U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

As we have seen while watching this episodes we can se how everything revolves around language. In history for example, all the mayor battles have “roots of the language as well”(The Story of English).

Talking about the backgrounds and origins of the English language we can see how strongly Britain and America were divided and they shared a mutual language.

So there is the struggle for Independence, and having their own government and all the battles which connect back to English, and so does politics, since all the “political revolutionaries were also, language revolutionaries”(The Story of English).

Patriotism grew with the inventions of new words.

So now, in the English language there wasn’t only focus in where they spoke English and how they spoke it but also how correctly they did.

 The pronunciation. In different regions people pronounced words differently, and this created doubt between regions on which was the correct way of pronouncing that word. This is were dictionaries have another very powerful resource that didn’t only consist of defining the word.

Merriam Webster who was a lexicographer of the time invented the famous dictionaries.

This would not only help the different regions speak the same way but it would be a way to make mispronunciations of words disappear. But it would be difficult because it was hard to “reproduce the idiomatic pronunciations that Americans used”(The Story of English).

But what Dictionaries did do was an effort to help newcomers to pronounce better, so the people who came to America and Canada could adopt more easily to the way people spoke in their region.

If people have already established their way of pronouncing then there is no way of telling them not to pronounce it that way or how to do it in fact, but Americans were able to pronounce words like “forehead, through”(The Story of English). Thank you Mr. Webster!

Pronunciation isn’t a big part of how I speak, because I am not American, I believe that it is not necessary to have the best accent or a perfect pronunciation to be perfectly understood. When I used to live in Paris all my friends bothered me because of my accent, when in fact I speak correctly and I make small mistakes in pronunciation. I don’t believe that it is a big deal.  

There is a huge difference between British English and American English you have to cross an ocean. But you would never imagine that in Canada, which is only divided by forts that there would be such a strong difference in how they pronounce words. You can differ Canadians and Americans in the way they pronounce:  “house” and “out” and “about”(The Story of English).

           

People really do make fun of the Canadian accent, like Barney over here! And in France, don't even get me started on how they criticize their french accent.