American and British English: Divided by a Common Language? by Paul Baker, and: The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English by Lynne Murphy (review)

The differences between the varieties of English spoken in the United States and the United Kingdom have been remarked on since colonial times. In public discourse, it’s a regular trope of journalists and columnists to remark on differences, often as a pretext for some other agenda. At the scholarly level, articles, papers, and books have been written to address diverse aspects of these dialectal differences and what they mean or portend. Many past and current DSNA members are among the contributors to this genre: John Algeo, Richard Bailey, Carol-June Cassidy, Edward Finegan, Paul Heacock, and myself, to name a few. Now two new books have appeared in this genre, and they are as different as chalk and cheese, to use a decidedly British expression.

STILL DIFFERENT AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Paul Baker, a professor at Lancaster University in England, has written American and British English: Divided by a Common Language? It is a much more technically oriented book than the title might suggest; those who geek out on corpus statistics and the arcane ways in which they can be wrung from data will find much to examine in his book. Baker sets out to determine “to what extent are British and American English different, in what ways, and how have these differences altered over the last 100 years” (3). His approach to these questions is constrained by the data he examines, which is limited to the Brown family of corpora—a set of eight corpora comprising published material in separate collections of British and American English drawn from writing at different time periods. Baker’s claim is that comparisons between them have “high validity” (6) because they were all built using the same sampling frame. The corpora offer a view into the state of the dialects in 1931, 1961, 1991, and 2006.

To give a flavor of the highly technical analysis that Baker undertakes, you will be a third of the way through the book before there is much discussion of words and what they mean in one dialect or the other. Up to that point, his discussion centers on a more atomic view of the dialects’ components: spelling differences, morphemes, affixes, letter sequences. The results are laid out in tables, charts, and graphs, with accompanying interpretive discussion.

Baker’s sophisticated analysis of the corpus data is far beyond what a casual corpus user might discover. It is based on algorithmic queries of the corpora that make a simple wildcard search feel like child’s play. You will learn, for example, that in the Brown corpora, mean sentence length in British English began a slow increase in 1961 that did not begin to taper off until 1991, but even in 2006 it remained significantly longer than sentence length in American English. Americans, for their part, come out on top of the “standardised type token ratios” (22; a measure of lexical diversity), an achievement in which the data suggests that they surpassed the British in about 1980. For the most part, Baker is examining corpus language through a more abstract lens than the one that lexicographers use. He generates statistics about language based on changing frequencies of semantic categories, syntactic functions, and parts of speech, as indicated in the corpora by computer-driven tagging schemes.

The findings in Baker’s book will be of interest mainly to corpus linguists, who are also the readers most likely to find fault with them. His analysis of the Brown corpora are novel and ingenious, and his interpretations of his results often show great imagination. But are they...