To say that someone is wrong is not a personal attack. However, I will delete all the extraneous comments about personal attacks.

Yeah, "ain't" is a good example of something well preserved here and moribund in England, I believe.

American English is generally simpler than English English and, perhaps for that reason, slightly less articulate and interesting.  Only in academic circles do you find Americans correctly making use of the subjunctive, for example.  Very few Americans will say "If I were...", they will always say "If I was...".  No one ever says "Had I this .." which is neat and concise, they will only say "If I had this ..".

And in many other ways too, American is flatter and simpler.  Nobody says "the fox has gotten in amongst the chickens."  What is said is "the fox has gotten into the chickens".  That perhaps is an improvement, really. 

It also happens that American accents have flattened out.  New England, especially Downeast, Appalachia and the Old South are exceptions,but there isn't much regionalism.  Even that is flattening out over time, perhaps because of TV.  There used to be a very strong "Long Gyland" accent, but you pretty much only hear it in the movies. 

There is such a thing as a "working class" accent in England and also a "posh" accent.  Nothing really like that here.  While Southern and Appalachian regionalisms used to be associated with poverty and low eduction, they no longer are.  There used to be a "Brahmin" accent spoken by some very well-to-do New Englanders (some of you may have heard George Plimpton speak), but it seems to be dying out.   In this country it's usage, not accent, that is used to detect class in language.

Nowadays it's not about English English vs American English, but more regional versions are acknowledged - for example, if you install a spell checker in Mozilla/Open Office environments there's a whole bunch of different Englishes to choose from, Australian, South African etc etc.

And from the following clip I leant that some 'American words' are actually old English words that had been replaced by newer ones in English. (about 8.50 in, if you don't have 11 minutes...)

Gilchrist is a legend wrote on 06/19/12 at 06:40:15:


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Nothing personal.

A lot of people spell color "colour," but not that many native English speakers spell it that way.  It really is like Brazilian Portuguese, only moreso because of Hollywood, Silcon Valley, etc. etc.

Practically any slang widespread in America has a good chance of becoming widespread in this world.  "OK" and "yeah" were once considered Americanisms.  But peculiarly English expressions, however attractive and piquant they may be, never spread, to the best of my knowledge.  Not even in Canada do they use English expressions, only English-English spellings.

I salute England with its vibrant culture, superior education (for some -- just like here), storied past, strength in chess relative to total population (semmingly exceeding that of the U.S.) and superb literature.  I salute it for fighting on alone for two years against Hitler.  But linguistically worldwide, American speech and mode of expression have taken over.

Edited:

I am wrong of course? ... Do Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Australians, South Africans, Ugandans, Singaporeans, Hong Kongers, etc. speak/write/spell/learn British English (meaning at least English with British spelling and/or terminology) or American English? Most of my family are British Commonwealth citizens (West Indies, Australia, UK, Canada, Hong Kong), and all of them have learnt British English in school. ...

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Is there any moderator even watching this forum?

Edited:

I thought it was standardly accepted that American English is now the predominant version of the language, comparable to Brazilian Portuguese holding sway over European Portuguese.

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