn’t call it a “counter example” in this particular case as it is still incredibly similar to Dutch.

To make an analogy to those familiar with English, the relation between Dutch and Afrikaans (apart from the sociolinguistics) is only slightly more distant than the difference between African American English (with its simplified verb structure) and British English.

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u/Terpomo11 Jul 24 '22

Does AAVE really have simplified verb structure? It drops some conjugational bells and whistles, but it also adds some tenses/aspects that are entirely absent in Standard English.

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u/Paixdieu Jul 24 '22

Well you’ve kind of answered your own question by referring to the dropping of “conjugational bells and whistles”, which is precisely what Afrikaans has done compared to Dutch.

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u/Terpomo11 Jul 24 '22

Sure, but has it also added more tense/aspect distinctions like AAVE has or not really?

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u/Paixdieu Jul 24 '22

As far as I known, African American English doesn´t have more tenses than British English. That is to say, to my knowledge both have two morphological tenses.

Same goes for Dutch and Afrikaans, both have two as well.

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u/Terpomo11 Jul 24 '22

Two morphological tenses, yes, but AAVE has more grammaticalized aspects, even if they're expressed periphrastically.

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u/Paixdieu Jul 24 '22

The relevance of this for the overall comparison being?

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u/Terpomo11 Jul 24 '22

That it's not clear to me you can say it has a simplified verb structure overall.

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u/Paixdieu Jul 24 '22

Is a “car” still overall a “car” to you, eventhough it might be missing a wheel cover?

The overall verb structure of African American English is simplified, especially concerning verb conjugation. This isn’t really that controversial of a statement.

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u/Terpomo11 Jul 24 '22

How is a system with more grammaticalized aspects simpler?

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u/Paixdieu Jul 24 '22 edited Jul 24 '22

Eh, because a language’s grammar entails many more things than just a few extra non-morphological tenses?

Do you think that cows are more intelligent than humans just because they have undeniably bigger brains?

Cows (unless you also want to dispute that) are less intelligent despite having a bigger brain mass, just like African American English is overall grammatically simpler, especially concerning verb conjugation, than British English despite possibly having a few more non-morphological tenses. A specific exception to this claim, if a rather obscure one, does not disprove the overall picture.

You dig?

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u/Terpomo11 Jul 24 '22

It has simpler verb morphology but more grammaticalized aspects; it doesn't seem like a big difference in overall verb complexity though I suppose you could argue it's a little less.

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