'Separate in name and power': How America reinvented English

From "deadline" to "lituation", from "prairie" to "amirite", America's linguistic independence has transformed the English language with a wealth of new words and phrases – shaping its own cultural identity in the process.

Did the founding of the United States of America demand a new way of speaking? President Thomas Jefferson certainly thought so. In August 1813, he wrote an impassioned letter to his friend John Waldo about the blossoming of new terms in fertile terrain of the 37-year-old United States of America.

"So great growing a population, spread over such an extent of country, with such a variety of climates, of productions, of arts, must enlarge their language, to make it answer its purpose of expressing all ideas, the new as well as the old," he claimed. "The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects."

Let British English remain "stationary", Jefferson argued, while American English gained strength: "Its new character may separate it in name as well as in power, from the mother-tongue."

By this point, the British had long complained about American phrases "contaminating" the purity of the English language – even before Independence. In 1756, the writer Samuel Johnson defined the "American dialect" to mean "a tract [trace] of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed."

In the 21st Century, the UK and the US remain two countries divided by our common tongue – and on the 250th anniversary of American Independence, there is no better time to examine how American and British English evolved to sound so distinct. From the rise of "soccer" in place of "football" and "fall" in place of "autumn" to the spread of "cooties", the words spoken on either side of the Atlantic have been the product of social undercurrents alternately pushing the two countries apart and pulling them together again – forces that continue to shape our speech today.

The immediate process of colonisation would have quickly placed the settlers' language apart from the people they left behind. With a mix of populations from across the British Isles and Europe, most regional differences between individuals' initial accents and vocabulary would have been "levelled off", says Jack Grieve, a (Canadian) linguist from the University of Birmingham in the UK.

When those groups then spread out across the continent, each area would have started to develop their own ways of speaking, resulting in the distinct accents we hear across the continent today. And this natural drift was accompanied by concerted efforts to establish a new voice that was distinct from the King's English. The ringleader was the lexicographer Noah Webster. "A national language is a band of national union. Every engine should be employed to render the people of this country national," he wrote 1789. "As an independent nation, our honor [sic] requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government..." It was, he said, essential for their "political harmony".

The Webster Blue Back Speller

Learn more about the history of the Webster Blue Back Speller, and how a single object became a gateway to literacy and self-determination, on A History of the US in 100 Objects.

To do so, he established a series of grammars, spellers and dictionaries. Webster is responsible for omission of the u's in words such as hono[u]r and favo[u]r, the single l in words like "traveled", the conversion of "draught" to "draft", and the reversal of the r and the e in centre ("center").

"It was a long hard struggle for those spellings to change, but they eventually did bed down," says American-British linguist Lynne Murphy at the University of Sussex, UK.

Not all Webster's suggestions would stand the test of time: he advocated for spelling tongue as "tung", and "leather" as lether, for instance........

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