Toward(s) an Americanization of non-native Englishes? ESL and EFL compared

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle [UCL]

In their comparison of British and American English, Leech et al. (2009: 253-254) noted that “the evidence is cumulatively persuasive in indicating American ‘leadership’ being one of the major moving forces on BrE [British English]”. Since then, the linguistic influence of American English has been claimed to extend to other varieties of English, leading to a more widespread phenomenon of Americanization. Thus, Mair (2013) takes American English to be the hub of his “World System of Englishes”, that is, the variety that is relevant to all other varieties of English and is “a potential factor in their development” (ibid. 261). However, his claim mainly relies on “anecdotal evidence” (ibid. 263) and his model, while including English as an institutionalized second language (ESL) varieties, does not take English as a foreign language (EFL) into account. In this presentation, I will investigate the possible influence of American English on ESL and EFL varieties, and compare it with the influence of British English. My hypothesis is that, ESL varieties being acquired and used in an essentially naturalistic environment, they will be subject to the forces of globalisation which according to Mair (2013) are associated with the dominance of American English. On the other hand, EFL varieties, whose typical context of acquisition and use is that of the classroom, are expected to be more subject to the forces of education, which tend to be more conservative and more oriented towards British English models (cf. Schneider 2007: 172, Trudgill & Hannah 2017: 5). The study uses data from two large corpora, namely the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE) for ESL and the EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT) for EFL, representing a total of 645 million words and 32 million words, respectively. On the basis of a list of twenty pairs of words or phrases taken from Algeo (2006) and shown to be distinctive of American English vs British English (e.g. movie/film, toward/towards, take a shower/have a shower), it assesses the influence of American English on ESL and EFL varieties. It appears that, contrary to expectations, both ESL and EFL are on average more strongly influenced by American English than by British English. EFL even turns out to display a higher Americanness rate than ESL (58% in ESL, 63% in EFL), which contradicts the initial hypothesis. However, while the American influence on ESL is relatively stable across the different pairs of items, EFL is characterised by a large degree of variation, with an Americanness rate ranging between 6.19% (for have gotten/have got) and 98.44% (for give it a try/give it a go). In an attempt to explain these results, different factors are considered, including the changes in society that have blurred the distinction between ESL and EFL, the functional domains that are more likely to be affected by Americanization (like those of entertainment or technology) and the linguistic features that may favour the use of certain items (e.g. semantic transparency, morphological simplicity or similarity to the speakers’ L1).